STORYTELLING FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE
Through accessible language and candid discussions, Storytelling for Social Justice
explores the stories we tell ourselves and each other about race and racism in our
society. Making sense of the racial constructions expressed through the language
and images we encounter every day, this book provides strategies for developing a
more critical understanding of how racism operates culturally and institutionally
in our society. Using the arts in general, and storytelling in particular, the book
examines ways to teach and learn about race by creating counter-storytelling
communities that can promote more critical and thoughtful dialogue about
racism and the remedies necessary to dismantle it in our institutions and
interactions. Illustrated throughout with examples drawn from contemporary
movements for change, high school and college classrooms, community building
and professional development programs, the book provides tools for examining
racism as well as other issues of social justice. For every facilitator and educator
who has struggled with how to get the conversation on race going or who has
suffered through silences and antagonism, the innovative model presented in
this book offers a practical and critical framework for thinking about and acting
on stories about racism and other forms of injustice.
This new edition includes:
•
•
•
Social science examples, in addition to the arts, for elucidating the storytelling
model;
Short essays by users that illustrate some of the ways the storytelling model
has been used in teaching, training, community building and activism;
Updated examples, references and resources.
Lee Anne Bell is Professor Emerita and The Barbara Silver Horowitz Director
of Education at Barnard College, Columbia University.
The Teaching/Learning Social Justice Series
Edited by Lee Anne Bell
Barnard College, Columbia University
The Teaching/Learning Social Justice Series explores issues of social justice—
diversity, equality, democracy, and fairness—in classrooms and communities.
“Teaching/learning” connotes the essential connections between theory and
practice that books in this series seek to illuminate. Central are the stories and
lived experiences of people who strive both to critically analyze and challenge
oppressive relationships and institutions, and to imagine and create more just
and inclusive alternatives.
Promoting Diversity and Social Justice
Educating People from Privileged Groups, Second Edition
Diane J. Goodman
Actions Speak Louder than Words
Community Activism as Curriculum
Celia Oyler
Practice What You Teach
Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets
Bree Picower
Active Learning
Social Justice Education and Participatory Action Research
Dana E. Wright
Storytelling for Social Justice
Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist Teaching, Second Edition
Lee Anne Bell
For more information, please visit: www.routledge.com/Teaching-Learning-SocialJustice/book-series/SE1023
STORYTELLING FOR
SOCIAL JUSTICE
Connecting Narrative and
the Arts in Antiracist
Teaching
Second Edition
Lee Anne Bell
Second edition published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Lee Anne Bell to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN: 978-1-138-28738-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-29280-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-10104-0 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
I dedicate this edition to all who dream of a better world
where issues of justice drive our policies and actions toward
each other and toward the living environment that sustains
us all. I especially want to recognize young people whose
emerging/transforming stories keep us moving toward the
social and environmental justice on which our survival as
a planet depends.
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
1
2
3
ix
Introduction to the Second Edition: Storytelling and
the Search for Racial Justice: Race Talk Matters
1
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism Through
Story and the Arts: Introducing the Storytelling
Project Model
7
Stock Stories: Reproducing Racism and White Advantage
27
Essay #1: Resisting Stock Stories and Learning to Teach
Courageously
Lauren Anderson
41
Concealed Stories: Reclaiming Subjugated Memory and
Knowledge
Essay #2: Unpacking History Through Place-Based
Learning: Concealed Stories of Asian American
Resistance
Kayhan Irani
Essay #3: Toward Love, Liberation and Abolishing
the Single Story
Yolanda Sealey Ruiz
44
62
66
viii
Contents
4
Resistance Stories: Drawing on Antiracism Legacies to
Map the Future
Essay #4: Community Storytelling for Racial
Reconciliation: Telling the Hard Stories That Can
Lead to Community Change
Susan M. Glisson
5
6
Emerging/Transforming Stories: Challenging Racism
in Everyday Life
71
84
89
Essay #5: Reading the World in and Beyond the
Classroom
Vanessa D’Egidio
102
Essay #6: Critical Literacy: Imagining Other Ways
of Being
María S. Rivera Maulucci
106
Cultivating a Counter-Storytelling Community:
The Storytelling Model in Action
Essay #7: The Classroom Is N: A Structured Approach
for Cultivating a Counter-Storytelling Classroom
Community
John Madura
Essay #8: Storytelling Gives the School Soul: Creating
Counter-Storytelling Community
Zoe Duskin
Index
111
129
139
142
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This second edition of Storytelling for Social Justice has been enriched by the ideas,
energy and creativity of so many people in my personal and professional life.
My own experiences with using the model for teaching and training continue
to show me its power as an educational and organizing tool. Hearing the stories of how others have used the model to address racism and other forms of
injustice in their own teaching, training and activism has been affirming and
inspiring. I am especially grateful to the eight people who wrote the short
essays included in this edition that illustrate how they have adapted and used
the model in a variety of contexts. I hope their examples generate further creative uses of the model.
I am also deeply appreciative of the anonymous responses from a survey of
users and the detailed feedback from three reviewers about how they use the
model, its strengths and their suggestions for improvement. I have taken this
feedback seriously in revising this new edition.
Acknowledgements From First Edition
The Storytelling Project Model at the heart of the project described here took
shape during 2004–2005 through the collaborative work of an amazing creative team of artists, public school teachers, scholars and Barnard/Columbia
undergraduates: Rosemarie Roberts, Roger Bonair-Agard, Thea Abu ElHaj, Dipti Desai, Kayhan Irani, Uraline Septembre Hager, Christina Glover,
Anthony Asaro, Patricia Wagner, Zoe Duskin, Vicki Cuellar and Leticia Dobzinski. Our work together was one of the high points of my professional life. I
especially want to honor the contributions of Rosemarie Roberts, who co-led
x
Acknowledgments
the Storytelling Project with me as a post-doctoral fellow at Barnard from 2004
to 2007. Her insight, passion, commitment and wisdom were a constant source
of inspiration throughout the three years we worked together.
Four Barnard/Columbia undergraduates worked with us in 2005–2006 to
conduct research on the Storytelling Project Curriculum in two high school
classrooms: Svati Lelyveld, Brett Murphy, Vanessa D’Egidio and Ebonie Smith.
Their enthusiasm for the project and commitment to the high school youth
with whom we worked were invaluable. I am grateful to the students, teachers
and administrators in the small high school where we conducted our research
for their responsiveness to this experiment and for the many insights they shared
as we worked through the curriculum together.
This project would not have been possible without Marco Stoeffel and the
Third Millennium Foundation, who provided financial support and encouraged us to experiment and take risks. The International Center for Tolerance
Education offered a spacious and inviting setting for our work as a creative team
and for the summer institute for teachers where we first tested out the model.
A Visiting Research position at Vassar College in 2008 enabled me to work
in a majestic library surrounded by beautiful grounds to walk when I needed a
break from the world in my head. I am especially grateful to Chris Bjork and
Chris Roellke, who welcomed me to Vassar and provided friendship and support during my time there.
I could not have completed this book without the patience and support of
my wonderful Barnard colleagues and a sabbatical that afforded essential time
to immerse myself in the project and complete the manuscript. In particular,
María S.Rivera and Lisa Edstrom have been unwavering in their support and I
feel blessed to work with them on a daily basis.
At various times I was sustained by conversation with friends and colleagues
who provided encouragement and a sounding board for my ideas: Maurianne
Adams, Dipti Desai, Markie Hancock, Kayhan Irani, Jackie Irvine, Linda
Marchesani, Ina Mitchell, Celia Oyler, Kathy Phillips and Ximena Zuniga.
Kathy Phillips, in particular, read every word and offered insights and perspective from her decades of work as an educator and community activist. The
book is immeasurably enriched by her close reading and detailed feedback.
Catherine Bernard, my superb editor at Routledge, was responsive and supportive throughout the project even as her second child and the completion of
this book arrived at the same time!
I am indebted to the three anonymous readers who provided thoughtful,
critical feedback on earlier drafts. Their comments pushed my thinking further
and helped me keep my audience clearly before me as I wrote and revised.
I am lucky to participate in an embracing community of friends who are
always available for encouragement, laughter, and welcome diversions. They
are too many to name but please know that I love you all. Also, thank you,
Acknowledgments xi
Ami, for helping me to learn to stay in the present moment and, Anna, for helping me to believe in my own voice.
Finally, I am so deeply grateful to Ravi, who read draft after draft, cooked
nourishing meals, dragged me out for walks and generally propped me up
whenever my confidence and energy f lagged. Your support and love make
everything possible. I promise normal life can now resume!
INTRODUCTION TO THE
SECOND EDITION
Storytelling and the Search for
Racial Justice: Race Talk Matters
How we talk about race matters. It provides a roadmap for tracing how people
make sense of social reality, helping us see where we connect with and where
we differ from others in our reading of the world, and it defines the remedies
that will be considered appropriate and necessary. While talk in and of itself
can’t dismantle racism, a critical analysis of how we talk about racism as a society and as members of differently positioned racial groups, provides a way for us
to see ourselves and others more clearly, understand the racial system we have
inherited, recognize the different roles played by blacks, whites and other racial
groups in this history, and come to grips with the urgent work still to be done
to dismantle racism and live up to the promises of equality and democracy in
our national rhetoric and governing documents.
Storytelling for Social Justice focuses on race talk and the stories we tell ourselves and others about race and racism in our society. The book presents a
conceptual and pedagogical model for teaching about race and racism through
examining the kinds of stories we tell and for developing alternative stories
that account for history, power, and systemic normalizing patterns that justify
inequality. The Storytelling Project Model (STP) analyzes racism through four
story types: stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories and emerging/
transforming stories. Using the arts in general, and storytelling in particular,
the book examines ways to teach and learn about racism through creating raceconscious counter-storytelling communities that can promote more critical
and thoughtful dialogue about racism and the remedies necessary to dismantle
it in our institutions and interactions.
When I wrote Storytelling for Social Justice almost ten years ago, I was concerned with challenging stock stories that are presented as Truth, posing as
seamless narratives that are in fact partial, but are portrayed as the whole story.
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Lee Anne Bell
To challenge the hegemony of stock stories, I wanted to unearth and honor
other stories, historical and contemporary, of and by marginalized communities and social justice activists that relate their knowledge, perspectives and
aspirations—stories that are too often omitted from history books and contemporary discussions. I tried to make clear that I was not talking about individual
or idiosyncratic stories but rather about broad narratives that echo through the
experiences, hopes and desires of those who are left out of mainstream stories
that bolster the status quo. These counter-stories—that I call concealed, resistance
and emerging/transforming stories—speak to broader truths about social conditions, contribute to a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of racism today, and suggest ways to counter racism and act toward justice. In the
first edition, I illustrated such counter-stories in the Philadelphia speech of then
presidential candidate Barack Obama, where he articulated the different stories
that shape and ref lect the divergent experiences of white people and African
Americans in the United States. Such counter-storytelling, I argue, seeks to
expand understanding by being respectful and inclusive of the lived truths and
historical experiences of marginalized groups.
At the time I could not have imagined the situation we find ourselves in
today—where the term “alternative facts” has entered the lexicon to justify
complete fabrications. The term came into use when Kellyanne Conway, advisor to newly elected president Trump, used the phrase to defend press secretary
Sean Spicer’s false statement that the crowds at the Trump inaugural were larger
than those at the Obama inaugural, a demonstrable lie that was pointed out at
the time by news commentators. “Alternative facts” as used by Conway fits
the definition of propaganda. “Propaganda is indifferent to truth and truthfulness, knowledge and understanding; it is a form of strategic communication
that uses any means to accomplish its ends” (Walter Cunningham, The Idea of
Propaganda, 2002). “Alternative facts” are intended to undermine the credibility
of legitimate sources of knowledge, foreclose critical engagement and honest
debate, and ultimately undermine trust in the democratic process.
The above usage of “alternative facts” should not be confused with the information and perspectives presented in counter-stories. Counter-stories offer an
additional set of true facts as an alternative to those currently taken as the full
story. While historians, as academics in other fields, constantly debate, expand
and revise what is taken as truth, such debates are not made in an “anything
goes” manner. They recognize that social processes, including social power,
shape how facts are selected and interpreted, often in the interests of the dominant group. They reanalyze what has come before and add new knowledge in
order to create a more honest record of the historical experiences of all actors
in our society. Often this knowledge-building and critical analysis comes from
scholars of color and women who enter the field bringing different experiences,
standpoints and analytic frames. They provide a fuller, more rounded picture of
social life in the United States aimed at living up to our democratic ideals as a
Introduction to the Second Edition 3
society. Vigorous debate and discussion, and intellectually honest challenges to
received knowledge and powerful interests, are key to this process.
“Alternative facts” as used by Trump and his people are not counter-stories.
They are false narratives, fabrications that distort, outright lies that deny history
in order to support inequality. They are meant to subvert and confuse, to sow
distrust and to foreclose challenges to power and received knowledge. “Alternative facts” are destructive because they pervert language and stif le debate.
My use of storytelling to unearth counter-narratives that empower marginalized communities is the very opposite of “alternative facts.”
Counter-storytelling truths are generous, not exclusive. They seek to
expand knowledge, to reveal what has been left out, suppressed, misunderstood
and ignored in order to build broader understanding of our history as a society
and to challenge the country to live up to its ideals. The essence of such truth
is not reductive but expansive—seeking to understand the experiences of those
at the bottom and margins of society in order to create more inclusive and
honest knowledge of our social condition. My hope is that through becoming
more aware of our racial narratives, their roots in our history and their role
in sustaining institutional patterns of inequality that persist, we can be more
receptive to the evidence of racial injustice around us, more thoughtful about
remedies required and more urgent in our commitment to work for justice.
Audience
Storytelling for Social Justice is addressed to people who want to challenge racism
and other forms of injustice in their institutions, communities and personal
lives. While many of the examples in the book focus on young people and
teachers in public schools, the ideas in the book can be usefully applied to any
institution and community where people gather to understand and challenge
racism and other forms of injustice so as to work toward more equitable and
inclusive environments.
Educators in K–12 and higher education, for example, use the STP model to
develop curriculum and design courses in a range of areas including: composition, research methods, media studies, pedagogical theory and practice, literature, sociology, history, and teacher education. Students in public school and
university classrooms learn to use the story types as a framework for analyzing
texts and structuring arguments in written papers and projects. One faculty
member has used the model to organize a travel course to Montgomery, Alabama, to show how racial history is constructed and given meaning through
storytelling. Many K–12 teachers have used the model to develop curriculum
and school-wide projects. Community consultants and activists have used the
story types as a frame for looking at community histories of racial conf lict and
resistance to develop strategies for addressing racism in the present. While the
emphasis continues to be on race and racism, the story types have also been
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Lee Anne Bell
adapted and used to examine sexism, classism, ableism, heterosexism/homophobia,
nativism and other social justice issues in both school and community settings.
Changes in the New Edition
While the second edition continues to put educators and youth in the forefront,
I have worked to keep a broader audience in mind and to make more explicit
the connections and uses of the storytelling model that are possible in multiple
settings. While the arts played an important role in creating the model and
continue to provide powerful pedagogical tools, in this edition I also show
how social science methods can illustrate the model and provide valuable ways
to teach about the story types. In this edition, I have also updated examples
and references and added new information, resources and cases to round out
description of the story types and to expand pedagogical tools for teaching
about them.
Essays by Users: I’m delighted to present in this new edition short essays
by users that illustrate some of the ways the storytelling model has been used
in teaching, training, community building and activism. These essays are
interspersed throughout the book. The essay by Lauren Anderson that follows Chapter 2 illustrates the power of the Storytelling Model to challenge
complacency about racism and other forms of injustice in a pre-service teacher
education program and shows the value of the story types for helping teachers
think critically and create coherence across curriculum. Following Chapter 3,
Kayhan Irani describes how she uses the model in a yearly summer Civil Rights
Institute in Arkansas, where participants examine concealed stories in local
history including those of Japanese internment and resistance as they visit the
site of a former relocation camp. Yolanda Sealey Ruiz then shares how teachers
in her diversity course have used the model to unearth narratives that challenge a single story as they seek to recognize and affirm their own experiences
with racism. Following Chapter 4, Susan Glisson demonstrates how she uses
storytelling in her work with communities in the South to acknowledge the
effects of segregation and negative police/community interactions and to plan
concerted action in the present. After Chaper 5, Vanessa D’Egidio and María
S. Rivera Maulucci illustrate emerging/transforming stories in an elementary
school and university classroom respectively. D’Egidio explains how she uses
the story types to make curriculum meaningful to her students so that they see
themselves as actors and agents who can shape the future in their classroom and
in their school community. Rivera Maulucci’s essay describes the development
of an Arts and Humanities course framed around the story types that uses the
resources of New York City to develop critical literacy. After Chapter 6 John
Madura shows how he uses statistical methods to facilitate movement through
the forming and storming stages of the model to create a counter-storytelling
community that enables students to more honestly name and confront ideas
Introduction to the Second Edition 5
they and others hold that sustain racism. In a final essay, Zoe Duskin shows
how she uses the model as a school leader to create school communities where
it is safe to share stories about race and other dimensions of identity. Duskin
believes that the process of creating shared stories is what “gives a school soul.”
These powerful essays illustrate the many ways the storytelling model can
be used in diverse environments. My hope is that these examples will inspire
other practical and inspirational methods for using the model to challenge
stock stories, unearth concealed and resistance stories and generate emerging/
transforming stories that contribute to broader, more inclusive visions of and
actions toward justice in our society.
Chapter 1, “Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism Through Story and
the Arts: Introducing the Storytelling Project Model,” describes the Storytelling
Project and introduces the theoretical framework for the Storytelling Project
Model as a scaffold for organizing curriculum, teaching and training in different arenas. I review the four story types through which we conceptualize
racial discourse in the model (stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories
and emerging/transforming stories) and discuss the challenges of creating a
counter-storytelling community in which honest investigation of racial storytelling among diverse groups can take place. I discuss the power of the arts as a
vehicle for examining racial stories in diverse communities and for helping us
to imagine otherwise.
Chapter 2, “Stock Stories: Reproducing Racism and White Advantage,”
offers the first iteration of the Storytelling Project Model in practice, highlighting the construct of stock stories. I provide a definition of stock stories and
discuss how they function to protect and reinforce the racial status quo. I use
the example of the American Dream to illustrate how stock stories support
inequality and describe activities we developed in the project to deconstruct
and critically analyze this iconic stock story.
Chapter 3, “Concealed Stories: Reclaiming Subjugated Memory and Knowledge,” offers a second iteration of the Storytelling Project Model in practice,
highlighting the story type of concealed stories. I define concealed stories and
trace how they circulate within communities of color and among white racial
progressives as sources of critical literacy and sustenance for survival in a racist
society. I look at the role of social memory in perpetuating stock stories and the
potential of memory work to expose and critique the self-interested nature of
stock stories that are taken for granted as natural. I illustrate concealed stories
through activities that draw on racial memory to expose the genealogy of racism, tracing how individual stories are linked to broader patterns. I show how
the juxtaposition of stock and concealed stories through visual art, versions of
historical events and social science data can open up new understanding of how
racism works.
Chapter 4, “Resistance Stories: Drawing on Antiracism Legacies to Map the
Future,” turns to the third story type: resistance stories. This chapter offers a third
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Lee Anne Bell
iteration of the Storytelling Project Model in practice. I define resistance stories
through contemporary examples that draw from and build on resistance in the
past. I discuss youth resistance as a valuable source for developing curriculum
that engages concerns of young people to make education meaningful. Drawing on our research in two high school classrooms in New York City where the
Storytelling Project Curriculum was enacted, I illustrate how we use resistance
stories to look at racism through theater games, poetry, murals, oral history and
action research in local communities.
Chapter 5, “Emerging/Transforming Stories: Challenging Racism in Everyday Life,” offers a fourth iteration of the Storytelling Project Model in practice,
highlighting the final story type of emerging/transforming stories. I define this story
type and discuss why public schools, despite all their limitations, still offer an
important site for struggle against racism and other forms of injustice. I use the
example of an undergraduate teacher education seminar to demonstrate how
the Storytelling Project Model can be used to help teachers understand racial
positionality, think more critically about their practice, and develop curriculum
that engages students as social critics and actors.
In Chapter 6, “Cultivating a Counter-Storytelling Community: The Storytelling Model in Action,” I trace the Storytelling Model through a fiveday intensive summer institute for teachers to illustrate the development of
counter-storytelling community. I draw on theories of small group dynamics and
intergroup dialogue to highlight stages in the development of a race conscious
storytelling community and to illustrate key points in the process.
Storytelling for Social Justice, 2nd Edition offers a practical, critical framework
for thinking about and acting upon stories about racism to develop common
ground with others to work for racial justice. Now more than ever, such work is
urgently needed and essential to enacting and living up to our ideals as a diverse
democracy.
1
CRITICAL TEACHING/
LEARNING ABOUT RACISM
THROUGH STORY AND THE
ARTS
Introducing the Storytelling Project Model
When we begin to see ourselves as contributing to a fabric, we are no longer
invisible threads or entire bolts full of lonely self-importance.
The quote above comes from a paper written by a white student in a qualitative
research course in which, over two semesters, we conducted interviews about race
and racism in the United States with people working in education and human
services (see Bell, 2003). As we analyzed the transcripts of these interviews, I
observed that people often draw on stories to explicate their views about race and
noticed the persistent ways that certain stories repeat, uttered as individual but
patterned across multiple interviews. I also noticed that students who were more
knowledgeable and conscious about racism (more often, though not exclusively,
students of color) were able to comment on the racial assumptions embedded
in stories in ways that enabled less aware classmates to discern racism through
the vehicle of the words spread before them. When white students recognized
themselves in these stories, for example, they were more open to ref lecting on
their own racial socialization in critical ways, and more able to recognize their
position within the fabric of racism. It also seemed that students of color felt freer
to point out the racist content of interviews without feeling they had to temper
their insights to avoid defensiveness from white classmates. In one such discussion, a young white man commented in fascinated, dawning awareness, “I’ve said
that before!” as he began to recognize and consider racial assumptions pointed
out in the transcript he and a black classmate were analyzing. The focus on the
words and stories of others prompted some of the least defensive, most honest and
genuine conversations about racism I have witnessed in my teaching life.
I have been learning and teaching about racism for the past forty years, experimenting with pedagogical approaches to racism and other forms of oppression,
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Lee Anne Bell
and exploring how to use as teaching tools the understanding I have gained
about my own socialization and ongoing recruitment into whiteness. I have
facilitated numerous courses and workshops on this topic in both all-white and
mixed race groups and have witnessed the confusion, guilt, anger and resistance
that many white people express at the idea that they have been socialized into
a racist system, as well as the anger, frustration and disillusionment exhibited
by people of color who doubt that their own stories and experiences will ever
be fully heard and understood. Though sometimes I see members of diverse
groups come together as allies committed to work against racism, I feel dismay
at the continual challenges of helping people hang onto an awareness of the
systemic nature of racism in their lives and in the broader society.
Why does studying the stories and words of others sometimes open up more
honest, less defensive dialogue about racism and help people move to awareness
of the systemic nature of white supremacy so much more quickly? How does this
approach enable some white people to recognize their complicity in the racial
system, and the damage of normative whiteness to themselves as human beings,
as exemplified by the student quoted at the opening of this chapter? How does
such an approach allow people of color to feel more comfortable and willing to
share their experiences with and understanding of racism? These questions were
the seeds for the Storytelling Project described in this book.
In this chapter, I introduce the Storytelling Project and the development of a
pedagogical model for teaching about race and racism through storytelling and
the arts. I trace the process through which the model was created, introduce the
four story types we use as constructs to explore race and racism, and discuss the
central role of the arts in the model’s development and implementation. This
discussion lays the foundation for subsequent chapters that define in more detail
each story type and pedagogical tools and activities for using that story type to
explore race and racism.
Creating the Storytelling Model
Kurt Lewin famously said, “There is nothing so practical as a good theory.”
Our goals for the Storytelling Project were to experiment with the arts, and
story in particular, to learn about race and racism, and to develop practical pedagogical tools for teaching about racism that could be extended to other areas
of social justice, replicated and adapted for a range of purposes and groups. We
focused on strategies for curricular and professional development that would
engage people both in critical examination of racism and in finding proactive ways to work against racism in their own institutions and communities.
The Storytelling Model that emerged from this process views race and racism
through four story types, drawing on multiple artistic and pedagogical tools to
discover, develop and analyze stories about racism that can catalyze consciousness and commitment to action.
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 9
Our creative team of artists, educators, academics and undergraduate students met monthly for intensive full-day exploration and discussion of racism
through various art forms. This incredibly generative process was facilitated by
a grant from the Third Millennium Foundation and space for our work at their
International Center for Tolerance Education (ICTE). Housed in a renovated
warehouse in the DUMBO area of Brooklyn, ICTE provided a bright and
open space, filled with art and surrounded by an expanse of river and sky visible from every window. Once a month we converged on this space to engage
pedagogical and artistic processes for exploring racism.
Our starting point was a social justice education paradigm that looks at
diversity through the structural dynamics of power and privilege. We were
concerned both with diversity—differences among social groups such as ethnic
heritage, class, age, gender, religion, language, sexuality, ability, nationality—
and social justice—challenging the unequal ways in which social hierarchies
sort difference to the benefit of some groups over others (Adams & Bell, 2016).
Using this focus we explored how racial stories and storytelling both reproduce
and challenge the racial status quo and how methods derived from storytelling
and the arts might enable us to expose and constructively analyze pervasive patterns that perpetuate racism in daily life. We examined the power in stories and
the power dynamics around stories to help us understand how social location
(our racial position in society) affects storytelling and to consider ways to generate new stories that account for power, privilege and position in discussing
and acting on racial and other social justice issues. In particular, we wanted to
expose and confront color-blind racism and develop tools to tackle racial issues
more consciously and proactively in racially diverse groups.
In our collective reading we examined theoretical ideas about race (identity, positionality, racial formations) and racism (institutional and systemic
power, privilege, resistance, collusion). When we came together each month
we explored these ideas through the creative vehicles of poetry, writing, dance,
spoken word, theater games, film and visual art. At each meeting, we experientially engaged one or more art forms, ref lected on our experiences with these
forms and discussed the issues thus raised for understanding racism. We came
to see this as a collaborative theory building process (Murray, 2006) where we
put forth and tested out ideas for understanding and teaching about race and
racism through the arts. This collaborative process, described in detail in Bell
and Roberts (2010), drew upon the knowledge, expertise and lived experiences
of creative team members and used our diverse racial locations and perspectives
to generate the Storytelling Project Model.
Understanding Race and Racism
Four key interacting concepts undergird how we understand race and racism: race
as a social construction, racism as a system that operates on multiple intersecting
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Lee Anne Bell
levels, white supremacy/white advantage as key though often neglected aspects
of systemic racism, and the problematic notion of color-blindness as an ideal and
barrier to racial progress. Our thinking about each of these concepts was inf luenced by a range of resources and writing that I discuss brief ly below.
Race as a Social Construction
We understand race as something that is created through the assumptions,
norms and patterns human beings assign to it rather than as a naturally fixed
and given category (Haney-Lopez, 2006; Omi & Winant, 1986). We recognize
that all people are members of a human community that shares the same biological characteristics, exhibiting more variation within so-called racial groups
than between groups (Gould, 1996), and that the commonly held concept of
different “races” is an illusion (Adelman, 2003). Despite overwhelming scientific challenges to the notion of race, however, it continues to be used to interpret human differences and justify socio-economic arrangements to benefit
whites as a racial group (Smedley & Smedley, 2011).
We also recognize that the idea of race powerfully shapes the intimately lived
experiences of people assigned to various racial categories (Smedley & Smedley,
2005; Roberts, 2012), and that it is important to understand both the distinctive
and shared ways that racism operates on different communities of color, both
historically and in the present, as well as through intersections with other forms
of oppression (Crenshaw, 1995, 2016).
Racial identity is not merely an instrument of rule; it is also an arena and
medium of social practice. It is an aspect of individual and collective selfhood. Racial identity in other words does all sorts of practical “work”; it
shapes privileged status for some and undermines the social standing of
others. It appeals to varied political constituencies, inclusive and exclusive. It codes everyday life in an infinite number of ways.
(Winant, 2004, p. 36)
Though constructed through ideas and language, rather than biology, race has
significant material consequences in everyday life. These consequences shape
where one lives and works, how one is treated by the judicial and criminal justice system, the resources to which we have access including health and schooling, income and assets that we can pass on to the next generation—literally
every aspect of social life. In this sense, race matters a great deal.
Racism as a System That Operates on Multiple Levels
We conceptualize racism as a system of interpersonal, social and institutional
patterns and practices that maintain social hierarchies in which whites as a
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 11
group benefit at the expense of other groups labeled as “non-white”—African
Americans, Latinoa/s, Asian Americans, Native Americans, Arab Americans
(Bell, Funk, Joshi, & Valdivia, 2016). We understand racism as a phenomenon
that operates historically to sustain and inform the present, but in ways that
often don’t leave tracks ( Winant, 2004). Because it saturates our institutions and
social structures it is like the water in which we swim; the air that we breathe
(see Tatum, 2003). It shapes our government, schools, churches, businesses,
media and other social institutions in multiple and complex ways that serve to
reinforce, sustain and continually reproduce an unequal status quo. As a system
that has been in place for centuries, “business as usual” is sufficient to fuel an
institutionalized system of racism that often operates outside of conscious or
deliberate intention. Because we must understand its ubiquity in order to effectively challenge its hegemony, the quotidian vehicle of story offers a promising
way to get at the commonplace of racism in daily life.
Conscious awareness of racism varies widely among different racial groups,
however, and thus shapes the stories to which each group has access (van Dijk,
1999). Whites, as a group, tend to be less conscious of racism and/or more likely
to believe that racism has been addressed than people of color who experience
the ongoing effects of racism daily in their lives (Bonilla-Silva, 2006). Because
racial location so powerfully shapes the stories we hear and tell about racism,
we thought a great deal about how to account for positionality as we developed
the Storytelling Model.
White Supremacy and White Privilege/Advantage
Race has inescapable material consequences in society, shaping access to resources
and life possibilities in ways that benefit the white racial group at the expense of
groups of color (Katznelson, 2005; Lipsitz, 2006; Massey & Denton, 1993; Massey,
2012; Oliver & Shapiro, 1997). The racially shaped distribution of resources is
illustrated quite powerfully in a DVD we watched and discussed as a creative team
in one of our early sessions: “Race: The Power of an Illusion” (Adelman, 2003).
This excellent DVD provides a historical and sociological lens for dissecting ideas
about race and tracing the consequences of these ideas in American society.
Many scholars describe well how whiteness works as the unmarked but presumed norm against which people from other groups are measured ( Berger,
1999; Fine, 1997; Frankenberg, 1993; Hitchcock, 2002; Myers, 2005). Shining
a spotlight on whiteness as a central feature in the study of racism enables us to
identify the power dynamics and unearned advantages that accrue to whites as a
group historically and into the present ( Katznelson, 2005; Lipsitz, 2006; McIntosh, 2012; Middleton & Roediger, 2016; Wise, 2005). We wanted to unearth
stories that expose normative practices that are marked as neutral in order to
shine a spotlight on institutions that maintain and bolster white supremacy and
to open up analytic possibilities for challenging its hegemony.
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Lee Anne Bell
Color-Blindness
When Martin Luther King, Jr., put forth his vision of a color-blind society in
his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, he imagined a future where the eradication of racism would eliminate barriers for people of color. He did not mean
color-blindness in the naïve sense in which it is so often used today as signifying
“not seeing” skin color. King’s vision of a future in which barriers to people of
color are eliminated requires that we see and account for race in order to create
institutions and practices that do not replicate patterns of racial inequality that
have been rendered as normative (Bell, 2016a; Crenshaw, Harris, HoSang, &
Lipsitz, 2019).
Understanding colorblindness and its operations requires knowledge of history since “the political and cultural legitimacy of colorblindness rests on a
series of deliberate and debilitating lies about history” (Lipsitz, 2019, p. 25).
Rather than representing the success of the Civil Rights movement, “colorblindness sanitizes a long history of conquest and dispossession of indigenous
peoples, slavery, segregation and immigrant exclusion that created the structures of racial rule while purporting that race has nothing to do with it” (ibid).
Through a conscious and sustained focus on race and racism, the Storytelling Project sought to surface stories that illustrate racism’s differential effects on
white people and people of color so as to challenge color-blindness and generate more grounded and informed dialogue about racial realities ( Bell, 2016a).
Critical Race Theory
We were and continue to be greatly inf luenced by scholarship in Critical Race
Theory (CRT) and its insights about the persistence of racism (Bell, 1989, 1992;
Bell, Delgado, & Stefancic, 2005; Crenshaw et al., 2019; Delgado & Stefancic,
2017; Dixson & Rousseau, 2006; Matsuda, 1996; Taylor, Gillborn, & LadsonBillings, 2009; Williams, 1991). Like CRT scholars we see race and racism as
central to an analysis of inequality, and sustained by stock stories that rationalize
the status quo. Like CRT scholars, we use the idea of counter-storytelling to
highlight stories that counteract or challenge the dominant stories ( Delgado,
1989; Yosso, 2006).
In our model, we differentiate such stories into three types of counter-stories:
concealed, resistance and emerging/transforming stories. We conceptualize these
story types as pedagogical tools for helping people learn about systemic racism,
discern its manifestations in daily life and take action in their own lives to challenge racism and white supremacy. In this way we align with Ladson-Billings’
notion of CRT as “an important intellectual and social tool for deconstruction, reconstruction, and construction: deconstruction of oppressive structures
and discourses, reconstruction of human agency, and construction of equitable
and socially just relations of power” (Ladson-Billings, 2009, p. 19). Concealed
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 13
and Resistance stories help to deconstruct oppressive institutional patterns and
practices that Stock stories support, while Resistance stories and Emerging/
transforming stories bring forth historical examples to generate new ideas and
practices in the present that challenge racism and work for social justice.
The Power of Storytelling
Stories as Analytic Tools
Storytelling is a powerful means to explore the topic of racism for several
reasons. Stories are one of the most meaningful and personal ways that we
learn about the world, passed down from generation to generation through
the familial and cultural groups to which we belong. As human beings we are
primed to engage each other and the world through language. Thus, stories can
be deeply evocative sources of knowledge and awareness.
Storytelling and oral tradition are also democratic, freely available to all,
requiring neither wealth and status nor formal education. Indeed, stories have
historically provided ways for people with few material resources to maintain
their values and sense of community in the face of forces that would disparage
and attempt to destroy them (See for example, Allen, 1992, 1996; Anzaldúa,
2007; Bambara & Morrison, 1996; Han & Hsu, 2004; Lee, 2008; LevinsMorales, 1998; Silko, 1986; Yosso, 2006).
Because stories operate on both individual and collective levels, they can
bridge the sociological and abstract with the psychological and personal contours of daily experience. Stories help us connect individual experiences with
systemic analysis, allowing us to unpack in ways that are perhaps more accessible than abstract analysis alone, racism’s hold on us as we move through the
institutions and cultural practices that sustain racism. Further, because stories
carry within them historical/social formations and sedimented ways of thinking, what Gramsci called “commonsense” (1971), stories offer an accessible
vehicle for uncovering normative patterns and historical relations that perpetuate racial privilege. They also potentially enable conscious development of new
stories that contest the racial status quo and offer alternative visions for democratic and socially just race relations (Guinier & Torres, 2002).
The Arts as Transformative Learning
Recognizing that racism is “embodied and ideational” as well as “structural and
institutional” (Thompson, 1997) the arts provide a way to engage body, heart and
mind to open up learning and develop a critical perspective that affords broader
understanding of cultural patterns and practices. Sensory engagement without a
way to critique social patterns may lead to a myopic focus on individual change
that is at best anemic, but intellectual insight into broad patterns without sensory
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Lee Anne Bell
engagement can ultimately be distancing and disempowering. Too often, when
we, particularly white people, talk about race we use abstract language, treating
racism as something “out there” but not “here” in our daily lives.
The aesthetic experience of stories told through visual arts, theater, spoken
word and poetry, can help us think more creatively, intimately and deeply
about racism and other challenging social justice issues ( Bell & Desai, 2011).
The arts provide a realm where charged topics can be encountered and engaged
on an embodied level ( Roberts, 2013) and thus stimulate deeper learning ( Eisner, 2002). Maxine Greene describes this process of engagement thus: “[as] we
begin moving between immediacies and general categories . . . we participate
in some dimensions that we could not know if imagination were not aroused”
(1995, p. 186).
The arts also disrupt what we take for granted, helping us question normative presumptions about the world so that “commonplaces of racism can be
unsettled . . . rather than taken as natural” ( Thompson, 1997). The creative
dimensions opened up by aesthetic engagement help us envision new possibilities for challenging and changing oppressive circumstances ( Desai, 2017). As
Thompson (1997) notes, the arts can “take us up where we are but at the same
time shift us, introducing us into new and surprising relationships. No longer
grounded in the familiar, we begin to construct fresh understandings, and in
the process reconstruct ourselves” (p. 32).
Through helping us to encounter others in more authentic and honest ways
the arts may also open up new possibilities for dialogue within and across
diverse communities (Clover, 2006; Fox & Fine, 2013; Korza, Schaffer, &
Assaf, 2005; Romney, 2005). Aesthetic experience, and storytelling specifically, create an opening for the teller and listener to “extend, and deepen what
each of us thinks of when [we] speak of a community” (Greene, 1995, p. 161)
and “provide meaningful examples and ways to identify and connect” ( hooks,
1989, p. 77). Through empathic engagement, stories set the stage for affective
change; for imagining otherwise ( Bell & Desai, 2011). As we create new narratives we situate ourselves as responsive moral agents, enabling new ways of
behaving in line with social justice goals ( Wortham, 2000).
Problematizing Story
It is also important to recognize the ways in which the story form can be problematic. How stories are received and understood depends on context, on the
relationship between narrator and listener, on genesis and purpose, on power
relations within society (Harris, Carney, & Fine, 2001). The diverse groups that
make up the United States provide a rich source of stories to draw upon, but in
a deeply racialized society stained by structural racism, not all stories are equally
acknowledged, affirmed or valued. Vigilance about the danger of story to support an individualistic relativism that elides differences in power and privilege is
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 15
crucial. Some stories are supported and reinforced by the power structure while
others must fight tenaciously to be heard. As hooks comments, “for some, openness is not about the luxury of ‘will I choose to share this or tell that’ but rather
‘will I survive—will I make it through—will I stay alive?’ ” (1989, p. 2).
All too often discussions of race and racism in the white mainstream, or
“whitestream” (Grande, 2004), reify and repeat stock stories developed by the
dominant group to put them and their group in a favorable light vis-à-vis others (van Dijk, 1999). Frequently, they are stories of forward racial progress that
rationalize white privilege and the status quo (L.A. Bell, 2003; Bonilla-Silva,
Lewis, & Embrick, 2004). With awareness, however, such stories can serve as a
useful entry point to critically examine race, recognize how racism functions
on both individual and systematic levels, and understand its persistence and the
factors that enable it to endure.
For people from marginalized communities, stories are a way of bearing
witness to their struggle and survival in a racist system ( Levins-Morales, 1998;
Silko, 1986). Such stories persist through tenacious resistance in the face of
a status quo that marginalizes and silences their expression, submerging the
truths or lessons they impart. Standpoint theory (Hill Collins, 2000) provides
a framework for understanding story by highlighting how location in relation
to power shapes historically shared, group-based experiences and for acknowledging what is missed when the voices and stories of marginalized people are
suppressed or silenced. CRT also underscores the value of stories to give voice
to the experiences of those oppressed by racism and to provide analytic tools
for critical understanding of the mechanisms through which racism operates.
For members of the dominant group, critical analysis of stories provides a
way to get access to what Anzaldúa (1990) calls “racial blank spots”—the selective editing of reality that allows white people to disengage from the racial
advantages we enjoy. If, as Anzaldúa asserts, disengagement is “a sanctioned
ethnocentric, racist strategy” then critical, emotional engagement with stock
and concealed stories offers one way for white people to stay connected and
committed, and thus responsive and responsible to racial others (Boler, 1999;
Ioanide, 2019).
In the Storytelling Project, we seek ways to identify the conditions necessary
for marginalized voices to break through whitestream discourses that silence them,
as well as for dominant stories that tell on racism from the inside to be exposed, so
as to uncover possibilities for resistance to the racial status quo. We consider how
to create a community where the often subtle but persistent ways that positionality shapes risk can be noticed. We wish to create community where differential
aspects of story, and the connections between individual stories and group experiences with racism, can be continually confronted and engaged. We believe that a
purposely created, race conscious, counter-storytelling community ( Bell, 2016a)
is the key to the effectiveness of a storytelling methodology designed to confront
racism and thus is at the center of the model described in the next section.
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Lee Anne Bell
The Storytelling Project Model
Creating a Counter-Storytelling Community
At the heart of the Storytelling Project Model is the deliberate and purposeful
creation of a community of diverse members in which stories about race and
racism can be openly shared, respectfully heard and critically discussed/analyzed.
Many of our early discussions centered on the challenges of establishing a
multiracial community of storytellers where issues of social power and privilege can be exposed for critical analysis, dissected and transformed into new
imaginaries—i.e. a race conscious, counter-storytelling community.
Recognizing that people of color tend to bear the weight of talking about
race and racism we wanted to find ways to ensure that dominant group members more consciously take on a fair share of this burden. We sought to identify
the barriers that so often prevent white people from engaging honestly and
responsibly in dialogue about racism. We wanted to invite “kitchen talk . . .
honest, straight up conversation that people have in the kitchen, in contrast
to sugar-coated living room conversation that is too polite to get to the heart
of the matter” ( Korza et al., 2005, p. 108). We experimented with deliberate
ways to build community in which color- and power-conscious discussions are
invited so that people from different racial locations can better understand their
own and others’ experiences and the operations of the system that constructs
race relations in our society.
For counter-storytelling in diverse groups to be meaningful and honest we
first need to clearly articulate the “terms of engagement” ( hooks, 1989). Thus
the Storytelling Project Model invites the careful development of ground rules
that acknowledge the challenges of recognizing and countering inequality
from the different social positions occupied by members of the group. Explicit
guidelines can help create a community in which participants can openly
discuss race and racism, respectfully hear each person’s voice and story, hold
up and scrutinize stories in terms of their relationship to systems of power
and privilege, and interrupt practices of power that differentially privilege or
mute particular stories (thus reproducing the system we hope to dismantle). For
example, white people are often confronting the realities of racism for the first
time, realities that are all too familiar to people of color. Ground rules need to
acknowledge these differences and find ways to validate and learn from what
different positions/locations teach us about how the system of racism works
so as not to replicate the dynamics of power and privilege we seek to contest
(Ioanide, 2019; Reynolds, 2019; Sensoy & DiAngelo, 2014). It is also essential
that facilitators have the critical self-knowledge and awareness that will enable
them to effectively facilitate challenging conversations ( Bell, Goodman, &
Varghese, 2016).
We set forth these intentions with the group and engage them in naming
and practicing guidelines that support these intentions, so that when conf licts
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 17
or disagreements arise the guidelines can be used to facilitate thoughtful faceto-face discussion and engagement. While specific guidelines will likely differ
from group to group, what matters most is that they are intentionally generated
to acknowledge differences in power and privilege and to equalize and encourage honesty and shared risk-taking. It is also critical that the guidelines be
conscientiously used to facilitate frank dialogue and to recognize and stick with
uncomfortable moments particularly at the first sign of conf lict or disagreement. Establishing such a community is an essential foundation for effectively
using the Storytelling Model (See Chapter 6 for a fuller discussion and illustration of the model in practice).
Developing the Story Types
The creative team continually discussed the limitations and opportunities provided by stories to get at what we began to call “the genealogy of racism.”
We engaged in storytelling, mining our own experiences through writing and
poetry and through reading stories and poetry written by others. This process
raised provocative questions about the complications of storytelling: stories can
be truthful but can also be masks; they can allow us to take on the burdens of
racism as well as escape thinking about it; because our identities are multiple
our stories also speak to this multiplicity, complicating racism and its intersections with other aspects of social inequality. We found that sometimes telling
our stories in the group could help us remember what we had forgotten as
individuals about the pains of racism, the rewards of privilege and the normative discourses that make conscious, honest dialogue about racism so difficult
to sustain. We grappled with the challenges of using story to unearth sociocultural practices in a society that valorizes individualism.
Through these conversations we began to differentiate types of stories. Following the lead of critical race theorists, we used the idea of contrasting hegemonic or stock stories with counter-stories as one starting point and began to
f lesh out these two story types in our storytelling experiments. We also looked
to history, visual art, poetry and literature for inspiration, as well as to the
notion of counter-storytelling in CRT. These explorations led us to consider
and differentiate concealed stories held within oppressed communities that are
often hidden or protected from outside scrutiny, as well as stories of challenge
and resistance that are suppressed in mainstream discourse.
The model we ended up with codifies four story types to describe how people talk and think about race and racism in the United States. These are: stock
stories, concealed stories, resistance stories and emerging/transforming stories.
As Figure 1.1 shows, building a critical counter-storytelling community is central to exploring the four story types. We conceive of these stories as connected
and mutually interacting. Each story type leads into the next in a cycle that
fills out and expands our understanding of and ability to creatively challenge
racism. The story types provide language and a framework for making sense of
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Lee Anne Bell
FIGURE 1.1
The Storytelling Project Model
race and racism through exploring the genealogy of racism, the social stories
that generate and reproduce it and the stock stories that keep it in place.
Stock stories are introduced as the first type because they are the most public
and ubiquitous in the mainstream institutions of society—schools, businesses,
government and the media—and because the other story types, as counterstories, critique and challenge the presumption of universality in stock stories.
Thus, they provide the ground against which we build our analysis. Stock stories are the tales told by the dominant group, passed on through historical and
literary documents, and celebrated through public rituals, law, the arts, education and media. Because stock stories reveal a great deal about what a society
considers important and meaningful, they provide a useful starting point for
analyzing how racism operates to valorize and advantage the dominant white
group.
For example, we examine stock stories about the American Dream through
poetry, political speeches, songs, public art and social science data that delineate
aspects of this iconic story—individualism, meritocracy and inevitable forward
progress presumed for any person who works hard enough to get ahead. The
ideal of “America” as a place where anyone can come and make it has been a
beacon to immigrants throughout our history and into the present. We analyze
these stories so as to expose and question their presumed normative status and
to question what they leave out (see Chapter 2).
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 19
Concealed stories coexist alongside the stock stories but most often remain
in the shadows, hidden from mainstream view, but providing a perspective that
is often very different from that of the mainstream (Scott, 1990). Concealed
stories reveal both the hidden (from the mainstream) stories told from the perspective of racially dominated groups, as well as stories uncovered through
critical analysis of historical and social science data that illustrate how race
shapes experience in our society. Though invisible to those in the mainstream,
concealed stories are circulated, told and retold by people in the margins whose
experiences and aspirations they express and honor ( Levins-Morales, 1998).
Through concealed stories people who are marginalized, and often stigmatized, by the dominant society recount their experiences and critique or “talk
back” to mainstream narratives, portraying the strengths and capacities within
marginalized communities, what Yosso (2006) calls “community cultural
wealth.” Levins Morales writes, “We must struggle to re-create the shattered
knowledge of our humanity. It is in retelling stories of victimization, recasting
our roles from subhuman scapegoats to beings full of dignity and courage, that
this becomes possible” (1998, p. 13).
Following the lead of CRT, which underlines the value of experiential
knowledge about race and racism, we begin with activities that tell the stories
of racial oppression through the experiences of people of color. These stories
tend to narrate the past and ongoing realities of racism that are either invisible
or only glimpsed in the stock stories. For example, we examine poetry and art
created by artists from marginalized communities that describe the realities
of working hard but never getting ahead, of striving to realize the American
Dream but continually facing barriers to progress. We also search for the stories
concealed in statistics and social science data about the racial distribution of life
opportunities and access. For example, we look at statistical data about social
mobility among different racial groups to critically analyze stock stories that
anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps if they work hard enough.
Such stories guide the search for concealed structures of racial inequality
and the hidden stories of normalized white advantage. Through contrasting
stock and concealed stories we develop analytic tools to examine the concealed
stories that reveal the underside of racism and use these tools to identify the
penalties for people of color as well as the hidden advantages for whites. We
explore such questions as: What are the stories about race and racism that we
don’t hear? Why don’t we hear them? How are such stories lost/left out? How
do we recover these stories? What do these stories show us about racism that
the stock stories do not?
While concealed stories are often eclipsed by stock stories, they are everywhere to be excavated and held up to the stock stories they challenge. We
deconstruct stock stories through comparing them to concealed stories, identifying different perspectives and knowledge, and developing a fuller picture of
our society and its institutions. Such comparisons help us understand how stock
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Lee Anne Bell
stories maintain the institutional and social status quo in ways that scaffold and
perpetuate a racial system that ultimately harms everyone by preventing realization of the democratic ideals our country espouses (see Chapter 3).
Resistance stories are the third type of story we examine in the model. These
are the warehouse of stories, too seldom taught in our schools, that demonstrate
how people have resisted racism, challenged the stock stories that support it,
and fought for more equal and inclusive social arrangements throughout our
history. Resistance stories include the reserve of stories accumulated over time
about and by people and groups who have challenged an unjust racial status
quo. They include stories of “sheroes” and “heroes” who have been excluded
(and sometimes included and vilified) in history books, but who have nevertheless struggled against racism. Too often we simplify resistance through
iconic stories of heroic individuals that sanitize the collective struggles that
drive social change, and thus fail to pass on necessary lessons about how social
change actually comes about ( Theoharis, 2019; Dixson, 2018; Menkart, Murray, & View, 2004). Resistance stories teach about antiracist perspectives and
practices that have existed throughout our history up to the present time to
expand our vision of what is possible in our own antiracism work today.
Resistance stories serve as guides and inspiration for the hard work ahead.
They provide tools and examples of ways to resist and work against racism and
imagine possibilities for resisting the racial status quo. Guiding questions for
discovering/uncovering resistance stories include: What stories exist (historical
or contemporary) that serve as examples of resistance? What role does resistance
play in challenging the stock stories about racism? What can we learn about
antiracist action and perseverance against the odds by looking at these stories?
Finally, we explore emerging/transforming stories. These counter-stories
are deliberately constructed to challenge the stock stories, build on and amplify
concealed and resistance stories, and create new stories to interrupt the status
quo and energize change. Such stories enact continuing critique and resistance
to the stock stories, subvert taken for granted racial patterns and enable imagination of new possibilities for inclusive human community. In sharp contrast
to naïve, ahistorical stories, they are grounded in and emerge from a critical
analysis of stock and concealed stories that reveal social patterns. The analysis is
further developed through resistance stories that provide models for generating
new stories that imagine alternative scenarios for racial equality and articulate
strategies to work toward these visions.
Guiding questions include: What would it look like if we transformed the
stock stories? What can we draw from resistance stories to create new stories
about what ought to be? What kinds of communities based on justice can we
imagine and then work to enact? What kinds of stories can support our ability
to speak out and act where instances of racism occur? (See Chapters 4 and 5.)
These four story types are intricately connected. Stock stories and concealed
stories are in effect two sides of the same coin, ref lecting on the same “realities”
Critical Teaching/Learning About Racism 21
of social life, but from quite different positions and perspectives. Resistance
and emerging/transforming stories are also linked through their capacity to
challenge the stock stories. Resistance stories become the base upon which
emerging/transforming stories can be imagined and serve to energize their
creation. Emerging/transforming stories then build anew in each generation as
people engage with the struggles before them and learn from and build on the
resistance stories that preceded them.
The model also recognizes the persistence of racism and the possibility of
recruitment and cooptation back into the status quo as racism shape-shifts to
appear in new forms. In the model (see Figure 1.1), arrows show the potential
for moving outward toward action and change, but also back toward stock
stories. These possible directions indicate the need to stay mindful and open
to new stories as we continue to learn about racism and its effects on diverse
communities.
The act of placing diverse stories side by side as worthy of critical inspection
enables us to see that the mainstream story is not normative but one among
many, and thus contestable. We learn to attend to stories from the margins
as sources of crucial information our society needs if we are to realize our
democratic ideals. In this way, the Storytelling Project Model provides tools for
developing a critical lens that can be applied to many areas of analysis and thus
engage people in critical learning for social justice.
The Storytelling Project Model and the story types we identify present a
powerful pedagogical framework for helping people develop a critical understanding of race and racism, and other forms of injustice. High school students who participated in the experimental implementation of a curriculum
we developed based on the model found it to be a meaningful framework for
analyzing racism in their school and community and for generating alternatives
for change ( Roberts, Bell, & Murphy, 2008). We have also used the model for
in-service teacher education and teacher professional development (see Chapters 5 and 6). The teachers who participated in our summer institute in 2005
described it as an “innovative and powerful” means for raising and looking at
issues of race and racism in their classrooms (see Chapter 6). Since the first edition of the book, we have learned from other users of the model about its usefulness for framing humanities, art and social science curriculum in high school
and college courses, as a tool for studying narrative analysis, and as a framework
for examining other social justice issues and their intersections. Examples of
diverse uses of the curriculum are interspersed in the essays by users placed
between chapters in this new edition.
Conclusion
The Storytelling Project Model asks those who use it to consider what we lose
when stories of and by diverse groups are concealed or lost, and what we gain
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Lee Anne Bell
as a society when we listen to and learn from the multitude of stories available
for our consideration as we seek to dismantle racist structures and patterns in
our society. It invites people to tell their own stories and through such telling envision a future that embraces inclusion, equity and justice for all of the
diverse people in our country. As Martin Luther King reminds us, “We are in
an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly” (quoted in Barlow, 2003). It is
our hope that the ongoing examination and construction of such stories can
be powerful tools for motivating and sustaining antiracist work and generating
democratic change.
In the following chapters we illustrate the Storytelling Project Model through
several iterations and examples in practice. Each chapter highlights a different
story type, examining that story type in depth and showing how it links to other
parts of the model. Each also explores applications of the model and further draws
out the role of storytelling and the arts in developing our understanding of race
and racism. Interspersed throughout are essays by individuals who describe how
they use the Storytelling model in their own educational and activist work.
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2
STOCK STORIES
Reproducing Racism and White Advantage
History runs thick in all of us.
(Carroll, 1997)
This chapter introduces the first story type in the Storytelling Project Model—
stock stories. Here I define stock stories and examine the functions they serve,
illustrating how stock stories operate in everyday talk to legitimize the perspectives of the dominant white racial group in our society. Next I hone in on one
example of an iconic stock story—the American Dream. I describe one of the
activities we use in the Storytelling Project to critically analyze the American Dream and illustrate how stock stories can be explored through art-based
activities, excavating history and examining social science data.
Stock stories are a set of standard, typical or familiar stories held in reserve
to explain racial dynamics in ways that support the status quo, like a supply of
goods kept on the premises to be pulled out whenever the necessity calls for
a ready response. As “canned” stories they are stale and predictable, but they
have a long shelf life. They preclude originality, immediacy or surprise that
fresh, unscripted, potentially uncomfortable stories or encounters might open
up about racial/social life in the United States and thus about how we understand racial patterns and the dynamics that sustain them.
The term “stock” also connotes a share in capital that investors reap from
owning stock in companies. Just so, whites are invested in stock stories that
f latter and support our social position, providing shares in the racial status quo.
We inherit these assets accumulated across a history of special advantages, but
tend to assume them as our birthright and perhaps the earned rewards for our
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unique capacities as individuals, failing to recognize the racialized system that
awarded them and the unfair social and material benefits they perpetuate.
Stock has a third connotation with ancestry, often with reference to race or
ethnic group. Stock stories affirm, albeit often unconsciously and obliquely, the
superiority of the stock of whiteness. As the group defined as normal, “white”
stock is presumed to be proper, desired, the superior to other racial stock. In all
of these senses, stock stories operate to confirm and benefit whites as the “natural”
and deserving beneficiaries of the racial status quo in the United States.
Though mediated by class, gender, age, sexual orientation and other factors,
whiteness accrues benefits (legitimacy, respect, opportunity, protection) not
available to people of color. For example, a poor white woman may not have
the same amount of racial privilege as a wealthy white man, but the meager
amount she does have provides benefits, however small, over a woman of color
in the same circumstances, and often over persons of color of any means. That
such advantage exists, even in the face of great inequality among whites, is
evident in the history of poor and working-class white people who, against
their own economic self-interest, have rejected coalitions with similarly situated people of color ( Kelley, 1996).
Stock Stories Are Collective But Speak Through
Individuals
It is hardly surprising in a racially diverse society that people from different
groups think and talk about one another and generate stories to explain our
interactions (Smitherman & van Dijk, 1988; van Dijk, 1984, 1993, 1999). Yet
such stories are not simply personal or idiosyncratic but are produced and communicated within specific historical contexts and social locations that shape
their meaning—the stories we tell are those that are available for the telling
( Ewick & Silbey, 1995). Ideas about race reverberate, often unconsciously,
through individual stories in ways that reinforce and legitimize broad social
patterns—history indeed “runs thick in all of us.”
Polls show that a majority of white Americans believe that racism is no longer
a major obstacle to advancement for African Americans and other people of color,
and 41 percent say there is too much focus on race and racial issues ( Pew Research,
2019). Many assert that we are in a “post-racial” era and have moved “beyond
race” (Neville, Gallardo, & Sue, 2016). Even when ongoing racial problems are
recognized, many whites say they are satisfied with the progress achieved thus
far. Four in ten believe the country will eventually make the changes needed for
blacks to have equal rights, and 38 percent say enough changes have already been
made ( Pew Research, 2019). From this perspective, complacence prevails over
urgency in addressing racial inequalities that persist.
These beliefs echo the emblematic stock story of America as a “color-blind”
meritocracy where opportunity is open to anyone who works hard enough
Stock Stories
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to achieve their goals. Even many young Americans today who recognize
ongoing racial disparities, view colorblindness as the solution to racial problems
(Vandermaas-Peeler, Cox, Fisch-Friedman, & Jones, 2018), thus perpetuating
invisible systemic patterns that sustain racism. This enduring color-blind story is
one my mother passed on to me in quite explicit language.
I grew up in the 1950s, in the middle of Indiana, in the middle of the country,
in a General Motors town enjoying the employment boom of car-obsessed culture. Like many places in the U.S. then and now, the town was racially diverse
but residentially segregated. The only high school in town at the time was also
racially diverse but, as I understand looking back now, academically segregated
through tracking. My mother, a divorced parent of three children and “dyed-inthe-wool Democrat,” taught us a fervent belief in American democracy, meritocracy
and opportunity—espousing the ideas of Ayn Rand and Norman Vincent Peale
among others—alongside a liberal color-blindness that said we should not see color
and should treat everyone the same. The racial epithets we heard from other white
people were considered “trashy” and we were not allowed to talk that way. These
ideals and injunctions operated alongside passivity in the face of neighbors and others who actively expressed racist sentiments and, as we grew older, anxious concern
when my siblings and I invited home black friends.
This stock story supports the idea that, despite genocide, slavery, exclusion
and other shameful periods in our history, the country has moved forward,
even going so far as to elect a black president, and thus no longer has responsibility to actively right wrongs of the past. Indeed, many whites suggest that we
need to “get past” race, faulting those who bring up issues of discrimination
as the real cause of the problem, and asserting that “reverse racism” against
whites is now as big a problem as discrimination against black people and other
minorities ( Pew Research, 2017, 2019). Even among young white people who
purport to be more open to racial issues, nearly one in three believe “reverse”
discrimination is a problem (Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2018).
In contrast to this stock story, the stories told by people of color more often
ref lect awareness of past and continuing discrimination in most aspects of
life, and an understanding that while our history oscillates between cycles of
progress and retreat on racial matters, ongoing inequality tenaciously persists
(Pew Research, 2017, Vandermaas-Peeler et al., 2018). Like other Americans,
people of color embrace the American Dream and its ideal of working hard
to get ahead, but see this possibility thwarted by continuing racial barriers
(Pew Research, 2017). Frustration with the slow pace of change and anger at
what they see as inevitable retreat are the understandable response. Journalist
Ellis Cose captures this perception gap, “Built into almost every interaction
between blacks [and other people of color] and whites is the entire history of
race relations in America” (Cose, 1997, p. 185).
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Without accounting for the history of racism in our country and the ongoing reverberations today, we are unable to see or understand the patterns that
sustain racial hierarchy and inequality.
Millennials have grown up in a world where we talk about race without racism—or
don’t talk about it at all—and where “skin color” is the explanation for racial
inequality, as if ghettos are ghettos because they are black, and not because they
were created. As such, their views on racism—where you fight bias by denying it
matters to outcomes—are muddled and confused. Which gets to the irony of this
survey: A generation that hates racism but chooses colorblindness is a generation
that, through its neglect, comes to perpetuate it.
(Bouie, 2014)
In the storytelling model we seek to examine these interlocking relationships
through looking critically at stock stories so as to expose the interests and
beliefs that sustain them. Learning the counter-stories in history is one essential and powerful tool for critically examining stock stories. The transformative
value of learning the history of racism in this country came home to me when
I encountered African American history for the first time as an undergraduate.
In college I encountered for the first time knowledge, opinions and world-views that
radically challenged everything I had previously learned in my family and at school.
As a history major I enrolled in a course in African American History, and eventually double majored in History and Afro-American Studies. Exposure to a history
I had never been taught opened up a whole new world, radically upending the stock
stories I had grown up with about democracy, meritocracy, fairness, equality and
my benign place in the world. Stunned that I could be so ignorant, I began to question everything and to take a much more critical view of my country, its espoused
ideals and the trustworthiness of my own experience as a measure of reality.
Since then, I have continued to explore and learn from writing not only about
African American history but about the history of other marginalized groups in the
U.S. These histories are more readily available today than ever and provide a much
fuller and more honest picture of how racism has operated in this country historically and into the present. Historical knowledge enables us to discern patterns in
society that shape racial position and opportunity so as to understand the systematic
nature of racism and be able to challenge the stock stories that support it. Historical
precedents help to explain the ongoing patterns, as well as divergences and shifts, in
policies and practices that maintain or disrupt racism ( Bell, 2016a).
Stock Stories Are Not Innocent
Stock stories about race are strategic, operating to advance particular goals and
interests ( Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Love & Tosolt, 2010). For example, white talk
Stock Stories
31
about “minorities” often serves to confirm dominant group perceptions and
present white people in a favorable light by comparison ( Bell, 2003a; BonillaSilva, 2006; van Dijk, 1993, 1999). Stock stories operate as “socially shared tales
that incorporate a common scheme and wording . . . and provide ideological
support for white dominance” ( Bonilla-Silva, Lewis, & Embrick, 2004). The
dominant story lines include such statements of dominant group innocence as:
“Since white people living today did not own slaves (or massacre Indians at
Wounded Knee, or intern Japanese Americans) we are not responsible for sins
of long ago,” “The past is the past and people should just get over it.” Absolved
of responsibility for the past, white people can then argue that remedies for
past discrimination are themselves unfair, seen in statements such as, “I was not
admitted to that college (or didn’t get that job) because of a black (or Latina/o
or Native or Asian) person” ( Bonilla-Silva, 2015; Solorzano, etc.).
Stock stories personalize story lines about other groups, creating a “social
data base” or stockpile of stories individual white people can draw on to explain
social reality. These “testimonials” provide “an aura of authenticity” ( BonillaSilva et al., 2004) when familiar stories about racial others are retold as if the
narrator had experienced such encounters first hand. Often stories challenging
Affirmative Action are of this ilk—stories of a friend or family member who
did not get a job that was given to a “less-qualified” minority. Such stories are
inevitably biased since they are second or third hand and the speaker is rarely
privy to the actual qualifications and considerations of the parties involved. Or
they are stories that focus on “quotas” or “preferences” with no acknowledgment of the historically stacked deck in favor of white people that created the
need in the first place for affirmative or proactive action to pry open opportunity systematically denied to others.
Van Dijk speculates that stock stories also allow whites to draw upon negative
stereotypes to complain about other groups without being subject to charges of
racism themselves. Such stories ignore or minimize how past inequality continues to play out in our present economic and social structure, support assertions
that our society is a color-blind meritocracy, and perpetuate the notion that
anyone can advance based on individual merit. Such stories became familiar to
me when I first started teaching in a predominantly black middle school and
continually heard these ideas in the comments of white colleagues and friends.
As a young teacher in a northeastern urban school district, I witnessed daily the
disconnect between the incredible efforts my students and their families made in the
face of obstacles and realities with which they had to contend, and the disparaging
views of white friends and colleagues about them. I had constant arguments with
well-meaning white people who assume without question that they have earned
what they have through hard work and that those who have not succeeded, particularly people of color, are lazy or lacking in gumption or simply incapable of doing
what is necessary to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. If only they had our
“values” and “work ethic.”
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Through deconstructing stock stories we see that there is something at stake
in the stories we tell. Stock stories not only legitimize a f lattering self-portrait
of the dominant white racial group but, through constant reiteration, contribute to the ongoing reproduction of stock stories ( Ewick & Silbey, 1995; Scott,
1990). For example, the stock story of meritocracy naturalizes the “maldistribution of opportunity” (Crenshaw, 2019, p. 54) and undermines even the
mildest efforts at remedy for the consequences of past discrimination. It affirms
an image of a fair system in which positions of dominance are rightly earned,
while simultaneously holding those who are not successful accountable for their
own failure. This stock story creates a vicious cycle of “blaming the victim”
that justifies and perpetuates systemic racism (Hochschild, 1995).
Maintaining white dominance in the face of counteracting evidence can be
destabilized, however, and thus requires continual reiteration and confirmation. “Finding expression and being refashioned within the stories of countless
individuals may lead to a polyvocality that inoculates and protects the master
narrative from critique” ( Ewick & Silbey, 1995, p. 212). Thus focusing a critical
spotlight on everyday stock stories may be a crucial place to shine a spotlight
and expose master narratives that sustain racism.
Stock Stories Neutralize Challenges to Their
Authority
Stock stories not only teach what we should assume as truth, they also warn of
the consequences of nonconformity and preempt alternative stories that might
challenge their veracity ( Ewick & Silbey, 1995). Those who contradict dominant narratives often encounter shocked disbelief in the face of what is taken
as their self-evident validity. Individuals, from any racial group, who assert
counter-narratives that challenge stock stories are met with ridicule, ignored
or dismissed as fringe or crazy. I am reminded of this in an experience I had as
a new faculty member.
I am in a meeting with the administrators at my college and some other faculty
(all-white) following a racial incident on our campus. Elderhostel guests (white)
living in a summer dorm have complained that the students (of color) next door
are playing their radio too loud. Campus police (white) arrive and rudely challenge the students using abusive language and in one reported instance blow cigar
smoke in a student’s face. The argument escalates, town police arrive, and four
students, including our current student body president, are taken to jail. The
students call the director of student affairs for help but rather than bailing them
out, he leaves them in jail overnight. Their understandable outrage and sense of
betrayal leads to defiance and demonstrations as more students (and some faculty/
staff) join them.
Our meeting is to address this problem. I suggest that we need to consider the
issue of racism on campus and question our own unacknowledged racial blindness.
Stock Stories
33
They look at me as if I have three heads. “We’re not racist! How dare you say
such a thing!” I try to explain that I’m not judging them—I include myself in this
analysis—but merely arguing that we try to see things from the perspective of the
students and try to understand how we may be operating on racist assumptions
of which we are not even aware. With every word, I can see that I am becoming
more and more alien, irrational, crazy. I am quickly pushed to the margin of this
conversation, someone to be dismissed, as my colleagues of color were before the
conversation even began.
While both white people and people of color are familiar with the stock
stories regarding race, whites as the dominant group are much less likely to be
aware of the contradicting stories that circulate within communities of color.
Thus white people are often taken by surprise when confronted with alternative scenarios and interpretations of racial experience. For example, white people are often shocked to hear the stories people of color recount on social media
about their endless negative encounters with police—while walking, driving,
shopping, barbequing, swimming, renting Air bnb—the list goes on and on.
Stock stories become an effective strategy for marginalizing social and political claims by people of color and neutralizing potential challenges to the racial
status quo. Journalist Ellis Cose explains this as a “perception gap [that] quietly
shapes how blacks and whites interpret the world, their experiences and each
other. It shows up in our assumptions and rationalizations, in our decisions
and politics, in our neighborhoods and schools. To be sure not all whites think
alike about race, nor do all blacks. But the consensus within each race is striking” (Cose, 1997, p. 193). This perception gap exists between whites and other
groups of color as well.
The “integration illusion” seems impervious to the abundant social science
data, and the stories emerging from the lived experiences of people of color,
that point to quite a different reality. Schooling, housing, employment, social
relations, religious observation, the media, relations with police, literally every
area of social life, are experienced differently by whites and people of color
(Campisteguy, Heilbronner, & Nakamura-Rybak, 2018; Jones, Schmitt, &
Wilson, 2018). Nowhere is this disparity more evident than in the criminal
justice system (Alexander, 2012; Stevenson, 2014). Stock stories continuously
work to neutralize and defuse counter-claims and often overwhelming contradictory evidence in order to maintain their standing.
Stock Stories Are Not Immutable
Stock stories do not go unchallenged and are not immutable. Alternative stories find voice in the counter-narratives of people of color and white “racial
progressives” ( Bonilla-Silva et al., 2004) who defy the status quo and insist on
more expansive versions of reality. Communities of color have always nurtured
stories that testify to their realities and experiences with racism. White people
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Lee Anne Bell
can also develop a consciousness that acknowledges our ties to a racist history and expose from an insider perspective how racism is learned and enacted
among white people.
I am grateful to the historical examples of white people who challenged racism and
to the African American History classes that introduced me to these early abolitionists. I have spent a good part of my adult life trying to understand the forces
that maintain the gap between our national rhetoric of equality and realities on
the ground. As an insider to white culture, I know intimately the stories, rationalizations, and resistances to acknowledging racism. I also feel the powerful tug
of conformity to a status quo from which I benefit as a result of white advantage.
I recognize that understanding my racial location is key to my evolving consciousness, excavating my blind spots, and developing the ongoing commitment to listen
to, learn from and build bridges with people of color to collaborate in dismantling
racism. I recognize that this work is ongoing and never complete and that I am
constantly being recruited back into the stock stories I resist.
Stock stories can seem intractable but they are vulnerable to, and can be destabilized by, concealed and resistance stories that voice the counteracting knowledge generated within communities of color and among white antiracists.
Analyzing the American Dream Stock Story
The American Dream, the assertion that anyone who works hard enough can
get ahead, is familiar to everyone in this country, including our newest immigrants. As the story goes, in America, unlike societies where title and inherited
wealth determine life chances and opportunities, individuals can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and, with enough hard work and fortitude,
ensure their own children will be better off than those of previous generations.
This optimistic assertion that personal opportunity is available to all is one of
the most deeply held tenets of American life.
The centrality of this iconic stock story is evident in the frequency with
which presidents and politicians invoke it in their speeches; its durability evident
in the way it is so broadly embraced, even by those whose lives do not realize its
promises. People of color as much as white people, poor people as much as the
aff luent, aspire to the American Dream in their own lives (Pew Research, 2017).
In fact, the least enfranchised are often the most faithful to its tenets, shown by
their hard work and perseverance in the face of, often insurmountable, obstacles.
Yet they also are more likely to see the barriers to attaining the Dream and to be
more critical of platitudes about meritocracy and individual opportunity.
Whites believe the American Dream works for everyone; blacks believe it only
works for those not of their race. Whites are angry that blacks refuse to see the
Stock Stories
35
openness and fairness of the system; blacks are angry that whites refuse to see the
biases and blockages in the system. If this disparity worsens the American dream
cannot maintain its role as the central organizing belief of all Americans.
( Hochschild, 1995, p. 68)
Hochschild further argues, “the ideology of the American Dream forecloses
empathy for the plight of those who fail to reach it, ensuring that others will see
them as losers” (p. 34). The stock story of the American Dream sets up a vicious
cycle where barriers of race and class make it likely that certain people “are
disproportionately likely to fail to achieve their goals . . . and are [then] blamed
as individuals (and perhaps blame themselves) for their failure . . . carry[ing]
the further stigma as members of non-virtuous (thus appropriately denigrated)
groups” (Hochschild, 1995, p. 34).
While the lives of people of color have improved over the past fifty years (in
terms of access to jobs, gains in education and participation in politics, for example), the concealed stories embedded in social science data reveal the distortions
and traps in the American Dream stock story that differentially affect whites and
people of color in terms of health, home equity and asset accumulation, unemployment and underemployment, criminal justice and other areas of social life.
For example, recent economic analyses show a huge and compounding discrepancy between the ability of white people and people of color to accumulate and transfer assets to the next generation (Greene, Turner, & Gourevitch,
2017). Home ownership is the basis for accumulating assets that can be passed
on, but for black and Latino households rates of home ownership have fallen
every decade for the last forty years. “Even in 2015, black households with a
college education are less likely to own a home than white households whose
head did not graduate from high school” (Goodman & Mayer, 2018).
The potential for building equity is affected by residential segregation that
shapes the appraisal of real estate value. Residential segregation was created
through policies at all levels of government, such as redlining, that gave rise
to and continue to reinforce residential segregation ( Rothstein, 2017). Indeed,
some fifty years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, the country is nearly as
segregated as when President Johnson signed it into law and African Americans
remain more highly segregated than any other ethnic group ( Jones, Schmitt, &
Wilson, 2018). Real estate and housing practices that exclude people of color,
at all socioeconomic levels, from significant home ownership advantage white
people by comparison ( Katznelson, 2005; Lipsitz, 2018). Such disparities in
home ownership rates, typical home equity, and neighborhood values contribute substantially to the wealth gap between whites and blacks and Latinos.
In addition, ongoing unemployment, underemployment, racial segregation in
jobs, and discrimination in hiring and promotion have created a permanent
recession for people of color ( Jones, Schmitt, & Wilson, 2018; Massey, Durand, &
Pren, 2016).
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Lee Anne Bell
The American Dream stock story has also been brutal for Native Americans
who today experience not only color-blind racism but, as outlined in a recent
report, a form of pervasive invisibility (Campisteguy et al., 2018). Native people survived removal, forced assimilation and attempted genocide only to live
in a country that pretends they no longer exist as their varied histories, cultures
and contemporary lives have been systematically erased from K–12 education,
mainstream media and popular culture (Ibid., 2018). The report reveals that
two thirds of Americans don’t believe Native people experience discrimination
despite the fact that they are more likely to be killed by police, and have the
lowest graduation rates and highest suicide rates of any other group.
Recent social science data demonstrates that whites and people of color are
worlds apart in their knowledge, experiences and views of race and inequality, a gap that contributes to white resistance to the remedies needed to make
the opportunities espoused in the American Dream open to all. Thus critically
examining the stock story of the American Dream can be a valuable place to
begin building awareness of the storylines and assumptions that undergird this
stock story.
Unpacking the American Dream
Poetry, political speeches, history and other narratives can be used to engage
people in complicating and deconstructing the stock story of the American
Dream. One activity we devised draws on the oratory of two politicians—
Arnold Schwarzenegger and Barack Obama—as they addressed the presidential
conventions of their respective parties in 2004. We have used this lesson with
high school students, with higher education professionals at national conferences, and with undergraduates preparing to become teachers. While these
speeches occurred over fifteen years ago, and one can find references to the
American Dream in every presidential election since, these speeches distill the
essence of the American Dream and thus continue to be useful for analysis
today.
In the activity, participants divide into small “same-speech” groups of four
or five per group. Each group receives copies of one of the two speeches—half
of the groups read the Obama speech and half read the Schwarzenegger speech.
Abridged copies of the speeches are available in the Storytelling Project Curriculum at www.barnard.edu/education/grants_projects.php. High school students especially love reading the Schwarzenegger speech using the accent and
swagger from his movie persona. After reading their assigned speech, group
members identify and categorize references to the American Dream found in
their speech.
Both speeches repeatedly talk about the American Dream and share many
of the same images and assumptions about it. For example, Schwarzenegger
says, “To think that a once scrawny boy from Austria could grow up to become
Stock Stories
37
governor of California and stand in Madison Square Garden to speak on behalf
of the president of the United States, that is an immigrant’s dream. It is the
American Dream.” Obama invokes similar sentiments in his speech, “I stand
here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe
a debt to all of those who came before me, and that, in no other country on
earth, is my story even possible.”
Next we remix the groups in jigsaw fashion to form new groups of members
who have read both speeches. Together these “mixed-speech” groups create a
Venn diagram—two overlapping circles in which one circle represents the Obama
speech and the other represents the Schwarzenegger speech (see Figure 2.1).
Drawing on their lists from the same-speech groups, participants categorize
references to the American Dream made by each politician into the Obama
circle, the Schwarzenegger circle or, in the case of shared references, in the space
where the circles overlap. For example, the quotes noted above suggest that in the
overlapping circle both men invoke their own story to show that the American
Dream works. Items in the Schwarzenegger circle might include: Republican,
language no barrier, limited role for government, John Wayne as hero—rugged
individualism. In the Obama circle might be: Democrat, more work needs to be
done, the dream not yet complete, need for government change in priorities, our
connections to each other.
In the following discussion, each group presents to the whole group the
Venn diagram they have created. We find that typically the analysis is consistent
FIGURE 2.1
Venn diagram: The American Dream Stock Story
38
Lee Anne Bell
across groups. Usually all groups describe similarities where ideas about the
American Dream overlap and important key differences in the two speeches.
We consider the area of overlap to be the heart of the stock story of the American Dream. The circles where the politicians diverge we view as liberal and
conservative versions of the American Dream stock story. Taken as a whole
they illustrate the power and pervasiveness of this stock story across ideology
and political position.
We then ask groups to consider what is outside of the Venn diagram altogether. What is in neither circle? Who is not included? What stories are left out?
What is not mentioned at all? What is invisible? What cannot be said? This is
where concealed stories may be found that can help us look at the American
Dream from a different angle. This activity motivates a critical view of stock
stories and initiates a search for concealed stories to discover what they reveal
about the American Dream that the stock story does not.
African American poet Langston Hughes vividly evokes what happens to
those who faithfully embrace the Dream but are continually thwarted from
receiving its promised rewards in his poem “A Dream Deferred.” This poem
can be another focus for engaging in the analytic process described above.
Hughes captures a yearning for the American Dream, a willingness to work
hard for it, as well as the anger and bitterness engendered when its promise is continually postponed—“maybe it just sags like a heavy load, or does it
explode?” Held up as a contrast to the stock story, the poem provokes us to consider: What would need to happen for the American Dream to truly work for
everyone in this society? What would need to change? The next chapter takes
up and explores concealed stories and illustrates further how the juxtaposition
of stock and concealed stories can be used to support greater understanding and
more critical analysis of stories and social patterns that perpetuate racism.
References
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New York, NY: New Press.
Bell, L. A. (2003a). Telling tales: What stories can teach us about race and racism. Race,
Ethnicity and Education, 6(1), 3–28.
Bell, L. A. (2016). Telling on racism: Developing a race-conscious agenda. In H. A.
Neville (Ed.), The myth of racial color blindness: Manifestations, dynamics, and impact
(pp. 105–122). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2006). Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial
inequality in the United States (2nd ed.). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Bonilla-Silva, E. (2015). Down the rabbit hole: Color-blind racism in Obamerica.
In The myth of racial color blindness: Manifestations, dynamics, and impact (pp. 25–38).
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Bonilla-Silva, E., Lewis, A., & Embrick, D. G. (2004). “I did not get that job because of
a black man . . .”: The story lines and testimonies of color-blind racism. Sociological
Forum, 19(4), 555–581.
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Bouie, J. (2014). Why do Millennials not understand racism? Slate. Retrieved from
https://theavarnagroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Millennials-racismand-MTV-poll_-Young-people-are-confused-about-bias-prejudice-and-racism.pdf
Campisteguy, M. E., Heilbronner, J. M., & Nakamura-Rybak, C. (2018). Reclaiming
native truth—Research findings. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-8350-9609-7_5
Carroll, R. (1997). Sugar in the raw: Voices of young black girls in America. New York, NY:
Crown.
Cose, E. (1997). Color-blind: Seeing beyond race in a race-obsessed world. New York, NY:
HarperCollins Publishers.
Crenshaw, K. W. (2019). Unmasking color blindness in the law. In K. Crenshaw, L. C.
Harris, D. M. HoSang, & G. Lipsitz (Eds.), Seeing race again: Countering colorblindness
across the disciplines (pp. 52–84). Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Ewick, P., & Silbey, S. S. (1995). Subversive stories and hegemonic tales: Toward a sociology of narrative. Law & Society Review, 29(2), 197–226.
Goodman, L. S., & Mayer, C. (2018). Homeownership and the American dream. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 32(1), 31–58. https://doi.org/10.1257/jep.32.1.31
Greene, S., Turner, M. A., & Gourevitch, R. (2017, August). Racial residential segregation and neighborhood disparities. Retrieved from www.mobilitypartnership.org/
publications/racial-residential-segregation-and-neighborhood-disparities
Hochschild, J. L. (1995). Facing up to the American dream: Race, class, and the soul of the
nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Jones, J., Schmitt, J., & Wilson, V. (2018). 50 years after the Kerner commission. Economic Policy Institute (pp. 1–8). Retrieved from www.epi.org/files/pdf/142084.pdf
Katznelson, I. (2005). When affirmative action was white: An untold history of racial inequality
in twentieth-century America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
Kelley, R. D. G. (1996). Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the black working class. New York,
NY: The Free Press.
Lipsitz, G. (2018). The possessive investment in whiteness: How white people profit from identity
politics (Rev. and expanded ed.). Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Love, B., & Tosolt, B. (2010). Reality or rhetoric? Barack Obama and post-racial America. Race, Gender & Class, 17(3/4), 19–37.
Massey, D. S., Durand, J., & Pren, K. A. (2016). The precarious position of latino immigrants in the United States. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science, 666(1), 91–109.
Neville, H. A., Gallardo, M. E., & Sue, D. W. (2016). The myth of racial color blindness: Manifestations, dynamics, and impact. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Pew Research. (2017). On views of race and inequality, blacks and whites are worlds apart
(pp. 1–79). Retrieved from www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-ofrace-and-inequality-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/
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pewsocialtrends.org/2019/04/09/race-in-america-2019/
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America. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company.
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CT: Yale University Press.
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Wayne State University Press.
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& Grau.
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Theoharris, J. (2019). A more beautiful and terrible history: The uses and misuses of Civil
Rights history. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
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research/mtv-culture-and-religion
van Dijk, T. A. (1984). Prejudice in discourse: An analysis of ethnic prejudice in cognition and
conversation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
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van Dijk, T. A. (1999). Discourse and the denial of racism. In A. N. C. Jaworski (Ed.),
The discourse reader (pp. 541–558). London: Routledge.
Essay #1
RESISTING STOCK STORIES
AND LEARNING TO TEACH
COURAGEOUSLY
Lauren Anderson
Sometimes you come across a tool and it finds its way into your practice such
that it is hard to recall having worked without it. We feel that way about the
Storytelling Model, especially as it relates to our joint work in an undergraduate teacher education program at a predominantly white liberal arts college.
The program we lead centers the power of teachers as public intellectuals
and curriculum creators. Refusing to cede curricular agency to regimes of
standardization, we recognize the responsibility we have to prepare teachers to
work adaptively with mandated materials, to practice project- and place-based
pedagogies, and to build curricula that are tailored to the particular children in
their midst. Not surprisingly then, all of our courses require that students craft
original units of some kind. The Storytelling Model has been essential to this
work, both inside and across individual courses.
What makes it so useful? It’s simplicity and accessibility, coupled with its
depth and resolute centering of race, a topic that many students—and some
colleagues—tend to opt out of addressing if given the chance. The Storytelling Model, engaged to its fullest, lovingly refuses that option. It provides our
students (and us, too) with a streamlined, yet f lexible method for teaching
courageously and clearly, about race. When students try, as we might anticipate
given what we know about new teacher development and the development of
critical consciousness, to focus on less structural or intersectional content—for
example, to teach about gender stereotypes in ways that leave patriarchy and
white supremacy unnamed and unchallenged—the Storytelling Model assists
us in pressing their thinking forward in ways that acknowledge where they are,
without letting them rest there too long. The model has helped usher into the
world: a fourth grade unit on the social and political construction of “good”
hair; a second grade unit on Hawaii’s history as a still-occupied territory; a
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Lauren Anderson
tenth grade unit on bebop’s cultural contributions; a first grade unit on the
limitations of binary thinking, specifically as it relates to gender; a sixth grade
unit on the environmental and social science of Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy
and their racially suspect recovery efforts; and on and on. No unit is ever “perfect,” but all of these were more accomplished and ambitious than they would
have been absent scaffolding from the Storytelling Model.
The model has resonated with students so much that a colleague recently
used it as a centerpiece when revising a two-credit course that addresses specific
state-mandated content, such as drug prevention, HIV/AIDS, and conf lict resolution, that is not easily integrated elsewhere. Re-framing the course as a series
of modules about critical issues in education, our colleague used the Storytelling Model to construct greater coherence across seemingly disparate topics.
Each module began with a set of experiences aimed at eliciting students’ “stock
story” understandings of the topic at hand. For example, for drug prevention,
he engaged them around questions like: What do we mean by “drugs”? Who
sells and uses them? For whom is prevention (and punishment) prioritized?
What concealed, resistance and transformative stories emerge when we look
more deeply? How does attentiveness to race and racism inform what we see
or don’t see, learn or don’t learn, know or don’t know? This approach helped
students identify and interrogate how the sale and use of drugs on liberal arts
college campuses, including their own, gets constructed, with what implications, and for whom. It led them to research and (re)consider three-strikes laws,
penalties and sentencing norms, and risk factors for exposure and addiction.
Rather than sliding into safe and simplistic “solutions” (e.g., “just say no”),
students developed a broader, more critically conscious understanding of the
issues at play. And with the culminating task of creating a mini-unit to address
one of these issues or another of their choice, students could not escape the call
to think through how their own learning should inform their work in K–12
classrooms.
Equally important, the Storytelling Model has been what socio-cultural
learning theorists might call an especially generative “boundary artifact.” We
know well that the oft-cited “two-worlds” pitfall is too simplifying a frame for
considering the complexities of what and how teacher candidates learn across
higher education and K-12 contexts. At the same time, many of us do work
in places where boundaries—permeable ones, but boundaries nevertheless—
separate the spaces where students complete most of their coursework from
the spaces where they participate in most of their clinical experiences. Teacher
candidates’ learning, of course, transcends these boundaries. It doesn’t start
and stop in silo-ed ways; neither do our efforts to mediate it productively—to
support, cajole, intervene, and otherwise scaffold. In these efforts, the Storytelling Model has proven to be a tool that traverses boundaries beautifully. It
offers conceptual grounding that future teachers can understand and communicate about with their cooperating teachers, who may not feel comfortable or
Resisting Stock Stories 43
experienced when it comes to teaching about the kind of topics that student
teachers may address in their critical units. Indeed, cooperating teachers, firsttimers especially, often express uncertainty at the outset of the student teaching
semester—worries about departing from content-as-expected, concerns about
backlash from colleagues or parents, questions about whether student engagement will slip, and general nerves about touching on the very issues that are,
by definition, more typically concealed in (and by) school. That said, it is not
uncommon for us to hear, gradually over the course of the semester and most
vociferously at the end, how much cooperating teachers come to appreciate
the Storytelling Model via their efforts to engage with their student teachers
around unit planning, and how they are already or will be applying it in their
own practice going forward.
It’s also common for us to hear about how the Storytelling Model has
“stuck” with our students, becoming an important pillar of post-graduation
critical professional practice. Take Cassie. Five years ago, when she was student
teaching in fifth grade, she wrote about how the “Storytelling Model provided
the structure for this unit”—an original unit she designed to address “power,
racism, and exploitation of immigrants”—“as it was based on a stock story
within a [required] reading anthology . . . [about] the Transcontinental Railroad as told by the dominant group.” Her cooperating teacher, who had been
reluctant at first, could hardly contain his pride: “What she did with that unit,
how she brought it all together, is what good teaching is about; I’m learning
from her, too.” Cassie is now four years into fulltime teaching and contemplating a Board of Education role someday. “I still use the Storytelling Method all
the time,” she has explained. “It helps me brings a critical lens to the madness
of all those mandated materials I sometimes think I have to cover. I remember
to ask myself: what’s the stock story here? The concealed story? How can I rearrange things to teach about resistance and what’s possible. It never fails to help.”
Lauren Anderson is a former upper-elementary teacher and support provider for K–6 teachers, an associate professor of education at Connecticut
College and an advocate for public education in and beyond her home
city of New Haven, CT.
3
CONCEALED STORIES
Reclaiming Subjugated Memory and
Knowledge
History is the struggle over who has the authority to tell the stories that define us.
( Levins Morales, 1998, p. 5)
Persevering in the shadows of stock stories are concealed stories, the second
story type explored in the Storytelling Project Model. While stock stories
offer the sanitized official version at the center of public life, concealed stories
embody the teeming, unruly and contradictory stories that leak out from the
margins. These are stories about racial experience eclipsed by stock stories that
colonize the limelight. While stock stories control mainstream discourse and
naturalize white racial dominance, concealed stories narrate the ways that race
differentially shapes life experiences and opportunities, disputing the unblemished
tales of color-blindness, opportunity and laudatory progress propagated by
stock stories.
Like stock stories, concealed stories are not purely individual but rather
emerge from and connect to broad social and historical patterns. Concealed
stories about experiences with racism link back to the historical relations and
social policies that produce them—and can never be solely understood as individual. This is an important distinction in a talk show-saturated culture where
the individual and idiosyncratic are so pervasively valorized. The goal of the
Storytelling Model is to focus on the patterned threads that connect stories to
social practices in order to understand the persistence of racism.
The Storytelling Project creative team very consciously chose the term “concealed” to signify that these stories are just beneath the surface; not so much
unknown as constantly overshadowed, pushed back into the margins, conveniently
“forgotten” or repressed. Like unwelcome company, concealed stories disconcert
Concealed Stories
45
stock stories, challenging their smug complacency and assumed normality by
insisting on a different accounting of experience. Through alternative renderings
of the lived experiences of racial subordination and racial advantage, concealed
stories present a more encompassing view of reality, one that exposes the partiality
and self-interest in stock stories.
Concealed stories challenge stock stories by offering different accounts of
and explanations for social relations. In the face of stock stories that insist otherwise, they “name and reclaim, over and over, the connections we are taught
to ignore, the dynamics we are told do not exist” ( Levins Morales, 1998 ,
pp. 4–5). For example, the stock story about Native Americans presents them
as relics of the past, invisible today except for stereotypic images used by sports
teams and in advertising, and in holidays like Thanksgiving and Columbus Day
celebrated by the mainstream, but that for native people represent an American
holocaust and are a continuing emotional trigger (McKay, 2019). Concealed
stories within native communities narrate the ongoing historical trauma of
attempted cultural genocide, relocation, family separation, and grief, as well
as community resources and strengths developed for survival in a society that
ignores and trivializes their lives ( Duran, Duran, & Brave Heart, 1998). In
many ways, the articulation of these concealed stories is one of the sources of
their survival, “survivance,” today (Fear-Segal, 2007; Vizenor, 2008).
Concealed stories can be narrated by anyone, but because of how we are situated as narrators in a hierarchical racial system, they tend to comment on different aspects of the system of racism. Concealed stories by people of color relate
how racism is experienced by those subjected to racism and, for reasons of safety
and survival, are often told outside of the hearing of the dominant group (Scott,
1990). This “subjugated knowledge” (Hill Collins, 2000) offers firsthand evidence of the impact of discrimination on those at the receiving end of racialized
policies and practices. Such stories also catalogue “community cultural wealth”
( Yosso, 2006), the strengths, capacities and resilience within marginalized communities that are invisible, ignored or trivialized in stock stories.
Concealed stories are embodied in the everyday talk of people on the margins as they articulate their experiences, the challenges they face, the struggles
to make it, and their aspirations and despairs living with the burdens of racism
(see for example, Chou & Feagin, 2015; Collier-Thomas & Franklin, 2001;
Gwaltney, 1993; Woodard, 2018). Such stories are shared in church basements,
bars, street corners and front porches, on reservations and in barrios, indeed
everywhere that those beaten down by racism gather to let down their burdens
and renew themselves for another day. The stories thread through family narratives and traditions. They are embedded in the everyday speech of young
people and elders, as well as in the oratory of politicians and reformers. Concealed stories are found in poetry, art, dance, music and drama that creatively
express the trauma of being dehumanized by racism as well as the hard-won
knowledge, wisdom and strength to carry on in the face of injustice.
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Lee Anne Bell
Concealed stories can also be discovered in the stories of white people who
have become conscious of racism’s effects and expose how whiteness is taught
and learned as an ideology of dominance. Such stories “tell on” racism ( Bell,
2003), revealing how racism is learned and reinforced within white communities, thus exposing from the inside the dynamics of how privilege is reproduced.
Concealed stories also reveal the cost to white people of resisting policies that
would help people of color as well as themselves, in effect biting off the nose
to spite one’s face. Ultimately, white racial resentment ends up reducing white
access to quality health care, schooling and other resources (Haney-Lopez,
2014; Metzl, 2019). Such stories are available from white antiracists who provide an insider perspective on socialization and conditioning in white society
(see for example Bush, 2004; Fine, 2012; Kimmel & Ferber, 2014; McKinney,
2005; Wise, 2012). Though much less abundant than writings by people of
color, white antiracist work too can be found in literature and the arts, music
and poetry, history and everyday talk by white people who honestly examine
and critique their location in a racist society. These stories subvert norms of
complicity with business as usual and open the way for white people to create
more authentic and trustworthy relationships with people of color, relationships that can sustain alliances to work against racism ( Kendall, 2006; Moore,
Penick-Parks, & Michael, 2015; Plummer, 2019).
Mainstream discourse, however, works against telling and hearing concealed
stories that challenge dominant white racial views of the world. For example,
high profile police killing of unarmed black men have appeared regularly in the
news since Michael Brown was killed by police in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014
(and Rodney King in 1991, Amadou Diallo in 1999, Trayvon Martin in 2012
and countless others before and since). Not only are black (as well as Latino and
Native American) men more likely to be fatally killed by police, they are even
more likely to be killed when they are unarmed ( Jones, 2017). It should be
noted that women of color have also been targeted, beaten and killed by police
over the same period. Indeed, the risk of police-involved death by race/ethnicity
has been labeled a public health problem ( Edwards, Esposito, & Lee, 2018).
Nevertheless, almost two thirds of whites say that such killings are “isolated
incidents” rather than part of a broader pattern in how police treat African
Americans and other people of color. This is contrasted by the 81 percent of
black Americans who view such killings as evidence of a pattern of systemic
racism in law enforcement that white people tend to ignore, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary ( Pew Research, 2016). The efforts by Black
Lives Matter to highlight the pervasiveness of systemic racism, are often met
with assertions that “Blue Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter,” as if there are
equivalent patterns of disproportionate shootings of police officers (who are
armed) or people in the general population, neither of which is accurate.
In the absence of critical commentary that would open up understanding
through connecting historical knowledge to contemporary patterns in race
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relations, people in the dominant group fail to grasp the legitimate grievances
about law enforcement treatment in communities of color.
Now, more than ever a wealth of resources are available for educating ourselves about these hidden histories in books, media, websites, and activist organizations. Such knowledge is vital for understanding racism and the differential
ways white people and people of color recall the past and understand the present. The references provided in this text are one place to begin.
Remembering concealed stories is essential memory work for challenging
stock stories that underwrite racism. The social and historical function of memory to support or challenge stock stories is evident in official representations
and interpretations of the past that preserve what is to be memorialized and celebrated, and by omission, what is to be ignored and forgotten. Through public
rituals, the history presented by the dominant group is made to “seem transparent” and thus uncontestable, making it difficult for aggrieved communities to
get their claims for justice recognized. In the face of “official memory” those
who are marginalized must struggle to hold on to their own representations
when there are no social mirrors that accurately and meaningfully ref lect their
experiences. A myopic focus on the present through the haze of a fixed and
glorified past also means that the broader society is bereft of the kind of deep
historical knowing that could make genuine progress on racial matters possible.
Because history persists into the present and shapes the future, memory is an
important site for social struggle. The culture wars over what and how history
is to be taught illustrate well the powerful stakes invested in controlling official
memory. This is evident in ongoing struggles by people of color to memorialize historical events in the face of white resistance ( Eagles, 2017; Erekson, 2012;
Symcox, 2002). The significance of social memory is illustrated, for example, in
recent battles over confederate symbols (SPLC, 2019), the spate of defacement
of a memorial to the murder of Emmett Till (Burch, Shastri, & Chaffee, 2019);
and efforts to remove stereotypical and racist symbols of Native Americans in
sports teams and popular culture ( King & Springwood, 2001; King, 2015).
As a bridge between past and present, social memory shapes identity, informs
our interpretations of events, fuels grievances and claims on the present, and
suggests what we might imagine for the future. Through the practice of uncovering concealed stories we work against the grain to resurrect hidden histories/
social memories, learn from the “confiscated heritage” of subjugated peoples
and expose the constructed nature of official representations of reality.
Concealed stories that counter mainstream accounts of racial reality can be
powerful educational tools. Such stories “are full of dangerous, subversive revelations that undermine the whole fabric of inequality” ( Levins Morales, 1998,
p. 18) and thus provide critical intelligence so necessary for antiracist work.
They help us affirm and learn from the experiences of those whose stories
have been marginalized as we seek more inclusive and varied ways to live and
develop individual and social potential. They can help people in the dominant
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group develop a different kind of listening in which we seek out rather than
avoid stories that challenge our assumptions about the world so that we begin
to understand the ways we are implicated in the lives of others ( Boler, 1999).
Concealed stories enable people from all racial groups to develop greater critical awareness about how racism operates so as to more consciously challenge its
grip on our relationships and social structures.
Exploring the Genealogy of Racism Through
Concealed Stories
Concealed stories are literally everywhere, “hidden in plain view” ( Loewen,
2006), usually familiar within communities of color that preserve and pass them
on, but mostly invisible or overlooked in the mainstream. Sometimes they may be
suppressed, consciously or unconsciously, to avoid traumatic and painful memories of dehumanization by those on the receiving end of racism, or to evade the
guilt and moral responsibility of those who benefit from a stratified racial system,
but such stories are there to be recovered by those committed to doing so.
Central to this project is the intentional creation of a critical, race conscious
counter-storytelling community ( Bell, 2016) that can bear witness to and
support “the naming of trauma and the grief, rage and defiance that follow”
( Levins Morales, 1998, p. 16). Within an intentional storytelling community,
people from different racial locations relate their own and hear other’s stories,
working together to make the connections that are hidden by dominant narratives about racial life. Using written and performance exercises, interviews,
dialogues and discussions with people from one’s own racial group and with
others from across racial groups, we can evoke experiences with race and racism as a basis for revealing the patterns that connect.
The arts provide a compelling vehicle for memory work because they provoke our senses, activate our emotions, spark visceral contradictions and generate more embodied awareness of what we encounter in our social world. We
call upon written and oral narratives and poetry, visual art and media, music
and dance to draw out concealed stories about racial experience. We collect stories from multiple communities and contexts, and (re)present our own stories
visually, musically and physically to generate new expressions of community
and possibility. A wealth of sources are available for recovering concealed stories by shifting to the foreground that which is usually background to the stock
stories that keep them hidden.
Revealing Concealed Stories Through Memory Work
A visualization and writing exercise, introduced by artist Roger Bonair-Agard
to the Storytelling Project creative team, provides an example of memory work
through the arts. The exercise draws on firsthand accounts of moments in which
we are socialized about race. The stage is set by guiding the group through a
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progressive relaxation exercise to shut out external stimuli and focus internally.
We are asked to imagine ourselves at earlier stages of our lives, starting with the
present moment and moving backwards in five- or ten-year increments until
reaching around five years of age. We are prompted to visualize in our mind’s
eye a vivid physical image of ourselves at that young age, sitting on the lap of or
talking with someone we love—a parent or grandparent, beloved aunt or uncle,
or other significant adult—and to imagine a conversation with that person about
race. We might recall an actual conversation but we could also construct a conversation from what the person might have said. Playing out the conversation in
our mind’s eye, we note the affect, the words and language used, and the lessons,
implicit and explicit, about race in this emerging “memory.”
Once we have completed the visualization, we spend time, five minutes or so,
writing about the scene we visualized, noting as much of the dialogue, affect and
our own responses in the situation as we can recall. We then pair up with another
person and read what we have written aloud as our partner bears witness to the
frequently emotional, often painful responses it provokes. Once each person has
read her/his story to the other, we analyze the stories together to consider what
they tell us about how race is taught and learned, consciously and deliberately, as
well as unconsciously and inadvertently, from those we love and trust.
When we come back together as a whole group we discuss specific examples
from the stories and trace patterns across them. For example, participants of
color often describe a person they love instilling advice for dealing with a hostile
white world, responding to racial barriers they are sure to encounter, suppressing oneself in order to be safe, or maintaining dignity in the face of prejudice
and discrimination.
Roger illustrates through reading a poem he wrote titled “Bullet Points”
(excerpted here):
You are Black. Not Negro
Not Nigger
Not Brown. Not Mixed
Not you have some German on your mother’s side
From your great-grandfather because no one can
See that anyway
You are Black . . .
White people cannot be trusted
Be cordial. Be polite
But white people must prove themselves
Before they can be trusted . . .
White participants occasionally relate memories of being deliberately taught
racial animus by someone they love. More frequently, however, they describe
overt and covert messages about maintaining “appropriate” social distance,
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learning to fear those who look or speak differently, or being taught to express
tolerance toward those less fortunate—with the implication of superiority
embedded in that position. After the exercise I write in my journal:
I think of my grandmother, someone I adored as a child. I imagine myself sitting on
her lap. If she were to say something about race, what would she say? She might
say, “You should be kind to all people. You should not call names.” She might also
say races shouldn’t mix. We should be with our own people. She might even say
we are more civilized, they are good people but they don’t care about education like
we do, telling me I must be smart and study hard and learn. All this she would say
in a gentle way, in a way a five-year-old cannot refute. Racism with a kind face,
imbibed on the lap of someone I love.
These “memory” stories can be emotionally wrenching for both tellers and listeners. A strong and supportive counter-storytelling community that is willing
to face and not smooth over conf licting feelings of guilt, anger, pain, shock and
despair helps us pay attention to and learn from the feelings and lessons these
stories evoke.
As we link our individual stories into a collective story we discern patterns
of racism. We see how dominance and subordination are engendered, even
against our own desires. We witness how our stories are interconnected, how
advantage and disadvantage are co-constructed. It becomes impossible for a
white person to say, “I never owned slaves, so I’m not responsible for the aftermath.” We come to know in our guts that we ARE responsible and must be
responsive to what our collective history has wrought if we are ever to be truly
free in the present. We experience at a visceral level how everyone, regardless of
race, is dehumanized, albeit in racially specific ways, through socialization into
a racialized system. Such deep recognition creates the conditions for engaging
more consciously with racism and other forms of oppression, recognizing the
individual and collective work necessary for developing commitments to challenge these patterns in our institutions and personal lives. Through exercises
such as this we (re)discover concealed stories about how racial consciousness is
shaped and transmitted from within families and communities, but linked to
patterns in the larger society that transcend individual experience.
Another example of recovering concealed stories through memory work
can be found in a film I produced, “40 Years Later: Now Can We Talk?”
( Bell, 2013). In this film, African Americans from the first class to desegregate
their high school in the Mississippi Delta in 1967–69 share concealed stories of
the trauma they experienced as young people entering a hostile white school
environment, stories they had suppressed until provoked by an invitation from
former white classmates to their high school reunion for the first time in forty
years following the election of President Obama. The film begins with segments from a dialogue among the black alumni the day of the reunion where
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51
they respond to the prompt “I remember.” A few months later, a group of
white alumni gather for a dialogue about their memories of that period, using
the same “I remember” prompt. The film intersperses these separate memory
discussions with a third dialogue where the two groups come together to view
clips from their separate dialogues and talk about the feelings, reactions and
questions evoked in the process. The film illustrates the challenges and difficulties as well as the possibilities of cross-race dialogue for recovering and
confronting memories and concealed stories of injustice.
After watching the forty-five-minute film, viewers can discuss the memory
work done by the African Americans in the film and discuss the impact on their
white peers and on cross-race discussion. After listening to the traumatic experiences recalled in the film, viewers can consider what it means to bear witness
to these memories and the concealed stories they relate. They can write about
and discuss their own memories and racialized experiences in schools to ref lect
upon how them impact on students from different racial groups. Focusing on
one or two explicit memories in detail, viewers can examine their own concealed stories, how these may affect their feelings and assumptions about race/
racism, and consider different actions they might take in the present.
Retrieving Concealed Stories Through Visual Art
Visual art is another powerful medium for unearthing and juxtaposing contradictory stories, to spark alternative ways of seeing and engaging our critical
faculties. Art educator, and creative team member on the Storytelling Project, Dipti Desai illustrated the juxtaposition of stock and concealed stories by
engaging the creative team in an analysis of images produced by contemporary
visual artists.1 One image we examined together is “Wilderness” by artist David
Avalos ( Lippard, 1990). In this eight foot long panel Avalos has superimposed
letters to spell the word “Wilderness” over a diverse array of photographs of
Native American faces—men and women, from different Native communities
and parts of the country. The images come from photos by Edward Curtis who
was commissioned by JP Morgan in 1904 to create a photographic record of
all of the tribes in North America to record the “vanishing” lives of a people.
Above the photos, the artist has printed a definition of “wilderness” drawn
from a standard dictionary: “a tract or region uncultivated or uninhabited by
human beings.” This provocative piece vividly juxtaposes the very real presence of Native people against the idea of pristine, uninhabited wilderness so
popular in stock stories of discovery and westward expansion. We are invited
to identify the stock story being contested in this image, to think about the
concealed stories represented in the faces of people who have not vanished, and
to consider the stock stories they challenge by their very presence.
Another example from contemporary art looks at the concealed stories of
Chinese immigrant men, recruited for work on the railroads, but forbidden
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to bring their wives to join them. “Made in USA: Angel Island Shhh” by
artist Flo Oy Wong commemorates their stories and the necessary subterfuge
of creating “paper identities” for wives and children to be able to immigrate.
Wong’s own mother entered the U.S. as her father’s “paper sister” thus becoming the “paper aunt” to her three daughters who had been born in China. This
family secret created lasting fear of disclosure and deportation in hundreds
of other families who lived with this subterfuge. The installation presents 25
sewn f lags made from rice sacks on which the artist has added the family secret
that allowed these “paper people” to enter through Angel Island. Visitors to
the exhibit see the cramped space where detainees were held, and listen to the
voices of the people Wong interviewed, many of whom were revealing their
“paper” identity for the first time. Wong says, “I want the silence of invisibility
to break the “paper people” narratives and eventually permeate the hearts and
minds of those who see the show.”
In another piece, titled “Baby Jack Rice Story” Wong honors friendships
among Chinese immigrants and their African American neighbors in the
South—an example that contrasts with stock stories that typically pit these
groups against each other. The artist’s father-in-law immigrated to Georgia in
1919 and opened a grocery store that served the African American community. Showing the illogic of segregation, Chinese who were considered white
were not welcome in white neighborhoods, so they lived and worked in black
communities. Baby Jack Rice Story honors the friendship between Wong’s
husband’s family and their black neighbors, who called him by the affectionate
nickname Baby Jack, a translation of the nickname his mother called him Be
Be Jai, a Chinese colloquial term for baby boy.
“Deportable Aliens” by Rodrigo Lara Zendejas is the first installment of a
six-part series, Latino Americans: 500 Years of History. In the exhibit Lara revisits
the forgotten history of mass deportation from the U.S. of more than two million people of Mexican descent during the Great Depression. In this piece, porcelain statues shaped like thumbs look like distorted parts of human faces; one
has only eyes, some have ears and others don’t, one has a mouth and a mustache
but no eyes or ears. Like thumbprints, they represent distorted traces of a whole
person that the state uses to identify and categorize human beings and render them expendable. Zendejas shows the changing status of “undocumented
immigrant,” “citizen” and “legal resident” since parts of Mexico became part
of the U.S. in the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. He traces the lines from
the past that show how deportation, raids, “show-me-your-papers” policies,
border militarization, for-profit detention centers with quotas, and extreme
immigration reform proposals—connect to a historical process of racism and
discrimination in immigration policy that extends to today.
Contemporary artists offer a wealth of visual images that question and challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about racial/social life that can be used to
teach about concealed stories (see for example, Bell & Desai, 2014; Fox, 2014;
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Desai, 2017; Lampert, 2013; Love & Mattern, 2013; Rader, 2011; Reilly, 2018).
Through images such as those described above, artists open up concealed stories to expose contradictions, unsettle assumptions and compel us as viewers to
question and look anew. Contemporary art provides many such examples that
can be used to engage people on a sensory level to reconsider dominant stories,
to recognize what they leave out or conceal, and to listen anew to concealed
stories in ways that force us to question what dominant stories naturalize as
true. In this way, concealed stories are able to challenge and resist stock stories
about the “American” experience.
Finding Concealed Stories in History
When we juxtapose the stock stories taught in traditional history texts with
concealed stories pulled forward by contemporary historians, we can trace the
construction of white racial advantage over time. The elements of the historical stock story we learn in school are familiar to every school child. With rare
exceptions, we learn to uncritically view the founding fathers as wise visionaries, and the Constitution as an ideal document. We typically do not learn about
the race-based decisions to explicitly enshrine race, as well as class and gender,
privilege in founding documents created by an all-white, male, land-owning
group (Feagin, 2006). We generally study slavery as a dark, but singular, episode in our past that is over. We do not learn that slavery and legal segregation
were in place for almost 90 percent of our history as a nation and that the vestiges of this history persist in patterns of racism today (Kendi, 2016; Roithmayr,
2014). We learn little about the long history of government retreat in the face
of white resistance to racial remedies or about ensuing government policies and
practices that ensured black poverty and sustain white advantage into present
times ( Blackmon, 2008).
Even when we do acknowledge shameful episodes in the past, no connection is made between then and now. “We have no critical sense of the trajectory
of our history with race and thus no grounding for understanding its persistent presence in our lives and institutions today” ( Loewen, 2006, p. 473). The
Thanksgiving stock story taught to school children, that Native Americans
welcomed the Pilgrims, has in some cases been modified to acknowledge that
vast numbers of Native people were killed and their land stolen by whites. Yet
the realities of the current lives of Native Americans, even the fact of their
contemporary existence and ongoing resistance to domination, remain invisible, locked in stereotyped images of the past, with no exploration of ongoing white complicity and responsibility for their situation today (Churchill &
Trask, 2005; Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Rader, 2011; Treuer, 2019).
Historical accounts that make these connections can be unearthed to help us
understand present-day racial patterns. This is particularly helpful for uncovering how white racial advantage, presented as neutral and normative, is actually
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constructed. Posing as history detectives we can ask questions about what is
taken as unquestioned truth but may tell only part of the story. For example,
why is it that the population in certain parts of the country is all or predominantly white? Loewen (2006) explores the deliberate creation and maintenance
of all-white towns (“sundown towns”) throughout the country following
Reconstruction, towns where black people, and in many areas Native Americans, Mexicans and Asians, were forbidden to live or stay after dark, and were
literally run out of town. Thus, we learn that it is not an accident that parts
of the country are all or mostly white. We discover that in fact they are the
result of deliberate expulsion and exclusion, contributing to the concentration
of groups of color in urban areas and on reservations, often the only areas where
historically they were allowed to reside ( Wilkerson, 2010). Loewen encourages
people to investigate sundown towns in their own areas of the country through
using his website ( https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/sundowntowns.php).
Through studying history, we can explore how it came about that white
people own so much more of the wealth of this country than any other group.
Typically highlighted is the stock story about manifest destiny and the merit
and hard work of those who are successful. Yet abundant scholarship and social
science data reveal the ways that government policy rigged the system to the
advantage of white people from earliest times. A few examples: slavery and the
coerced free labor of black people created major advantages for white slaveholders and others who benefited from a plantation economy—some estimates
put this in the trillions of dollars. The 1830 Indian Removal Act expelled the
Cherokee from the east and gave their land to whites. The Homestead Act of
1862 created a massive redistribution of Indian land to mostly white homesteaders and the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 meant to benefit black freedman
(40 acres and a mule) instead ended up benefitting white landowners. White
racial preferences in immigration laws from the 1790s through 1965 worked
to the benefit of white immigrants. The 1935 Social Security Act excluded
agricultural and domestic workers (where blacks and Latina/o were largely
concentrated) while the 1935 Wagner Act enabled white workers to unionize
for better wages and working conditions, but permitted the exclusion of African Americans, Asian Americans and Latina/os. Between 1934 and 1962, the
federal government backed $120 billion of home loans, of which more than 98
percent went to whites (Adelman, 2003; Rothstein, 2017).
Thus, explicit government policies enabled the accumulation and intergenerational transfer of wealth to white people through programs that were not
available to people of color, ultimately entrenching the gross racial disparities
in assets that continue today (Rothstein, 2017). The DVD “Race: The Power
of an Illusion” (Adelman, 2003) and an article by Coates (2014), are excellent
teaching tools that vividly recount the story of the construction and perpetuation of white privilege, as does a powerful essay by scholar Jacqueline Jordan
Irvine in which she traces the fortunes of her ancestors, and the white family
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that owned them as the two family lines moved forward in time, vividly illustrating the impact of compounding advantage into the present day ( Irvine,
2016).
Resurrecting and teaching a full and critical history not only provides more
accurate explanations for the roots of inequality today, and thus a better likelihood of their effective remedy, but may make history more relevant and engaging to a citizenry that is less and less informed and often tuned out. There is
some evidence that youth of color are much less willing than white students to
uncritically accept a valorized version of history that ignores the struggles and
contributions of their communities. Exposure within families and communities that preserve and pass on the history and struggle (concealed stories) of their
people make them skeptical of the homogenized history (stock stories) taught
in schools. While such skepticism could provide grounds for a more critical
reading of history, without teachers who know the racialized history of our
country and who have the ability to teach it critically, students of color often
feel alienated from a curriculum in which they do not see themselves ref lected
( Epstein, 2009; Roberts, Bell, & Murphy, 2008).
White students, as well, are prevented from coming to grips with the problems and limitations of a distorted history that ill prepares them for understanding systemic racism and living in equality with others. Too seldom do white
people learn about the structured benefits of whiteness and its implications for
their lives today, or about how they might draw on more accurate history to
think about and work for justice as equals with others. Nor do they learn about
role models of white people who have fought against racism throughout our
history and whose example could guide them today (Aptheker, 1992; Brown,
2002; Derman-Sparks, Ramsey, & Edwards, 2006; Zinn, 2003).
Finding Concealed Stories in Social Science Data
Social science data is another powerful tool for revealing concealed stories
about injustice and inequality. Social science tools provide evidence about the
current status of different groups that can reveal racialized patterns in government policies, schooling, wages, incarceration rates and other arenas of social
life that are invisible, taken as natural, or attributed to characteristics of the
group rather than to systemic patterns of discrimination and exclusion. Such
data help us see concretely how race is constructed and reconstructed to advantage whites as a group.
For example, economic mobility is central to the American Dream that
promises those who work hard can get ahead and be better off than their parents
before them. The Opportunity Atlas (www.opportunityatlas.org/) is an interactive tool that enables people to explore data on intergenerational economic
mobility across different racial groups. This free resource lets us compare and
contrast statistics for different demographic groups, and explore what the data
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has to say about economic opportunity, race and mobility. For example, comparative data show that downward mobility is much higher for African Americans and Native Americans than for white, Latina/o, or Asian Americans. Data
also shows that upward mobility for children born into the bottom fifth of the
population is much higher for white than for black or Native American children.
People can use the Opportunity Atlas in pairs or small groups to explore data
on race, class, and gender for different populations and create graphs to show
their findings. As a whole group, they can then discuss such questions as: What
are the concealed stories about economic mobility that this data reveals? What
do these findings say about the American Dream for this generation? Does
everyone have an equal chance at success if they work hard? What does the data
say about who owns the wealth in the U.S.? What would have to change for
merit to overcome race/class/gender barriers to mobility? How does inherited
wealth compound the barriers to economic mobility? How would political and
economic arrangements have to be changed to make economic mobility more
equal and just? Exploring such questions can reveal the concealed factors that
render the American Dream out of reach for so many, increasingly so, and provide ways to discuss what needs to change.
Film and social science data can combine to reveal and analyze concealed
stories in powerful ways. The documentary “Teach Us All” ( Lowman, 2017),
for example, examines school re-segregation across the U.S. sixty years after
the desegregation of Little Rock High School in Arkansas. As the film follows
students of color in hyper-segregated schools today it shows the human cost of
segregation. Indeed, the number of black and Latinx students attending hypersegregated schools has tripled since 1988 (Frankenberg & Orfield, 2012). Viewers can discuss the impact on students of having restricted access to safe schools,
up to date supplies, qualified teachers, advanced placement classes and other
resources that are widely available to middle class white students.
Viewers can then explore the relationship between attending segregated
schools and future prospects in terms of income, incarceration, poverty, health,
etc. through reading a report available at Education Trust (2018). This report
contains a state-by-state analysis of public schools and the impacts on students
of color and students in poverty in the U.S. Viewers can look up information
for their state and locality, listed in percentages showing the per-student funding gap between the highest poverty and lowest poverty districts, the funding
gap between districts with many students of color and districts with fewer students of color, and the per-student funding level in dollars for the best funded,
least funded and their own district. Groups can create a chart that illustrates
their findings and identify educational items that could be bought with the
funding gap money (see Visualizing School Equity at Teaching Tolerance,
https://www.tolerance.org/ ).
Participants can write stories or poems drawing on the data presented to
describe educational inequities they experience in their own schools. They
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could work in pairs to revise the Dick and Jane story, substituting Maria (a student of color) and Jane (a white student) and try to capture how these two characters move through the education system, noting areas where white privilege/
advantage is operating and the effects on their characters. They can share stories
and discuss the outcomes of cumulative white advantage over time, exploring
how their characters’ lives might look as they move into adulthood and the
future. The combination of film with social science data and creative writing
can powerfully reveal the impact and human costs of segregation today.
Finding Concealed Stories in Poetry and Literature
Concealed stories related by poets and writers of color that challenge the
American Dream look beneath its shiny façade to reveal the lives of people in
the margins; those who, despite perseverance and hard work, do not realize the
American Dream. Participants work in groups to analyze and prepare a dramatic reading of the poem “Puerto Rican Obituary” by Pedro Pietri ( Pietri,
1973). This eloquent and moving poem describes the dedication to the American Dream of those who are so often excluded. Groups perform readings of
the poem and then discuss the concealed stories the poem reveals, considering
whether and how these stories are told in mainstream media and how they
contradict stock story images and stereotypes of Puerto Ricans, Latina/os and
other people of color.
“A World Without Black People,” by Philip Emeagwali (info@pemeagwali.
com), is a story that takes a young boy through daily activities where inventions
by black people are not available. For example, he is not able to find shoes, iron
his clothes, comb or brush his hair, use a dustpan or mop, etc.—all activities
that require an implement invented by a black person. Participants can discuss
their reactions to this story and consider why we don’t typically learn information about important inventions African Americans and other people of color
have made. They can follow up by composing a story, skit or play that imagines
a day in their own city or town without people of color.
In 2017, many communities engaged in actions around “A Day Without Immigrants” designed to contrast U.S. dependence on immigrants with
increasingly harsh and vocal anti-immigrant sentiments. Museums removed art
by immigrants, restaurants closed, schools were emptied as immigrant students
and their allies stayed home. The action illustrated work that would not get
accomplished, economic losses that might occur, and services that would not
be available without essential immigrant participation (see Rodriguez, 2019).
Such activities can be used to discuss who contributes to the American Dream,
whose contributions are recognized and whose omitted, and begin to consider
how this might be changed. As follow up, people can research further information about Native Americans, Asian Americans, Latinx and African Americans
that are often concealed in mainstream media, textbooks and popular discourse.
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Conclusion
As participants consider the concealed stories that shape experiences with race
and racism, uncovering stories from history, social science data, poetry and
their own experiences, they gain tools for critiquing stock stories about the
American Dream, mobility, meritocracy and access that are valorized in the
media and mainstream discourse. They begin to see that the stock story can be
contradicted and challenged, and that tools exist for uncovering information
that can help us develop an informed critique of the status quo as a basis for
thinking about actions we might take to challenge and change these stories.
Through contrasting stock and concealed stories, we use the information
in concealed stories to unpack and critically analyze the polished stock stories
at the center of American life and trace their connections to larger patterns of
discrimination and exclusion in our culture. The juxtaposition of stock and
concealed stories provides a vantage point for seeing differently, unsettling the
presumptive truth in stock stories and showing them to be as partial and incomplete as any other story—and thus open for contestation.
In contrasting stock and concealed stories, we can work the juxtapositions
backward or forward. We can start with stock stories and then look for the concealed stories underlying them. Or we can begin with concealed stories, analyzing what they reveal about stock stories that we take for granted. Once we
have exposed the stock stories and unearthed the concealed stories that show
the self-interested protection of advantage, we can turn to resistance stories.
How have people fought against stock stories in the past? What can we learn
from resistance stories to inform antiracist practice today?
Note
1. The images discussed here and in the next chapter can be found through googling
the artists named. I encourage readers to view and share with others these powerful
images and recognize the important role of contemporary artists in addressing injustice and imagining alternative possibilities.
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Essay #2
UNPACKING HISTORY
THROUGH PLACE-BASED
LEARNING
Concealed Stories of Asian American Resistance
Kayhan Irani
I’m walking in silence with a dozen or so educators along a modest dirt road.
The group is moving towards a series of listening stations placed at intervals
along this secluded lane in the middle of a swaying, green ocean of farmland.
My ears adjust to the sounds of the land, the buzzing of insects, crunching of
dirt, and rustling of leaves. To my right, as far as the eye can see, lies acre after
acre of mono crop—this year soybean; last year cotton, punctuated by a single
smokestack in the distance. Lonely and decommissioned, this beacon signals to
us that, as Faulkner wrote, “the past is never dead, it’s not even past.”
To my left, some members of the group have veered off the path and are
walking through a ring of trees to a small cemetery. The smokestack, a few
dozen faded grave markers, and a simple monument honoring those who fought
and died in WWII are the only physical evidence of what was once a 10,000 acre
Japanese-American concentration camp called the Rohwer Relocation Center.
This land holds multitudes of stories from the more than 8,000 American citizens incarcerated here from 1942 to 1945. As we will learn in the days ahead,
the struggle to recognize the history buried here has been long and contentious.
Politically motivated decisions shaped the physical landscape to conceal certain
stories and maintain others. Battles have been fought to push back against stock
stories and reveal resistance stories that challenge the dominant narrative about
Japanese American internment. The listening stations and the presence of Mr.
Yada—a local resident born in the camp—are victories in some of these battles.
I am in Arkansas as part of a one-week Civil Rights Educator Institute
(CREI), co-designed and co-led with Gail Burton, in partnership with the
National Parks Service’s Central High School National Historic Site. Robin
White, the visionary superintendent of the site, reimagined a model of what
a teacher institute could be—not a lineup of speakers, lectures, and site visits
Unpacking History 63
but a leadership development model with active engagement in social justice
issues. Where participants learn how to hold space for conversations and explorations about structural racism and inequity in schools and community spaces.
The institute is a fully immersive, experiential week of arts-based activities that
engage participants with issues of racism, human rights, and education for liberation. We use processes of analysis and inquiry, “Narrative Strategy,” arts-based
pedagogy, and place-based learning at the Central High School National Historic Site, the Rohwer Relocation Center, the Japanese American Internment
Museum, and the Butler Center of Arkansas Studies. One of the main components of the “Narrative Strategy” is the Storytelling Project (STP) framework.
Having been part of the creative team that birthed the STP framework, I
love using it to bring people closer to their own race stories, and make relevant connections to issues of systemic oppression and how communities speak
about them. The Institute is hands-on and deeply participatory where we practice of peeling back the layers of what we accept as the norm (stock story), to
probe what is celebrated as history and to question how that came to be. The
CREI shuff les the deck to include personally held truths and experience, in the
context of community histories, national history, and inherited stories. I help
participants develop the skills needed to hold space for themselves, and then
with their students, to grapple with difficult issues and understand how deeply
personal the political is.
The STP framework is introduced after we engage in a power analysis: a
look at the qualities of oppression, the way it functions, and the multiple levels
on which it operates—institutional, cultural, and interpersonal. In this way, the
framework functions as a tool, like a compass, that participants regularly use as
they process the new information they receive, especially as we visit sites where
contradictory and emotional stories and histories emerge.
Using the STP framework starts on the second day. Once participants review
the Narrative Strategy approach, share personal stories, and start to reveal how
they are shaped by race stories, I introduce a crowd-sourced American history
timeline activity. The timeline takes the form of a long sheet of butcher paper
pasted on a wall—extending horizontally from one end to the other. Along the
top of the sheet, from left to right, are the commonly accepted eras of American
history: 1400s, 1500s, 1600s, etc. Participants are given Post-It notes in different colors, each color ref lects a discreet aspect of history: laws, noteworthy
events, personal memories, oral stories they have heard, and arts and culture.
Using one Post-It per event or memory, we construct a vibrant American history timeline that ref lects the contexts and perspectives of the people in the
room. Some examples include:
•
•
“1955: DC schools desegregated”;
“June 11, 1963: Alabama governor Wallace stands in the schoolhouse door
to show his desire to prevent Black students from enrolling at the U. of Al.
64
Kayhan Irani
•
•
•
George, watches on T.V. with Cathy—who worked for years for my family
as a housemaid. Cathy is ironing”;
“1968 Amiri Baraka launches the Black Arts Movement”;
“1970s? First broadcast interracial kiss on Star Trek”;
“1980: Klan member tried to burn down my mom’s house in FL.”
Once the timeline is populated we bring in the STP framework, with the story
types, to and push into the spaces in-between. First, we identify which posts
are examples of stock, concealed, and resistance stories. Which ones represent
more than one story type depending on how we place or contextualize them?
What histories do we know of but didn’t actually post to the timeline? (In each
of the five years I led the institute, participants always point to the absence of
Native American histories and realities in this first round of history writing.)
As we make connections and build relationships between individual events and
“history,” the timeline comes alive. When a historical moment is no longer an
isolated, unmoving monolith, but an outcome of multiple forces, participants
begin to see history as a present and tangible force, one that we are moving
within, can act upon, and can transform. The story types help us navigate these
dynamic layers of information, multiple truths, and focus on social justice values, and transformative interpretations and understandings of history.
The institute relies on place-based learning to deepen engagement with history as a living force, one in which multiple forces use story to either uphold
the racial status quo or to understand and unveil how white supremacy still
operates today. After we visit the Rohwer Relocation Center, the Japanese
American Internment Museum a few miles away in McGhee, Arkansas, and the
Central High School National Historic Site and Interpretive Center in Little
Rock, we engage in a multi-day, intersectional analysis process. We focus on
the stories told through:
•
•
•
The words of the people who lived those experiences;
What the physical location, architecture, landscape, design of space conveys;
and
The curatorial or interpretive choices in the material on display.
Using the STP story types, we look at how Japanese Americans and African
Americans fought for their constitutional rights in very different contexts and
moments, what choices they made as resisters, how those choices were and still
are being interpreted, and how we can understand the nuances of their stories
in order to interrupt stock retellings and resist stereotypes.
For example, one participant raised her discomfort in reading and seeing language and material in the Rohwer Interpretive Museum exhibit that casts Japanese Americans as “model prisoners.” She spoke about the coded, racialized way
that Asian American resistance was framed as polite, docile, and accommodating.
Unpacking History 65
She focused on the choice to highlight certain tactics of survival (enlisting in
the armed forces, tending gardens, saying the pledge of allegiance daily, having
babies) over others (organizing against the war, the removal of “problem prisoners” by armed forces), and argued that this frame concealed the story of state
sanctioned violence; making it seem as if living in a prison camp with armed
guards monitoring your every movement had no inf luence on the way people
expressed resistance. She then made the connection that casting Asian American
resistance in this way upholds an unjust racial status quo. That framing of Asian
Americans as “model minorities”—a heavily loaded term—conjures narratives
used to pit Asian Americans (and other immigrant groups) and against African
Americans, in particular, by casting public, visible forms of struggle as unruly or
impolite. This narrative also conceals the vibrant and rich resistance struggles of
Asian Americans throughout history, and devalues contentious claim-making—
one of the most effective ways marginalized groups can gain attention and
support for civil and human rights. This rich conversation we had in processing
the stories and the ways the stories were told helped our group to clearly see the
narrative underpinnings that we must fight against if we are to create an intersectional analysis and move towards truly transformative stories.
Using the STP framework is an invaluable tool for countless settings. I’ve
found it enriches critical analysis, helps deepen ref lective processes, and supports the peeling back layers of the racialized ecosystem of the United States.
History making and storytelling is a living thing, a dynamic that can unfold
and come alive through inquiry, the Storytelling Project framework offers a
powerful tool that can help us see what we’re looking at, realign our vision
according to social justice goals, and move us to action.
Kayhan Irani is an Emmy-award winning writer, a performer, cultural
activist, and a Theater of the Oppressed trainer. She creates art to build
community and spaces for healing, and to re-connect audiences into their
desires to effect change. She uses theater and story-based strategies for
community organizing, engagement, and education. Kayhan was one of
ten artists named by President Obama’s White House as a 2016 White
House Champion of Change for her art making.
Essay #3
TOWARD LOVE, LIBERATION
AND ABOLISHING THE SINGLE
STORY
Yolanda Sealey Ruiz
For three years (2013–2015), I had the honor of co-presenting with Dr. Lee
Bell at the National Conference for Race and Ethnicity in American Higher
Education (NCORE) on her Storytelling Project (STP) model. I remember
feeling empowered and excited that I had read about and now experienced
a structured, yet f luid, way to engage people in telling stories about race and
racism and how these constructions intersect with other aspects of our personhood. Each time we presented the model at a pre-conference institute, it was
more powerful for me than the previous experience because I had begun to
see myself as a race storyteller and embraced ways the model could positively
impact my pedagogy and practice. Since those years, I have used the model in
my own classroom at Teachers College, Columbia University, and watched and
listened as students, often for the first time, publicly tell personal stories about
how race, racism, power, and other constructs and systems have impacted their
lives. It is fortuitous that the second edition of this remarkable book is being
released during a time when the sociopolitical context of our nation is at a low
point—when stories cast in the media about race are too often single-sided,
stereotypical stories that f latten the lives and experiences of people of color,
women, those in our immigrant communities, and others of us who are most
affected by inequality, injustice, and bias.
In light of this, I have chosen to write about my most recent use of the STP
model in my Diversity course at Teachers College. My students, perhaps as a
sign of the times or because of the emphasis on humanity in the course, chose
to discuss and write about how Dr. Bell’s model evoked pain, introspection,
eye-opening racial epiphanies, healing, and the desire to love. My students
talked about how the model led them to ref lect on and helped them see the
absence of love and thus the need to respond with love to issues involving race
Toward Love and Liberation
67
and racism. In this essay, I focus on the stories of three students (Michelle, Jillian, and Raven) to offer examples of how the STP model was meaningful to
them in their personal lives and how it impacted views on their teaching and
learning.
By engaging the prompt “I remember,” Michelle shared stories about her
time in the Peace Corps in Rwanda. She told the story about being repeatedly called the N*word by Rwandans because that is what the media (through
“American television”) taught them. She recounted the unfair treatment she
received by those she viewed as her African sisters and brothers. For two years,
she endured abusive comments and treatment while watching her fellow white
Peace Corps colleagues receive dignity and respect. Releasing the pain of these
memories through her tears, Michelle concluded that the model gave her a
space to grieve with her classmates, “be free,” and continue to move toward
forgiving those who mistreated her. She said she was finding it possible to love
the country and those who had mistreated her. As Michelle said:
Telling my story about the Peace Corps gave me the space to be free. In class, I
knew that I could laugh, cry, and most importantly heal from the joys and pains
of serving in Rwanda. My professor and peers were affirming and loving, which is
the therapy I sincerely needed.
The STP model prompted another student, Jillian, to take a less personal,
but still powerful, approach by applying the model as part of an inter-textual
analysis:
As I listened to the storytelling model, I couldn’t help but be reminded of Chimamanda Adichie’s TedTalk, “The Danger of a Single Story”—or the harm of
perpetuating false stereotypes. In this case, American history has been condensed to
a single story concocted by the winners; they have torn years’ worth of chapters out
of the book and erased some of the most significant conflicts and characters in order
to sell a fraudulent dream. We’ve all been brainwashed to believe this sugarcoated
story; in fact, if we’re white, we’re born with the pen to add to the story while
everyone else waits in line to catch a glimpse of the cover. But the story can change;
we can find the torn pages. We can write our own truths. There is no single story,
nor is there a single cloud in the sky. There are an infinite number of words waiting
to be heard—they must be heard, especially if we are to erase the centuries of lies
ingrained . . .
In this ref lection, Jillian, who talked about being raised in a “white bubble,”
offered a glimpse of the shift she experienced in her thinking that semester.
Like Michelle, she used the word “free” when describing how her knowledge
of stock stories and the notion of emerging/ transforming stories changed her
views and feelings about the history and social studies she had been taught in
68
Yolanda Sealey Ruiz
school. In another intertextual analysis, Michelle applied the STP model as a
lens to critique society. Referring to the music video “Lemonade,” she wrote:
I thoroughly enjoyed the storytelling model and hope to spend more time learning about it. Often “storytelling” is taught broadly as a conceptual framework. I
enjoyed learning about the different types of storytelling, Stock, Concealed, and
Resistance. I appreciated being able to apply the different types of stories to what
I see in the media. For example, in one part of Beyonce’s “Lemonade” video,
she shows Black and/or African women in chains drowning themselves in a river.
Their message was that they would rather drown and die than be slaves to a White
person. When Dr. Yolanda was teaching, I thought of this segment as a Concealed
and Resistance story. Concealed because I was never taught about the history and
power of these women, and Resistance because it shows that Black people were not
submissive or docile to slavery, as some textbooks try to depict us. I also enjoyed
learning about Emerging/Transforming stories. Recently, my students painted how
they see themselves. I see painting and collages as multimodal approaches to emerging stories for students. It was awesome to deconstruct different types of stories.
The STP model led to deep ref lections from pre-service teachers like Jillian and Michelle, as well as in-service teachers like Raven. In her ref lection
on using the STP model, Raven shared how it enlightened her perspective of
the mode of storytelling, particularly within communities of color. She wrote:
While I have known about those concepts outside of this specific model, having this
model for the purposes of connecting people of all backgrounds and races is extremely
valuable. It equips those without the knowledge to explore the concept of storytelling
and the value it holds in literacy, while at the same time reintroducing those who
have the background knowledge to see the importance of storytelling across cultures
and people.
As a middle school teacher and graduate student, Raven talked about how
she has valued storytelling in her classrooms with students of color as a way
of enacting culturally relevant pedagogy. Even as she engaged with the mode
of storytelling in her classroom where she taught, she still experienced a racial
epiphany while engaging the model in her graduate classroom with her peers:
While writing my own thoughts on the importance of storytelling for communities
of color, it didn’t occur to me that the storytelling we’ve always heard are those of
people in power and that these stories need to be countered by the stories of ancestors
and history of people of color.
Multiple students connected the STP model with how our perceptions of society have been molded based on the history taught in schools. As Beatriz shared
Toward Love and Liberation
69
in class, “the STP model can lead to a form of mental liberation from the lies we’ve
been told all of our lives. Lies that made me hate myself. Lies that made me want to love
and respect other people, more than those in my own community, just because they were
white.” Students also deeply engaged a critique of the “American Dream” as a
stock story and offered their own resistance and emerging/transforming stories
about their families—tales filled with love, struggle and determination. Raven
ref lected on the “American Dream” as a stock story and the power of using the
STP model in multiple settings to unearth and interrupt the damage this story
continues to inf lict on communities, particularly communities of color:
Yet the dream is portrayed as being for the very people that can never seem to attain
it; even when they do, the perseverance to obtain that dream was not easy and was
deserved long before it was probably obtained. This tool is one that can be used in
history and literacy classes, in professional development settings, and with students
to inform them that storytelling is valuable and necessary in order to counter the
histories that were told to us and understand how society was constructed. Storytelling is a way of crossing cultures and connecting identities; providing students with
stories and the counter-stories allows them the power to decipher the narratives told
to them, to create spaces where truths live and students have access to these truths
in order to create their own narrative.
In my experience, the use of the STP model is this: it allows place and space
for racial and social justice to be planned for and possibly achieved. Given the
insidious and sometimes secretive ways race and racism operate in U.S. society
there is a need for all voices to tell multiple stories—stories that offer various
perspectives, open different truths, and challenge the status quo. Race must be
central to any analysis of inequality, and our stories of how race has shaped our
lives and the lives of others are greatly needed and necessary if we are to move
this nation forward. The STP model beautifully engages the arts (music videos,
TEDTalks, visual arts, poetry, etc.) and invites students to think critically about
how race and racism play out in society and in their own lives.
In so many important ways, the STP model developed my students’ skills
to probe the historical legacy and present-day effects of racism as well as other
social constructs and institutionalized systems that affect their experiences and
representation in U.S. society. In that particular semester, as in all of the semesters when I have used the STP model in my class, students were able to discuss the implications of race—and American racism in particular—in edifying,
constructive, and deeply personal ways. It is a powerful moment when students
begin to question what they previously believed not only about race and racism, but also about their classroom practices with the students they are charged
to serve. The STP model unearths lies, promotes multiple truths, and unites
my students in more ways than I could have anticipated. It is a powerful model
that helps students develop a critical lens to understand marginalization (and
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verbally resist it), even as they identify how it occurs in their lives and in the
lives of others. Further, the STP model engages ideas about race and racism in
a visceral way that personalizes experience; as seen with Michelle, Jillian, and
Raven, it opens healthy discussion about race and stokes imaginative possibilities for this type of truth telling in today’s classrooms. Using this model helps
to tackle discussions on race and racism, even in this challenging sociopolitical
climate we are all doing our best to survive.
Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz is Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University (TC). She is founder of the Racial Literacy Project and co-founder of the Civic Participation Project at TC.
4
RESISTANCE STORIES
Drawing on Antiracism Legacies to
Map the Future
In the poetics of struggle and lived experience, in the utterances of ordinary
folk, in the cultural products of social movements, in the ref lections of activists,
we discover the many different cognitive maps of the future, of the world not
yet born.
(Kelley, 2002, p. 10)
Resistance stories are the third story type in the Storytelling Project Model.
These are stories that narrate the persistent and ingenious ways people, both
ordinary and famous, resist racism and challenge the stock stories that support
it in order to fight for more equal and inclusive social arrangements. They
draw from a cultural/historical repository of narratives by and about people
and groups who have challenged racism and injustice; stories that we can learn
from and build on to challenge stock stories that we encounter today.
Resistance stories come from several sources. Some resistance stories emerge
from (formerly) concealed stories that reveal the small and large ways people
before us have challenged racism in their communities and personal lives as
these are documented in writing and passed down orally. Other kinds of resistance stories come from the work of contemporary artists, educators and activists who model ways to challenge racism through their artwork, pedagogy and
political actions. By illustrating antiracist perspectives and practices, resistance
stories expand our vision of what is possible and form the foundation for ongoing creation of new stories that can inspire and direct antiracism and social
justice work in the present.
Dictionary definitions of resistance use terms such as “confrontation,” “opposition,” “struggle” and “conf lict.” These terms typically have a negative connotation, especially when applied to those who challenge the status quo. In the
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Lee Anne Bell
Storytelling Project Model, we ascribe positive interpretations to these terms.
Resistance—as in the ability of an organism to ward off what is damaging—is
healthy. Just so, resistance to racism, and other forms of oppression, is healthy
for our body politic. It makes a society stronger, more resilient and democratic,
and more effective at fostering the well being of its people. Likewise, confrontation, opposition and struggle connote for us proactive engagement with issues of
racism so necessary to generate change. In our view, conf lict is inevitable when
antiracist ideas and principles clash with a status quo that passively and actively
allows racism to continue. Such conf lict can be dynamic—catalyzing a sense of
being morally alive, actively engaged and willing to struggle with others toward
a better world.
Resistance stories, as a heritage of collective struggle to which we can lay
claim in the present, are too seldom taught (often remaining as concealed stories
that need to be unearthed and reclaimed). Yet they have the potential to inspire
and mobilize people to see themselves as proactive agents and participants in
democratic life. Such stories have the capacity to instruct and educate, arouse
participation and collective energy, insert into the public arena and validate the
experiences and goals of people who have been marginalized, and model skills
and strategies for effectively confronting racism and other forms of inequality.
Even when such narratives are raised though, they too often focus on iconic
stories about heroic individuals; stories that obscure and sanitize the collective
struggles that drive social change, and thus fail to pass on necessary lessons
about how such change actually comes about. The Rosa Parks story is one
example. In the typical mainstream story, Parks is most often presented as a
woman who one day was simply too tired to stand and courageously refused to
move to the back of the bus. The full story of Rosa Parks and the Montgomery
bus boycott, however, is one of careful and organized planning over time by a
group of people committed to challenging segregation and the daily courage
of thousands of ordinary people who walked for nearly a year rather than take
segregated buses (Collier-Thomas & Franklin, 2001; Kohl, 2004; Theoharis,
2015). It is also a reminder that in hindsight there may seem to be a grand plan
in resistance movements rather than the reality of a series of fits and starts, of
successful and unsuccessful actions taken, of persistence and serendipity. The
authentic story of Rosa Parks provides valuable information about how organized resistance comes about, filling in gaps and providing lessons, guidance
and models for organizing and sustaining opposition to racism and other forms
of oppression today.
As counter-stories to the status quo, resistance stories may be seen in a very
different light than stock stories of resistance. Opposition to British domination
by colonists in the Revolutionary War, for example, became a foundational
narrative of the American spirit of independence and drive for freedom, a stock
story of resistance that is preserved and passed on in textbooks, movies and
Resistance Stories
73
public rituals. Native American resistance to domination by those same colonists, however, is characterized as savage, hostile and illegitimate, either stereotyped or ignored altogether in public renderings. When people of color resist
the oppressive authority of the dominant white racial group, their resistance is
often characterized as negative, angry, inappropriate, something requiring suppression and subjugation. The lessons of resistance against injustice are plentiful
in our history as a nation but too often submerged under the crust of official
stock stories that preserve the interests of the status quo. Yet, such resistance
stories are there to be resurrected to inspire people today, and indeed offer ways
to make history relevant and meaningful (Green, 2000; Harding, 1990; Kelley &
Lewis, 2000; Vickery, 2008; Zinn, 2013; Theoharis, 2019).
Drawing on Anti-Racist Legacies to Resist
Contemporary Racism
As I write this chapter, several contemporary resistance movements come to
mind that both draw on legacies from the past and generate new ways to challenge racism. These examples illustrate the important role that young people play
in such movements and the new energy and ideas they bring. These contemporary resistance movements show a growing capacity to work intersectionally,
learn from divisions that thwarted movements in the past, and build successful
alliances across groups that is inspiring. As such they represent both resistance
stories that link past and present and emerging/transforming stories that extend
into the future. In this chapter, my purpose is to show how drawing from resistance stories of the past strengthens contemporary resistance movements.
Black Lives Matter
Black Lives Matter (BLM) was founded in 2013 after a jury acquitted George
Zimmerman of second-degree murder in the killing of teenager Trayvon Martin. As a contemporary movement for racial justice, BLM echoes earlier movements such as the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells in the early 1900s,
and the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 1970s ( Ransby, 2018). While
learning from and ref lecting ideas from those earlier movements, BLM more
consciously addresses issues of intersectionality by centering the leadership of
women, queer and trans people of color ( Dixson, 2018; Khan-Cullors, Bandele, & Davis, 2018). Calling attention to the stories of black and Latina/o men
and women who have been killed by police, BLM brings forward concealed
and resistance stories from the past to shed light on and challenge racism today.
BLM also serves as an emerging/transforming story and inspiring example of
young people of color taking the lead, and building alliances with other groups,
in the ongoing struggle against racism.
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Lee Anne Bell
Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) Protests
In 2016, a protest against construction of an oil pipeline at Standing Rock
reservation in North Dakota evolved into the largest indigenous protest movement of the 21st century. Building on sovereignty struggles of the past, it drew
thousands of indigenous people and their allies from around the world ( Estes,
2019). Like BLM, this movement also drew on examples of historical resistance by Native peoples in their 250-year struggle to preserve land, water and
ancient burial sites. As in the past, they used legal arguments to fight against
encroachment on treaty lands and to try to force the U.S. government to honor
agreements (Treuer, 2019). While ultimately unsuccessful in stopping the pipeline, the Standing Rock protests did succeed in raising public awareness of the
diversity of native groups, global indigenous rights struggles, the historic and
ongoing abrogation of treaty rights, and the urgent need to protect natural
resources. Most importantly, the protests inspired young people, indigenous
and non-indigenous, to become more active politically. As an example, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez attributed her decision to run for Congress
to her experience at the Standing Rock encampment when she was there to
support the protest.
The Dreamers
United We Dream, formed in 2008, has become one face of contemporary organizing for immigrant rights. Like the two examples above, United We Dream
carries forward resistance struggles from the past. Like other contemporary
resistance, this movement takes lessons from the Civil Rights movement,
Native struggles and immigrant rights movements to organize alliances across
immigrant communities as in the past (Latina/o, Asian American, African
diaspora). In the midst of anti-immigrant sentiment fostered by the policies,
language and actions of the current U.S. president, United We Dream puts a
human face on the struggles of immigrant families and communities, shows
the links between immigration and U.S. policies that drive desperate people to
immigrate, and illustrates the contributions immigrants make to enriching and
strengthening this country. United We Dream draws attention to America’s
espoused ideal carved on the Statue of Liberty as a place that welcomes even the
poorest immigrants and illustrates the similarities of circumstances that have
drawn people to these shores since the beginning.
Stories that show how everyday people can work together to resist injustice are a powerful tool for encouraging other young people to consider their
own roles as actors and citizens in the public arena. While stock stories often
code youth resistance as negative, particularly from young people of color,
actions among young people in the past twenty years reveal a much more hopeful picture. Young people are actively involved or part of the leadership in
Resistance Stories
75
several contemporary movements including antiracism, native and immigrant
rights, as noted above, as well as in anti-gun violence, challenging the school
to prison pipeline and mass incarceration, ending campus gender violence,
GLBTQ rights, and environmental justice (Connor & Rosen, 2016; Warren &
Goodman, 2018). Taking lessons from past movements, they are often more
conscious of working intersectionally across movements and finding ways to
unite causes (see, for example, Tseng-Putterman’s examples of Asian-American
organizing across movements (2017)). The 2016 midterm election had the largest youth turnout since 1982, partly as a result of focusing on issues rather than
specific candidates ( Ember, 2018). Youth involvement in resistance movements
has invigorated public debate, engaging young people from all racial groups as
active participants in democracy (Milkman, 2017).
Resistance and Education for Democracy
One would expect that a democratic nation would be intensely focused on
preparing its youth to for active citizenship. While this sadly is not the case in
the mainstream, many examples exist of communities and schools that take this
responsibility seriously. In the Storytelling Project we recognize youth as actors
with the capacity to uncover problems in their schools and communities and
utilize their energy, perspectives and experience as resources for educational
and social change. A primary goal of the Storytelling Project Curriculum is
to foster space (counter-storytelling communities) where young people can
engage as social critics, develop a historical understanding and strong critique
of racism and other forms of injustice, and generate effective ways to challenge
oppressive conditions in their schools and communities. Through focusing on
counter-stories of resistance, young people engage in “the practice of freedom”
(Freire & Freire, 1994; hooks, 1994), take an active stance against the social
barriers they face and consider new, more liberatory possibilities.
High school students who participated in the Storytelling Project Curriculum frequently expressed a yearning to know more about what they called “the
smaller people” in history, and to use their voices to challenge injustice in their
schools and communities. To explore their concerns, we cultivated a counterstorytelling community in two classrooms in the Bronx where stories by young
people were centered as the focus for learning (see Roberts, Bell, & Murphy,
2008). Working with two amazing teachers of color, who in part shared and
understood their students’ experiences and were comfortable openly discussing
issues of race and racism, we co-created a space of trust, honesty and critical
learning where youth could actively fashion the curriculum to fit their interests
and concerns.
Through dialogue, students unearthed the contradictions of living daily
with the consequences of racism in a society that claims race no longer matters.
They commented that teachers rarely want to talk about racism, and simply
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putting race on the table was a novel experience. As one of the participating
teachers noted: “I think that most of them don’t understand why it’s not talked about,
and they don’t know how to deal with it . . . I think it’s because people always say, ‘Color
doesn’t mean anything’ or ‘I treat everyone the same.’”
Within a supportive counter-storytelling community, students enthusiastically engaged in analyzing stock stories, bringing in their own concealed
stories about racial experience as contrast. In so doing, they surfaced “generative themes” that we could explore through the curriculum. For example, students’ own experiences completely contradicted color-blind rhetoric they hear
in school and in the mainstream media. They described how they are perceived
and reacted to in a range of situations: riding on the bus, venturing into downtown Manhattan, participating in a debate judged by white professionals who
stereotyped their Bronx accents and gave them a lower score.
They don’t understand you because of the accent . . . [x] did an opening
statement . . . She had good pace, but because she had good grammar, it didn’t sound
like her! How do you want us to speak? I think that they were assuming that because
we are from the Bronx that we don’t speak right.
They frequently expressed dissatisfaction with a curriculum that superficially focuses on stock stories about slavery and iconic figures from the Civil
Rights era, but does little to help them ref lect on concealed stories in their lives
and their communities or learn about resistance stories that might support their
capacity to imagine and generate alternatives specific to the historical moment
in which they find themselves. For example, one student articulated a desire
for historical information about the actions of ordinary people like themselves:
“We need to know more than just Martin Luther King and Malcolm X . . . they [teach]
the most important people but the smaller people they do stuff too . . .” As the “smaller”
people, youth want to understand how racism operates and how they might
challenge it effectively, but feel they get little guidance from social studies curriculum that seems frozen in time, or from adults who offer little current information or vision to guide them.
Another powerful theme that youth brought to the table centered on a sense
that they were being pushed out of their neighborhoods. As they examined the
concealed stories in social science data about how race sorts opportunity and
access, one student raised the issue of gentrification, a term he did not yet know
but whose examples were quite clear to him: “They trying to move everybody from
Harlem . . . they trying to run everybody out . . . they trying to bring everybody to the
Bronx because they want to keep Manhattan . . . the whole thing, Harlem too.” Their
teacher validated this concern: “A lot of students used to live in Washington Heights.
They have left. They can’t afford it anymore, and they see that everything’s changing.
They’re saying, ‘They’re only raising rent because they know we can’t afford it, so they’re
trying to get rid of us.’ That’s their understanding.” Students and teachers alike noted
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how race (and class) operate through gentrification and displacement of people
of color in their communities and struggled together to make visible that which
color-blind discourse conceals.
Students are hungry for spaces and curricula that provide context and historical knowledge to help them ground their own experiences and analyses.
Linking the Storytelling Project Model to their felt concerns, they created sites
within their schools for addressing critical social issues such as racism. As one
teacher argued: “They have such valuable opinions and beliefs and I think one of the
reasons why our students don’t get a lot of the information that comes out of the mainstream curriculum is that they don’t care . . . they feel like it has nothing to do with them.”
Within a counter-storytelling community, young people learn to value their
already developing analyses of the social world, to better understand the systems
they contend with on a daily basis and approach course content with the conviction that their experiences could be an integral part of the curriculum. Lessons
from the STP curriculum utilized and built on generative themes students raised
for consideration, lessons that can be adapted for other groups to use in their own
developing stories of resistance to racism and other issues of injustice they face.
Learning About Resistance Through Theatre of Oppressed
Artist and STP Creative Team member Kayhan Irani introduced an activity
called “Complete the Image,” based on Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed ( Boal,
2001, 2002) in order to complicate and extend ways to look at resistance, since
young people as much as adults are constrained by narrow popular views that
stereotype resistance as negative. This activity helps participants explore multiple forms of resistance, understand the variety and complexity of resistance
strategies, and problematize notions that resistance is necessarily ill mannered,
aggressive or violent.
“Complete the Image” starts with two volunteers who come to the front of
the room, face each other, shake hands and then freeze. The facilitator draws
an imaginary frame around the frozen image and asks the rest of the group
as observers to speculate about its possible meanings. For example, the image
could be two strangers meeting for the first time, friends greeting each other
in a familiar way, a boss interviewing a candidate, competitors shaking hands
before a match, etc. Participants call out possibilities and then discuss how
changing stances affect different interpretations of the image. A few warm-up
rounds demonstrate how the game is played and help participants to limber up
their observations and think creatively and playfully.
The facilitator then asks the group to focus on the term “resistance” and to
complete images of resistance as one person at a time steps inside the frame and
places themselves in the image. Observers analyze possible meanings each time
the image changes and new participants step in and out over several rounds.
Observers consider what forms of resistance are enacted, listing these on the
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board for later discussion. As a culminating round, they create a whole group
image of resistance, gradually adding as many participants as want to join in to
“complete the image.”
The discussion following the game is key. Participants draw upon their observations of the game to discuss how changes were made and with what effect.
They step back to consider the types of resistance observed—violent or nonviolent, outward or internal—and draw upon experiences from their own lives
to illustrate. They note, for example, the many ways students can passively or
actively resist in school—deliberately slowing down the pace of a lesson, talking
or disrupting just to the edge of the rules, taking a long time to sharpen a pencil,
using multiple bathroom breaks, daydreaming, etc. They also discuss the purpose of such resistance (avoid boring lessons or challenging assignments, cover
up fear of failure, get notice or respect from other students, etc.). Next they consider the pros and cons of different strategies and assess the most effective ways
to use resistance to meet their goals in different situations—for example, openly
expressing boredom with tedious lessons and articulating their preference for
learning that is relevant to their own concerns vs. passive resistance that may not
change the situation; resisting disciplinary codes that are top-down and punitive
by insisting on developing rules that respect their capacities and rights as school
citizens rather than f launting rules that bring punishment.
The level of discussion following games such as these is usually quite thoughtful. Participants gain valuable insights about methods of resistance and their
effectiveness in different situations and make meaningful connections to real
life. Through shared analysis, the group members develop a more explicit and
nuanced understanding of resistance, think more critically about approaches
to resistance, and are able to imagine alternatives for resisting consciously and
proactively to reach their goals.
Learning About Resistance Through Poetry, Literature
and Public Art
Analyzing how resistance is expressed in poetry and literature is another way
to generate ref lective discussion about resistance. For example, Maya Angelou’s
poem “Still I Rise” (Angelou, 1978) offers a provocative framework for a discussion of internal forms of resistance. The poem can be read silently by individuals and then in unison as a group, followed by discussion. How does Angelou
describe history? How does she distinguish between different types of history?
What is truth as expressed in the poem? What is the poet resisting against? How?
What does it mean to rise? Participants can discuss in pairs or small groups
such questions as: Where in your own experience do you see others or yourself
“rising up” to racism (or sexism, classism, homophobia, trans-oppression, etc.)?
How do you see yourself rising in your own life? Which forms of resistance
identified in the Boal game might you draw upon? For further ref lection, people
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79
can write their own poem about rising, perhaps using five pairs of couplets as
in the Angelou poem. Through creative self-expression, internal dialogues and
fictional characters, poems can show how seemingly individual, personal stories
can also ref lect ways that entire groups of people resist oppression.
In another example, participants explore how artists use murals as a medium
for representing issues their communities face to express resistance to injustice.
An essay by Judy Baca describes mural paintings in Los Angeles that affirm the
history and indigenous roots of the Mexican people. Baca traces how muralists
in Los Angeles used this art form to represent and discuss issues facing their
communities that are ignored in the dominant society. She shows examples of
how that mural form has been adopted to address the concerns of other communities (African Americans, Thai, Chinese, Jewish and feminist). The essay
culminates in a description of “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” as an organizing tool to connect the diverse communities who live in Los Angeles through
a joint mural project ( Baca, 2009).
Baca’s essay is a powerful prompt for discussion as participants relate the stories in the murals to their own school and community situations. For example,
our high school students discussed how Black, Latino and Asian students, U.S.
born as well as immigrant, are often pitted against each other in their schools
and neighborhoods. They ref lected on how the murals illustrated resistance
to racialized images and stereotypes of immigrants from the various groups
depicted, and considered how immigration policies contribute to the perpetuation of racism and white privilege. In small groups they researched immigration
policies in American history and then created their own murals in response. In
so doing, they developed knowledge about the history of immigration and racism in the United States, the differential treatment of white immigrants and
immigrants of color at various stages in our history, and discovered new ways
to represent their ideas, knowledge and concerns through art.
Creating Resistance Counter-Stories Through Critical Reading
Artist and journalist Alexandra Bell illustrates resistance counter-stories
through her critical reading of newspapers and other media. Her series title,
“Counternarratives” shows how mainstream news is often presented in ways
that, consciously or unconsciously, advance the agendas of those with power. In
the series, Bell annotates newspaper text to highlight the choices journalists and
editors make regarding images, titles of articles, and the placement of text and
images on the page, showing how changes in these areas that honor the perspective and experiences of those without power can tell a different story. She
then prints enlarged versions of her deconstructions and plasters them around
the city for by-passers to read and think about.
For example, Bell looks at the New York Times coverage of the death of
Michael Brown that placed side-by-side profiles of the victim and his killer,
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Lee Anne Bell
policeman Darren Wilson under the headline “Two Lives at a Crossroads in
Ferguson.” Challenging that framing as creating a false equivalence that minimizes the racial and power dynamics, Bell revised the article so that Wilson’s
profile read, “Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot an unarmed black teenager
named Michael Brown.” A new headline over a graduation photo of Michael
Brown then reads, “A Teenager with Promise.” Images of this work can be seen
at www.alexandrabell.com/public-work.
Bell hopes to encourage readers to read critically, look for the subtle as well
as overt ways racism shows up in the media, and to question the power dynamics in reporting that purports to be unbiased. Applying this form of resistance
reading to all types of media can help readers become more conscious and
critical of the perspectives represented, uncover stock and concealed stories and
resist falling into accepting embedded assumptions in such texts.
Learning About Resistance Through Participatory Action
Research
Young people can take a deeper look at problems in their schools and communities through participatory action research (PAR). Youth engaged in this type of
research (YPAR) have used research tools to examine the way problems are
framed in their communities and to generate action for change. For example,
“Polling for Justice,” a participatory research project involving youth in New
York City assessed youth relations with police in the five boroughs of New York
(Fox & Fine, 2013). They collected statistical data and then performed the presentation of this data in various community venues to share the data, discuss its
implications and generate ideas for action. As an activity, participants can watch
“Polling for Justice,” available at https://vimeo.com/22363812. People can discuss this video in terms of the stock stories it challenges about young people,
their relationships with police and their desires as members of a community.
In another activity, participants can create a “Role on the Wall” participants
are assigned a “character” such as teacher, principal, student, security guard,
police officer and parent. Centered on their newsprint they draw a large outline
of a body. Outside the body they write words and phrases that convey what
other people say about this “character” and what this character is expected/
pressured to do by the outside world. On the inside of the body, participants
write words or phrases that convey their character’s hopes, desires and fears.
Groups hang their pictures on the wall around the room, and do a gallery
walk to look at each body’s associated words/images. What are the similarities
among the characters in terms of needs, fears, hopes, etc.? What are the differences? What would have to happen for the characters to exist harmoniously
in their school/community? What role does lack of resources play in creating
conf lict among these characters? What broader changes are necessary? How
might groups organize and work together to demand needed changes?
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Local Community Resisters as Role Models and Mentors
Looking at local history, young people can study role models and organized
groups in their own communities who work against racism and other forms
of injustice. For example, our students learned about Mothers on the Move
(MOM), an activist organization in the South Bronx started more than fourteen years ago by mothers fighting for educational justice for their children.
They read interviews from an essay about an oral history project of MOM
(available at www.ashp.cuny.edu/mom/youth.htm) that generated ideas for
how they might conduct interviews with people and organizations in their
own communities. Imagining themselves in the role of investigative journalists
planning to write a story about everyday resisters against racism (or gentrification, or other issues of concern), participants can design protocols and rehearse
interviewing skills with each other. Based on what they learn from interviews
they can then write articles for a local community paper, take photos and/or
compile a newspaper to distribute in the community.
Through these and other activities, youth develop a much deeper understanding of resistance and see the possibilities for making their own claims
on school knowledge, bringing their issues and concerns into the classroom
and developing the kind of critical literacy that supports their proactive participation in addressing problems they identify in their schools and neighborhoods (Kahne & Westheimer, 2003; Kirschner, 2015). Not incidentally, they
also develop skills and knowledge valued by traditional schooling (literacy and
numeracy, historical knowledge, written and oral communication skills, cooperative endeavor, civic engagement), but through practices grounded in their
own concerns and interests. For other examples, see Abu El-Haj (2009, 2015),
Fine (2019), Fox and Fine (2013), Morrell and Duncan-Andrade (2008).
Conclusion
Learning about resistance and identifying examples of resisters in their own
communities prepares young people to create emerging/transforming counterstories that address issues they face in their own schools and neighborhoods.
The prior examination of concealed and resistance stories grounds them in a
broader historical and social context and helps them see that the problems they
face are not idiosyncratic or individual but part of larger patterns; and that they
are not alone but linked to a broader community (historical and contemporary)
that has engaged with similar problems before them and can offer ideas that
they can build on in the present. I have focused here on youth, but these strategies can be used by people of any age, as well as in other settings, to explore and
learn from resistance stories as models for action. The exploration of resistance
stories leads to emerging/transforming stories, the next and final story type in
the model.
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Khan-Cullors, P., Bandele, A., & Davis, A. (2018). When they call you a terrorist: A black
lives matter memoir. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press.
Kirschner, B. (2015). Youth activism in an era of education inequality. New York, NY: New
York University Press.
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into Civil Rights teaching. Washington, DC: Teaching for Change.
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Morrell, E., & Duncan-Andrade, J. (2008). The art of critical pedagogy: Possibilities for moving from theory to practice in urban schools. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
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Treuer, D. (2019). The heartbeat of wounded knee: Native America from 1890 to the present.
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York, NY: HarperCollins.
Essay #4
COMMUNITY STORYTELLING
FOR RACIAL RECONCILIATION
Telling the Hard Stories That Can Lead
to Community Change
Susan M. Glisson
“We don’t know each other. And because we don’t know each other, we don’t trust each
other,” remarked Gwendolyn Riley, a local African American journalist after
joining a dozen other black and white residents in December 2007 to begin a
conversation on race relations. A retired local judge, who once ordered local
civil rights activists jailed in the 1960s, had asked me to facilitate the process.
I began that first session by asking the group to tell me the story of their community. Most of the conversation centered around racial tensions, especially in
local politics. The attendees described the town’s contentious history, including: the creation of the White Citizens’ Council, a group that resisted the 1954
Brown decision and other civil rights advances, and the first place that civil
rights activists called for “black power” during a 1966 march. By the end of
that conversation, there was consensus on two items: that these freighted racial
dynamics could not be changed because they were entrenched in and reinforced by local politics, but that this group was willing to meet again. My hope
was that the group had taken a first small step toward a process of reconciliation
leading toward social justice.
In the next session, I asked the group, now up to 25 participants, to sit in a
circle. I told them we would have a story circle that day, with guidelines that
two members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
had shared with me. The instructions were simple but profound: “Sit in a circle
because every voice is equally valued. Take three minutes to respond to a prompt with a
story. Stories have a beginning, a middle and an end—this was not an opportunity to
rant. If you don’t want to share, you can pass and you’ll be given an opportunity at the
end in case you changed your mind and want to share. If you have several stories, pick the
one that comes from the deepest place. No one else talks when one person is telling their
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story; there is time for ‘cross-talk’ after everyone has shared. And, most importantly, you
don’t have to agree with the story that someone shares, but you do have to respect their
right to tell their story.”
I asked the participants to tell a story about the first time they noticed race
as the “elephant in the room.” One black participant told of going to visit the
city’s famous swing bridge in the 1950s. It had been built in 1925 over the Yazoo
River and would pivot from a central pillar to allow steamboats to pass. But
in the 1950s, in disrepair and with dwindling riverboat traffic, the bridge had
become stuck in the open position. City officials decided to close it forever. Mr.
Ware described sitting on the south river bank watching as workers closed the
bridge. It was the main connection between the depressed, predominantly black
side of town and the wealthy white neighborhoods on Grand Avenue. Ware
knew little about the residents on the other side of town, noting the irony of
opening a bridge between the two sides of town that failed to bring its people
together.
Ware’s story prompted Anita Batman’s memory of that same day. As she
described to me later, “Bill and I were both children of nearly the same age. We both
grew up in Greenwood and never knew each other. The last time the Keesler Bridge was
opened . . . I rode my little green western flyer bike down to the west bank and sat under
the bridge there watching in awe as the mighty gears on the center column worked for the
last time, cranking the Bridge span open, parallel with the flow of the river.” Batman,
who is a local white doctor, recalled that, “Bill also went to see that beautiful Pratt
truss rotate and watch the dredge boat pass through. He watched from the South bank,
almost directly across from me. We were so near, living parallel lives, yet we did not become
friends until [the reconciliation group began more than fifty years later]. We felt that history deprived us of each other’s friendship.” After three more evenings of stories, the
group shifted from a belief that nothing could change in Greenwood to trusting that some positive change could occur.
As powerful as those early meetings were, I consider that effort to have been
a failure. There are several reasons, but I believe the most important missing
component was how to use stories to move from awareness and understanding
of division and complex inequitable history to purposeful action; in short, how
to use stories to change power dynamics in order to challenge the status quo
and seek equity. When I encountered Lee Anne Bell’s work, I began to see how
we could use stories to secure justice.
There are several crucial ingredients in Storytelling for Social Justice that catalyzed substantial shifts in how I now approach community building and social
justice work. We begin as before, by asking a group to share the story of their
community. We now use these “stock” stories as a baseline in order to evaluate what interventions need to be made to disrupt entrenched biased attitudes
and mindsets. Using the SNCC story circle exercise, we begin to lift up the
“hidden” stories of the community that unsettle the stock story and begin to
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educate the community about itself. And then, we seek out the resistance stories of the community as well as the emerging/transforming stories of possible
change. Before I had the tools of Bell’s work, some of our community work
became stuck in a feedback loop. We were all learning new things about each
other but we weren’t accessing the stories that enabled us to make change; we
especially didn’t lift up the stories of inequitable systems. Now we have the
moral arc of the storytelling process: “What is our community’s truth? And
who before us has shown us how change can happen?”
Now we describe our community building process in three phases. In phase
one, we focus on dominant narratives and the hidden stories that compose a
community’s experience with race relations. In phase two, we begin to connect
those individual stories to the complex and inequitable systems that continue to
maintain a hierarchy of human value. We teach the participants how to research
their community’s history, and how to teach what they learn to each other. We
have participants read the section in Bell’s book that describes the four types of
stories and ask them to begin to apply the analysis to what they’ve been learning.
After that discussion, we challenge their understanding of how social change
happens by disrupting the “savior narrative” of the civil rights movement. Phase
three begins by having participants research and share the emerging/transforming
stories that offer a way forward to social justice. This context allows the community
to craft programs and policies that address inequity.
The pivot in phase two is an exercise I created about the Montgomery Bus
Boycott. I begin by asking the group to tell the stock story of the boycott. The
general understanding can usually be encapsulated as: “Rosa sat down, Martin
stood up, and now everyone is free.” Then I ask if the participants know the
accurate story. A few may know some details and I lift those up. Then I share
the accurate story, including Claudette Colvin and E.D. Nixon, the leadership
of the Women’s Political Caucus, and Vernon Johns at Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church before Martin King arrived. I explain how, under a segregated system
and long before cell phones and emails, the black community of Montgomery,
40,000 strong, organized a successful one-day boycott within four days of Ms.
Parks’ arrest and then maintained it for 13 months. Then, on large newsprint, I
write on one side “Myth/Stock Story” and on the other side “Reality/Concealed
Story” and draw a line between the two. I ask the participants to tell me how
social change happens if the myth is true. Then I ask how social change happens
if the reality is true. I capture the characteristics on the newsprint.
We then discuss who benefits from continuing to teach the mythic version
and which model seems more accessible. We link the fairy-tale story to the current power structure and maintenance of the status quo. I ask the participants
to ponder what other myths of history they may have been told. And finally,
I ask them, with the knowledge of the accurate story, how might they adjust
how they seek positive social change? The participants always awaken to the
power of story and to a new understanding of how different stories manifest in
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different outcomes. And they begin to see their own power to change inequitable systems.
In 2016, my partner and I piloted a trust-building session on public safety
between law enforcement and over-policed communities in Birmingham, Alabama. We used our scaffolded approach, beginning in the first week with exercises
that enabled the members of the group to get to know each other outside of their
prescribed roles. On the basis of that initial trust, we took the group to Montgomery, Alabama, for a tour of the Equal Justice Initiative and to conduct some
sessions away from the comfort zone of their home turf. By that point in the arc of
the three-week session, members of the group had formed trusting relationships,
enough to create some hope for future interactions and to ask how to make change
sustainable when change seems so hard. We used our Montgomery exercise above
to unsettle their ideas about social change in order to help the group see that they
themselves had the power to begin the change they sought.
In the last week of our session, they decided to create a permanent group,
named Birmingham Equally United, which has continued to meet weekly. As
their relationships and trust deepened, their stereotypes about each other fell
away. To continue their work, the group decided to create a new training session together for police cadets. They wanted to ensure that new recruits understood the ways that law enforcement has prevented civil rights progress, so that
as they go out into communities, they can help reset relationships freighted
by resentments over past police behavior. They invited us to help provide that
training and in November 2018 we used the power of stories to help twentythree new cadets build enough trust so that they could then hear the difficult
history of the Birmingham Police Department that they would inherit. This
new initiative is one of the emerging and transforming stories that provide
hope for mitigating fraught interactions between the police and they communities they are to serve. As one white officer shared at the end of the training,
“Originally, I could not see or understand why there is/was so much enmity between
Black people and the police or white people. Now I understand.”
Bell’s work highlights not only the power of story but also the effects of
the kinds of stories that we tell. As a participant in a storytelling project for
black mothers describes it, “What we’re told and what we believe about people and
places determine how we treat them—and those stories become woven into how we think
and how we act . . . They determine how we vote and how we engage in the systems
to which we are all bound—systems like democracy.” She goes on to say that stories
“determine who matters, and who is valued and invested in—figuratively and literally”
(Zenobia Jeffries Warfield, “Black Mothers Change the Narrative By Telling
Their Stories,” YES! Magazine, January 9, 2019). Bell’s analysis of stories has
enabled my colleagues and me to assist communities in studying the stories
they tell and those they hide, in order to find narratives of hope and transformation, and to create new stories that include everyone and generate a more
just world.
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Susan M. Glisson
Dr. Susan M. Glisson is co-founder and partner of Sustainable Equity,
LLC, a minority and woman-owned consulting firm based in Mississippi. She was the founding executive director of the William Winter
Institute for Racial Reconciliation, an internationally-recognized nonprofit. Informed by scholarship, data and over thirty years of practicebased evidence in community building, advocacy and public policy, her
firm offers a learning journey to organizations seeking to make the greatest collective impact on creating inclusive, trusting and humane work
and social environments.
5
EMERGING/TRANSFORMING
STORIES
Challenging Racism in Everyday Life
Make up a story. Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being
created.
(Toni Morrison, 1993, Nobel Lecture)
Emerging/transforming stories are the fourth story type in the Storytelling
Project Model. These are new stories we construct to challenge stock stories,
build on and amplify concealed and resistance stories, and take up the mantle of
antiracism and social justice work through generating new stories that catalyze
contemporary action against racism. Such stories enact continuing critique and
resistance to stock stories, subvert taken-for-granted racial patterns and enable
imagination of new possibilities for inclusive human community. Building
on concealed and resistance stories, we envision alternatives to the status quo
and generate strategies to realize our visions for racial equality in classrooms,
schools and communities. Emerging/transforming stories arise from such questions as: What kinds of communities based on justice can we imagine and then
work to make real? What kinds of stories can support our ability to speak out
and act when we see institutional and interpersonal racism in action?
The term emerging connotes both the developing, embryonic nature of new
stories and the historical and analytical roots that prepare the ground for their
manifestation. Emerging, as in something newly or recently independent, also
ref lects our hope that the preceding story types have paved the way for developing the necessary critical knowledge, agency and self-determination to construct stories that counter the colonizing stock stories of the status quo. The
term transforming describes the conversion of one form of energy into another
to catalyze change. Combining these two terms— emerging/transforming —
underscores that such stories arise from thoughtful analysis and careful study
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of history and culture, in contrast to ahistorical, individualistic stories that
ignore the roots of racism and its systematic continuation into the present.
Emerging/transforming also signifies the conversion of passivity into energetic
force and the capacity to act in alignment with one’s dreams toward a better
future. These stories are always in the process of becoming as each generation
builds on and adds to common struggles for social justice.
A caution: In the diagram of the Storytelling Project Model (see Figure 1.1),
emerging/transforming stories point toward action/change as well as back
toward stock stories, cautioning us to be aware of their capacity to transform as
well as calcify. This reminds us of the need to continually stay vigilant for new
manifestations of racism and other forms of injustice, and open to concealed
and resistance stories we may not yet have considered. We realize this necessity,
for example, in the evolution of understanding racism as we take up and learn
from different groups whose stories may not initially have been considered in
the analysis. Looking at racism (and other forms of oppression) from the perspective of Native Americans or Latinx people or Asian Americans or women
or LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) people raises different, previously unnamed or invisible, issues to consider. Thus the model highlights the
contingent and evolving nature of our understanding of oppression and the
need to work in coalition with others to develop the kind of “multi-perspectival”
( Romney, 2005) understanding and awareness required to unearth and challenge
entrenched patterns that reproduce racism in new forms.
In this chapter, I focus on the emerging/transforming stories of young teachers who desire to be social justice educators who work with their students to enact
more democratic and inclusive educational practices inside their schools and outside in their communities. Such teachers can be advocates for and allies with youth
in the ways described in the preceding chapter. I argue that public schools, with
all their problems, are an important site for struggle and demonstrate how I use
the Storytelling Model in a seminar for pre-service teachers, returning to themes
in earlier chapters to show how learning about stock and concealed stories prepares them for imagining and enacting emerging/transforming stories in their
curriculum and teaching. Readers who operate in different fields can apply these
lessons to their own experiences and developing consciousness of racism and its
impacts in the arenas where they work and live.
Why Focus on Schools as Sites for Emerging/
Transforming Stories?
Why focus on schools when we know the powerful role they play in reinforcing the status quo, reproducing race and class inequalities and other forms of
injustice? Despite espousing principles of equality, democracy and opportunity,
schools have historically failed to address the very real barriers to these ideals.
“From colonial times to today, educators have preached equality of opportunity and good citizenship, while engaging in acts of religious intolerance, racial
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segregation, cultural genocide and discrimination against immigrants and nonwhites” (Spring, 2004, p. 3).
Despite this sordid history, schools are also sites where practices of intolerance and discrimination can be interrupted and the attitudes that support them
changed. As long as we have a universal public education system, there is the,
as yet to be realized, potential to create public spaces where people can encounter each other across social groups and together develop the skills, capacities
and commitments needed to participate in the creation and maintenance of an
inclusive democratic society. Public schools hold out the possibility of becoming
places where we live out multiracial democracy through grappling across our
different locations with the patterns and practices that reinforce systemic racism
and other forms of injustice (Hill Collins & Simmons College, 2009; Oakes,
2018; Rogers & Orr, 2010). Public schools at their best have been such places.
This potential is currently jeopardized, however, by a national rhetoric that
is evermore focused on standardized testing, accountability (in the narrowest,
most utilitarian sense of the term), and individual advancement Ravitch, 2013).
Contemporary public education and reform are dominated by the goal
of individual social mobility and status attainment, which justifies public
schooling as a private good. . . . The prevailing reform climate emphasizes
students’ scores on high stakes standardized tests as near-exclusive indicators of school success. The emphasis on students’ market viability contributes to reducing democracy to an economic concept—one that too
often breeds selfishness, promotes a narrow conceptualization of social
responsibilities of citizenship, and undermines a vision of community.
(Fuhrman & Lazerson, 2005, pp. 132–133)
Reclaiming and working to enact the vision of public education as an incubator for democracy in our diverse society is urgent and compelling (Kahne &
Westheimer, 2003). Unfortunately, our teaching force is not currently prepared
for this challenge. For one, the student population is more racially, ethnically
and linguistically diverse every day while the teaching population remains over
80 percent white, middle class, female and English monolingual ( King, McIntosh, & Bell-Elwanger, 2016). This almost apartheid-like contrast between the
teaching force and student bodies creates a serious barrier to the potential realization of democratic school spaces that can prepare a radically diverse student
population to be agents and citizens of a multiracial democracy. Recruiting
many more teachers of color, especially teachers who come from traditionally underserved communities, is critical to this project ( Villegas & Irvine,
2010). Equally critical is making sure that the white/Anglo/non-indigenous
majority of current prospective teachers are knowledgeable about educational
inequality and systemic racism. Teachers from all racial groups need to learn
how to analyze and challenge racism (as well as classism and other isms) as
these affect school practices and procedures that differentially impact poor
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children, children of color, and children from diverse linguistic and cultural
communities.
Teachers of color, while less likely than white peers to deny the existence
of racism or cling to naïve color-blindness, can benefit from opportunities to
discuss and analyze their own experiences with racism and learn antiracist strategies to address it in their schools and classrooms ( Bell, 2003; Ullucci & Battey,
2011). White teachers can gain from learning to identify and examine their
own socialization, the unearned advantages of white racial dominance, and
the conscious and tacit assumptions they hold about other racial groups and the
social order ( Landsman & Lewis, 2011). All teachers need to develop skills for
detecting bias in classrooms and curriculum, analyzing and confronting racism
in school patterns and practices, and helping students become future citizens
prepared to enact fairness and justice in a multiracial democracy.
Using the Storytelling Project Model to Prepare Educators
The Storytelling Project Model provides one way for educators to explore
both the overt and implicit assumptions they hold about race and racism and
to develop strategies to teach knowledgably, conscientiously and ethically in
communities they often enter as privileged outsiders. The model asks aspiring
teachers who are white and/or middle class to question beliefs that they occupy
race and class neutral social positions. It exposes them to how racism operates
in the broader society and in the schools they will enter as teachers, and gain
historical and cultural knowledge to interrogate racism critically so as to teach
toward a vision of racial justice.
For several semesters, I used the Storytelling Project Model and story types
to frame a seminar for undergraduate student teachers (Bell & Roberts, 2010).
I structured the syllabus, readings and course sessions using the four story types,
beginning with an exploration of what it means to build a counter-storytelling
community where race and racism can be productively explored in a racially
diverse group. Seminar students used the story types as a set of lenses to examine and problematize their own socialization and the stock story assumptions
they hold about student and community assets in the communities they enter
as teachers, the sources of problems facing urban schools, their role as teachers,
and the effects of racism on the institution of school. They also used the Storytelling Model and story types to think about and plan social-justice-oriented
curriculum appropriate to their grade level/subject by using the story types
implicitly to organize and plan curriculum, and/or explicitly teaching the story
types directly to their students.
Problematizing Storytelling
In order to think about how to create counter-storytelling community in their
own classrooms, we began by reading authors who problematize storytelling
Emerging/Transforming Stories
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and the roles of both listener and teller. For example, we read an article that
contrasts storytelling in three different groups of learners (Sarris, 1990). In the
first example, Sarris describes his reading of a Pomo Indian tale to a classroom
of predominantly white, non-Indigenous students and notices how, semester
after semester, what they remember and leave out of the story is shaped by the
cultural lenses and experiences they bring as listeners. In the second scenario,
Sarris describes a classroom of Native American students, where the issue is not
understanding stories they all know and share but believing that their (concealed) stories matter in alien and alienating school contexts, and coming to
believe that they can talk back (resistance stories) to the dominant story told in
the mainstream curriculum. In a third example, Sarris discusses a diverse class
of students of color who share no single, cultural story but through juxtaposing
their varied stories, develop a shared understanding of and shape a collective
response to a system that dominates them all (emerging/transforming stories).
After discussing this essay, one of my students wrote about her realization that
all stories are partial and political and that recognizing this can actually help her
students develop as critical thinkers:
There is no space for a “neutral” story, as stories by their very nature are full of
perspective and personal experience, which makes them all the richer as models for
learning. Too often I feel that curricula attempt to erase their inescapable political
foundations and biases, instead of using these explicitly to encourage students to
critically analyze and grow as thinkers.
The Sarris piece is powerful because it destabilizes notions of a universal
perspective and helps student teachers see the power of racial positionality to
shape perceptions, experiences and understanding of the world. We followed
this with a close reading1 of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech
(Morrison, 1993), in which she tells and retells a story from multiple perspectives, further opening up questions of positionality and power in stories we tell
and further destabilizing notions of a single “true” or “correct” story. A Ted
Talk by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie beautifully illustrates the danger
of a single story (www.tedtalk.com).
In our seminar we also looked critically at the notion of empathy to consider
whether those who are outside of an experience, particularly within hierarchical relations, can step into the shoes of an “other” with any kind of validity. We
read excerpts from Feeling Power ( Boler, 1999) in which the author illustrates
how patterns of thinking that deny power relations actually perpetuate injustice and reinforce self-interested positions passing as neutral. “Passive empathy,” Boler argues, “produces no action toward justice but situates the powerful
Western eye/I as the judging subject, never called upon to cast her gaze at
her own ref lection” (p. 159). Such empathy, she argues, leads to a “habituated
numbness” that shields us from exposure and vulnerability that might lead to
shared action to change the status quo. She notes, “These ‘others’ whose lives
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we imagine don’t want empathy, they want justice. . . . What is at stake is not
only the ability to empathize with the very distant other, but to recognize
oneself as implicated in the social forces that create the climate of obstacles that
other must confront” (p. 166).
These readings provide a framework for thinking about racial positionality
and our responsibility (response-ability) to systems of oppression and lead to
an examination of stock stories of color-blindness. We read an essay from Seeing a Color-Blind Future, by critical race legal theorist Patricia Williams (1998)
in which she explores the notion of color-blindness through a story about her
black child’s experience with his “color-blind” white teachers, whose uncritical embrace of color-blindness literally blinds them to the assaults he experiences on the playground at the hands of his white classmates. This essay is
invariably revealing for students because it so clearly illustrates why assertions
of color-blindness, especially by teachers, are so problematic. The response of a
white student teacher illustrates the potency of these readings for prying open
awareness about racial positionality and the dynamics of power and privilege:
The truth is that there is no such thing as an un-racialized situation. . . . The
concealed story is that the color-blind mentality is detrimental to the goal of tolerance and equity . . . [To] teach a child through your actions and words that their
race doesn’t matter is to belittle that child’s very being, and the identity they have
created for themselves up to this point. In addition, ignoring any influence of race
prevents you as a teacher from identifying and challenging institutionalized racism.
Course readings open up the possibility for talking about race and racism
with the recognition that white people are also racially positioned and inescapably implicated in the systems they wish to interrogate. The readings lay
the groundwork for discussing ways to create counter-storytelling community in which we are attentive to racial and other positionalities and strive to
stay conscious of the hegemonic assumptions that often shape discourse. We
develop guidelines both to construct our community in the seminar and to
help students think about how they will create in their own classrooms the type
of community where the burden of risk does not fall unfairly on students of
color and where stretching beyond one’s “comfort zone” to engage in counterstorytelling becomes possible. A student notes:
My learning edge is pushing myself to be comfortable with all these discussions that
make me uncomfortable, so that I can continually reevaluate my own racialized
position with respect to that of my students. . . . If I’m comfortable, change can’t
happen.
This discussion takes place just as student teachers are themselves entering
a new elementary or high school placement, so creating community and a
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constructive classroom learning environment are very present in their minds.
They become sensitized to noticing and looking at their own racial location,
socialization and experiences in relation to that of their students and begin to
note ways that normative classroom discourse privileges and supports some
students while overlooking and silencing others. They use the concepts of stock
and concealed stories to consider whose stories and experiences are taken for
granted and validated in curriculum and classroom practices and whose stories
are hidden or ignored. This connection is made by a Korean American student
teacher as she unearths and then compares her own early schooling experiences
with that of a young girl in her classroom:
I . . . remember that as a child I would yearn to see an Asian in my texts . . . a
longing to belong. In the classroom where I am student teaching, the majority of the
texts have protagonists who are white . . . On one of my first days [student teaching in 2nd grade], several girls asked if I was a sister to one of the Asian students
in the class because, they said, “Your eyes look the same.” The girl, herself, then
proceeded to ask me if I was the same ethnicity as she and when I told her no [she
was Chinese and I am Korean], she seemed disheartened. I felt she was looking to
find something in me that is missing in the school . . . This made me think about
how important it is to be validated in the curriculum.
Having established norms for recognizing racial positionality and talking
openly about race, we move to a discussion of stock and concealed stories about
race, racism, teaching and learning in urban schools. Throughout the seminar,
student teachers use the story types to examine their own racialized narratives
and locations, and to listen and learn from the stories of their students, families
and communities in order to critique stock stories about color-blindness and
meritocracy. Through reading, observations in schools, analysis of popular culture, and autobiographical ref lection, we look at stock stories about working
class and youth of color in urban schools and communities. We contrast stock
stories about what they “need” evidenced in the grossly inadequate material
and human resources dedicated to their education, compared to those provided
to middle-class, white, suburban youth. One student teacher ref lects on the
power dynamics of language, cultural capital and agency.
Students who enter school speaking Spanish [as their first language], enter because
succeeding in the United States demands a working knowledge of English (and
often fluency). Attendance is all but obligatory. The students who enter school
speaking English as their first language do so because they have made a decision to
learn a second language. They have a choice. From the get go, the native Spanish
speakers have no control over where they go, whereas the English-dominant students have agency and power in their world . . . Working in a dual-language classroom in a country in which English is strongly reinforced as the “official” language,
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this message will always exist externally. All the more reason for what goes on in
the classroom to be actively antiracist, anti-oppression, and pro-social justice.
As students read articles and books that portray the concealed stories, history
and struggles of communities of color to achieve a decent education for their
children (Michie, 1999; Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2003; Valenzuela, 1999), they
write about their own experiences of schooling and examine these alongside
the readings and observations in their student teaching placements. For example, they read Theresa Perry’s essay about the long history of struggle by black
parents and communities against overwhelming odds to gain a decent education for their children ( Perry, 2003). This concealed story is contrasted with the
stock story, all too prevalent among teachers in urban schools, that defines the
problem as parents who “don’t care” about their kids’ education.
This positioning of stock stories alongside concealed and resistance stories
that challenge and talk back to them means that the “normative” story is up for
question and analysis. White and middle-class students begin to see the racialized nature of their previously assumed neutral position.
I realized I had fallen into the stock story that I was not racist, that this was not
my problem. I saw racism as something that I could help other people solve so
they would not be discriminated against. I also hadn’t understood until then how
race (specifically) and privilege (generally) affected my relationships with people on
individual levels, and the kind of difficult community building that is needed to lay
these issues out on the table instead of only pretending they operated on some macro
level, floating above our daily interactions.
The juxtaposition of stock and concealed stories also creates a more welcoming
space for students of color in the seminar to name, explore and recognize the
validity of their racialized experiences and perspectives and be relieved of the
pressure to go along with normative colorblind discourse.
I have experienced being educated in a wealthy school and being educated in a
not so wealthy school. For a few years I was in a predominantly white elementary
school and I remember being in a classroom with about twenty other students.
All the teachers were white and the school had state-of-the-art facilities but what
I remember most was how I was isolated (along with the rest of the minorities). I
remember knowing that I wasn’t like the rest of the kids. During recess, most of
the minorities would play together. Although I was getting a great education, I was
not socially accepted.
Students look at how stories about urban schooling are constructed to benefit some groups and disadvantage others and examine how such stories shape
school policies, curriculum choices, grouping practices, relations with parents,
and other issues. They develop the habit of interrogating normative practices
Emerging/Transforming Stories
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by continually asking, “In whose interest does this particular story, practice,
assumption operate? What concealed stories challenge or talk back to it?”
Once I had begun to think about how power and privilege operate on personal,
individual levels and as part of larger systemic machinations, it became a constant
lens for me to use in analyzing my classroom and myself. I worried about the ways
that I might be setting expectations at different levels, how my teaching might be
missing or connecting with certain students, what it meant for me to be a white
teacher in a classroom of students of color teaching and learning about racism, how
the curriculum was or was not built off of their experiences, cultures, and interests, and a host of other concerns. These thoughts and conversations helped me to
develop an entire way of thinking and looking at the world beyond the classroom
and pushed my commitment to social justice in all areas of my life.
Creating Curriculum
Student teachers study resistance stories both to sharpen their own analytic skills
and potential tools for teaching against the grain and to find curriculum materials they can use in their classrooms to introduce their own students to resistance
stories. As their critique develops, student teachers search for alternative stories
and examples to inspire and guide them in their struggle to teach in ways that
work for the interests of their students and against an unjust status quo. They use
the story types to design lessons and emphasize the value of teaching resistance
stories to help young people become more critical thinkers who can be proactive
in solving problems they name and analyze. One student teacher, after reading
Kohl’s essay on the Rosa Parks myth ( Kohl, 2004), writes:
As an educator, it is important to show students this system so that they are aware
of what they’re up against but also so that they know they are not inherently at
fault and can resist. Often what is left out is just as important as what is said.
For example . . . much of what is left out from the Rosa Parks account speaks
to the many levels in which [African American] culture is denigrated and history
sugarcoated. The account leaves out details that could better encourage resistance
to racism and also help to develop an empowering image of African Americans as
resistors and activists within their community.
Building on resistance stories, student teachers then begin to generate emerging/
transforming stories in which they imagine alternative images of what racial
equality would look like in their classrooms and schools and then develop strategies to work toward the changes they envision.
I believe that “truth” stories [those that counter stock stories], whether they hear/
see one from someone such as a teacher or peer or whether they experience them for
themselves, give students a chance to see and share the change and justice we want
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for the world, as well as to practice being agents themselves. “Acting in solidarity with others is a learned habit,” and being able to participate in monologues or
role-playing gives students their own voices and empowers them to see and share
alternatives to the oppression they and others experience.
Student teachers write a concluding story paper in which they review the
four story types to frame what they have learned during the semester and outline plans for their continuing development as antiracist educators.
As I approach the end of my student teaching semester, I have come to realize that
I have a voice and a story. . . . Attending NYC public schools, it seemed to be that
students of color were always left to fight for themselves and never had anyone truly
fighting for them or with them. . . . This experience gives me the courage to struggle
for social justice and never give in to the stock stories about our students. A colleague
said that [cooperating teacher] got too worked up over incidents that occur in the
school and she should pick and choose her battles. What I came to understand was
that it was all about the long-term battle; that she struggled to amplify her voice so
that everyone could hear it. She taught me, “Always make sure someone listens.”
Using the story types as a framework and/or as content, student teachers
design curriculum units in their respective subjects that use the story types as a
frame to help their students generate emerging/transforming stories. For example, some student teachers design history units in which they introduce story
types as analytic frames to help their students read classroom texts critically.
They identify stock and concealed stories in history and search for historical
evidence of resistance to racism, then use this information as a basis for considering conditions in their schools and communities, and ultimately to envision
and act toward what they would like their schools and communities to become.
A student teacher preparing to teach high school science designs a chemistry
unit that looks at DNA to debunk the notion of racial categories and to help her
students understand the social construction of race. They use this knowledge
to plan an assembly for the school where they talk about racial stereotypes and
the dynamics that divide students along racial lines. Another student teacher
creates a middle school literature unit using concealed and resistance stories to
discuss racism in novels and poetry, drawing as well on contemporary youth
hip-hop and spoken word. Students create their own spoken word poetry to
comment on conditions they face as young people of color and perform their
work at a community coffee shop.
Teaching resistance and counter-stories is much more than just asking higher order
questions, though it is teaching students to examine and question their surroundings. It’s not watering down what you teach to token holidays but rather addressing
the realities of the world and all of the difficult issues in it, such as racism, sexism,
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poverty and violence and giving students the ability to actively make changes
through social action projects. It’s helping them realize that the society in which
they live is not set in stone but rather shaped by the policies and people in it and
that they have the power to effect change. Resistance and counter-stories can provide powerful examples of how this has happened in the past and serve as a model
for what can be done now.
Teachers make course content relevant and applicable to students’ lives by
actively teaching the skills of organizing, building coalitions, thinking about
how to use power constructively and effectively to generate a compelling vision
and mobilize action. The emerging/transforming stories students and their
teachers generate catalyze a sense of possibility and help students develop confidence and the ability to act.
Conclusion
The Storytelling Project Model has proven to be effective at moving student
teachers to consider the problems of color-blindness, understand racism and
develop a critical pedagogy for creating justice-focused curricular and classroom practices. Their ideas and examples are inspiring. Yet, how far they get
in the development of their analysis is very much shaped by where they begin.
Many students simply do not yet have enough knowledge or models to apply
a consistent critique. Without further support and learning, expanding their
knowledge and awareness of racism and its historical and contemporary operations, continuing to develop a critical stance will be difficult. The following
testimonies from two student teachers illustrate that this is a life-long process
requiring ongoing commitment and support.
I don’t think that this will just happen one day, but rather will be a life-long process
as a teacher. To be honest, it is very overwhelming to think of how much I don’t
know and how much I have to learn. However, reading about teachers who were
able to effect change in their classrooms, I am inspired and motivated . . . because
I see that it is possible.
I have come to see learning to teach [ for social justice] in the same light as learning a
language. Even people who work diligently to master a language do not become fluent overnight. Or even over a week, or a month, or a year. Fluency is not a tangible
internal snap, it is a gradual and time consuming realization that understanding a
language requires intimacies and nuances that take a lifetime to generate.
Although students are inspired in the context of the seminar, it is not possible in one semester to build the necessary awareness and knowledge to resist
the constant recruitment back into the status quo that they will encounter
in their lives and schools after graduation. Even students who are the most
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knowledgeable, activist and committed and who have sustaining systems of
support, often encounter a school culture that makes it exceedingly difficult to
enact antiracist curriculum and teaching practices. Yet, without teachers who
have a vision of what socially just teaching can be, there is little hope that we
can create the kinds of classrooms and schools where all children see themselves
as central to the curriculum and agents of their own lives. Teachers who create
or join communities of support are more able to withstand the pressures of the
status quo and think together creatively about curriculum, teaching practices
and working with communities to support their vision for just and democratic
schools.2
The Storytelling Project Model offers a compelling framework that new
teachers, and others who work against racism, can use to actively critique the
stock stories that reinforce inequality and racism, seek out concealed and resistance stories about the history, struggles, strengths and aspirations of the diverse
groups in our society, and use this knowledge to develop emerging/transforming
stories that enact and sustain more inclusive and just educational and social
practices. As a practical conceptual tool, it is our hope that the model is one that
can be built on and added to over the long haul, operating as a caution against
smug assumptions of all-knowing truth and as a reminder of what is possible
when we listen to the multiple stories available for expanding our understanding as we work with others toward a multiracial democratic vision.
Notes
1. Thea Abu El-Haj, a member of the creative team, introduced us to this speech and
the close reading process.
2. Several valuable networks of support for teachers do exist: for example, NYCORE—
New York Collective of Radical Teachers (www.nycore.org ), Educators for Social
Justice (www.educatorsforsocialjustice.org)—, Rethinking Schools (www.rethinking
schools.org) and Teaching Tolerance (www.tolerance.org), to name a few. The Barnard Education Program has developed a New Teacher Network for this purpose
that is linked to teacher support networks in Boston and Philadelphia created by
CETE—Consortium for Excellence in Teacher Education.
References
Adichie, C. N. (2009, July). The danger of a single story. Retrieved from https://www.ted.
com/talks/chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.
Bell, L. A. (2003). Sincere fictions: The challenges of preparing White teachers for
diverse classrooms. Equity and Excellence in Education, 35(3), 236–245.
Bell, L. A., & Roberts, R. A. (2010). The storytelling project model: A theoretical
framework for a critical examination of racism through the arts. Teachers College Record,
112(9). Retrieved from www.tcrecord.org.
Boler, M. (1999). Feeling power: Emotions and education. New York, NY: Routledge.
Fuhrman, S., & Lazerson, M. (Eds.) (2005). The public schools. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Emerging/Transforming Stories
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Hill Collins, P., & Simmons College (Boston, MA) (2009). Another kind of public education: Race, schools, the media, and democratic possibilities. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Kahne, J., & Westheimer, J. (2003). Teaching democracy: What schools need to do. The
Phi Delta Kappan, 85(1), 34–66.
King, J., McIntosh, A., & Bell-Elwanger, J. (2016, July). The state of racial diversity in
the educator workforce. U.S. Department of Education, Educator Workforce Policy and
Program Studies Service, Office of Planning, Evaluation and Policy Development (pp. 1–42).
Kohl, H. (2004). The politics of children’s literature: What’s wrong with the Rosa Parks
myth? In D. Menkart, A. D. Murray, & J. L. Roem (Eds.), Putting the movement back
into Civil Rights teaching. Washington, DC: Teaching for Change.
Landsman, J., & Lewis, C. (2011). White teachers, diverse classrooms: Creating inclusive
schools, building on student diversity, and providing true educational equity. Herndon, VA:
Stylus Publishing.
Michie, G. (1999). Holler if you hear me: The education of a teacher and his students. New
York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Morrison, T. (1993). Nobel lecture, December 7, 1993. Nobel Foundation. Retrieved July 1,
2009 from http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrisonlecture.
html
Oakes, J. (2018). 2016 AERA presidential address public scholarship: Education research
for a diverse democracy. Educational Researcher, 47(2), 91–104.
Perry, T. (2003). Freedom for literacy and literacy for freedom: The African-American
philosophy of education. In T. Perry, C. Steele, & A. Hiliard (Eds.), Young, gifted and
black: Promoting high achievement among African American students (pp. 11–51). Boston,
MA: Beacon Press.
Perry, T., Steele, C., & Hilliard, A. (2003). Young, gifted and black: Promoting high achievement among African American students. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Ravitch, D. (2013). Reign of error: The hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to
America’s public schools. New York, NY: Knopf.
Rogers, J., & Orr, M. (2010). Public engagement for public education: Joining forces to revitalize
democracy and equalize schools. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press.
Romney, P. (2005). The art of dialogue. In P. Korza, B. S. Bacon, & A. Assaf (Eds.),
Civic dialogue, arts and culture: Findings from animating democracy (pp. 57–79). Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts.
Sarris, G. (1990). Storytelling in the classroom: Crossing vexed chasms. College English,
52(2), 169–184.
Spring, J. (2004). Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: A brief history of dominated
cultures in the United States. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill.
Ullucci, K., & Battey, D. (2011). Exposing color blindness/grounding color consciousness: Challenges for teacher education. Urban Education, 46(6), 1195–1225.
Valenzuela, A. (1999). Subtractive schooling: U.S. Mexican youth and the politics of caring.
New York, NY: SUNY Press.
Villegas, A., & Irvine, J. (2010). Diversifying the teaching force: An examination of
major arguments. The Urban Review, 42(3), 175–192.
Williams, P. J. (1998). Seeing a color-blind future: The paradox of race. New York, NY:
Noonday Press.
Essay #5
READING THE WORLD IN AND
BEYOND THE CLASSROOM
Vanessa D’Egidio
Reading words, and writing them, must come from the dynamic movement of
reading the world. . . . The basic question in school is how not to separate reading the word and reading the world, reading the text and reading the context.
—Paulo Freire1
Educator Paulo Freire connects literacy to students’ lived experiences, emphasizing how schools can counter oppression by engaging students in reading the
written word and the world around them. Including the realities, stories, and
communities of students in their schooling is critical work. As a middle school
social studies teacher committed to social justice education, I hold Freire’s
words close. My work in and beyond the classroom is grounded in the belief
that education can transform, empower, humanize, and liberate.
While taking courses in the Education Program at Barnard College, I was
offered the exciting opportunity to join The Storytelling Project team as a student researcher. This experience radically changed the course of my life and
journey as an educator. Along with the other student researchers, I facilitated
focus groups with high school students in the Bronx around their conceptions of
and experiences with race and racism. I also observed lessons from The Storytelling Project in action. I felt awe as I learned more about the model and what it
could mean for the teachers and students involved in exploring race and racism
through storytelling and the arts. On multiple occasions, I remember sharing
with the team how I wished I could have had access as a youth to a curriculum
challenging systemic racism and centering the stories and experiences of people
in marginalized communities through creative, critical analysis of history and
current social issues. As a White-presenting Latinx student who grew up in a
Reading the World 103
predominantly White community, the process of teaching and learning about
race and racism was completely absent from my formal schooling. I was not
given the time, space, or support to explore, unpack, and heal from my experiences with anti-Latinx bias and microaggressions, despite these issues having
had a profound impact on my life and family throughout my K–12 years.
Currently in my eleventh year of teaching, I strive to build the spaces, curricula, and relationships that young people deserve and that I am confident
could have helped me thrive as a young person navigating white supremacy in
my school system and town. The storytelling model has provided me with a
framework that guides my decision-making and practices. Considering what
and whose stories are told in my classroom is essential in my work as a middle
school social studies teacher. On a daily basis, I recognize the tremendous power
and responsibility that come with engaging my students in learning about the
past and present, as well as how our knowledge of both can shape the future. As
an educator, I challenge my students to seek knowledge to better understand
themselves, one another, and their local and global communities. By engaging
the youth I work with in critically examining relationships between individuals and society, they can recognize deep connections between history, current
events, and pressing social issues.
Our yearlong, integrated curriculum is built around the theme “Self and
Society: The Courage to Act.” Through this curriculum, my students analyze
factors that inf luence individuals and groups to take social action around key
issues impacting their communities—from delving into inquiry around the
“unsung revolutionaries” fighting for abolition, women’s rights, and preservation of indigenous lands during the American Revolution to the role of women
in the Indian independence movement to the social context of athlete activism past and present. Tracing revolution and resistance across time and place,
students can pursue their interests, ask questions, make connections, and apply
critical thinking as they research and collaborate on creative projects. Each
year, I strive to build a community where my students can bring their whole
selves into the classroom, learning and growing together through mutual support, intellectual challenges, and care.
The storytelling framework has proven to be highly useful as I ref lect on
and design curricula. At the start of my first year as a middle school social studies teacher, I learned that I would teach a unit on West African history, with
an emphasis on Edo society and Benin City. Utilizing the storytelling model,
I got to work examining the curriculum that had been taught previously and
designing new possibilities for my approach. To launch our study, I engage
students in unpacking their biases and misconceptions related to the continent
of Africa, African history, and Black history and the diaspora. Through videos
and readings, students examine and challenge stock stories or dominant narratives, such as the idea that Black history only includes slavery and the Civil
Rights Movement, the notion that African history begins from the point of
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Vanessa D’Egidio
European colonization and imperialism, and the myth that Africa is a monolithic place solely defined by negatives and deficits. Students analyze concealed
and resistance stories as they learn about Edo society and culture and the fascinating features of Benin City. An investigation of the stolen art of the Kingdom
of Benin—the famous, intricate “Benin Bronzes”—looted by the British and
still housed in museums across the world—sparks interest in current efforts to
decolonize museums.
Before I made the jump to teaching middle school social studies, I taught
various elementary grades. The storytelling framework was just as important
for me then as it is now. In the introduction to this book, Dr. Bell notes how
the framework could not only be an approach to racial justice work but could
also be adapted to critically examine other social issues and systemic isms. As
a second grade teacher, I provided my students with opportunities to learn
more about race, racism, and racial justice, relating to their own experiences,
characters in read alouds, and community leaders. I also engaged my students
in exploring and challenging gender roles and stereotypes. Through a “gender
boxes” activity, as a class, we brainstormed what people associate with being
a girl or a boy, and every year, it was clear how much my seven- and eightyear-old students already knew about the topic. They were eager to share their
own personal stories related to harmful and limiting notions of gender and the
binary. Through a critical media literacy project, students looked at gender stereotypes in clothing and toy catalogues and advertisements, writing persuasive
letters to companies to express our experiences and views related to the bias
uncovered. We explored books and media about people challenging gender
stereotypes and roles. My students were actively participating in curriculum
shaped by the storytelling model, exploring stock, concealed, resistance, and
emerging/transforming stories related to gender.
The storytelling framework can be applicable to anti-bias and social
justice-centered curriculum design around a broad range of social identifiers
and social issues. In addition to teaching, I am a co-advisor of our school’s Gender
Sexuality Spectrum (GSS) club for middle school students. I also co-facilitate
our faculty and staff GSS. The student GSS club leads the GLSEN event, the
Day of Silence, in our school community to bring attention to the silencing
effects of anti-LGBTQIA+ bullying in schools. Through a whole school assembly, planned and hosted by the students, we break this silence, and different
community members, including teachers, students, and administrators, share
their personal stories related to their identities and experiences. Specifically,
many share narratives about being silenced or speaking up and out as members
of the LGBTQIA+ community. The stories shared have been powerful and
emotional. The assembly, centering the stories and voices of people in our
community, has impacted our school culture in deeply transformative, positive
ways. Students and teachers alike have expressed that hearing such powerful,
personal stories and witnessing school-wide support for the assembly have made
our community a braver, safer space to be “out” and their whole, true selves in.
Reading the World 105
As the final days of each school year approach, I ask my students to ref lect
on their learning, our curriculum, and my teaching. This feedback provides me
with invaluable insights leading to continuous self-ref lection and growth as an
educator. In an end of year survey, a former student wrote:
My biggest take-away would have to be that there is more to history than
what you may think. One of our biggest goals is to challenge and go
beyond the Master Narrative, and I think this is different than just studying something; it’s going deeper into history and learning more about
perspectives. I think this is very important for students because we are
the next generation. We have to make the change and learn more about
our past in ways others don’t. We need to inf luence the world to be better and learning history besides [dominant narratives] is very important
in making us learn more and understand more of what happened and
why. . . . As I view myself, I also realize I can make a difference in the
world as a young, student activist. Many kids and students have protested,
and they have made change. This gives me hope and courage that I can
be a part of the change and help the world even if it is just by sharing in
class; it matters.
Students and teachers have stories to learn and stories to tell. Our collective
liberation depends on this powerful exchange of voice, memory, care, knowledge, and action.
Vanessa D’Egidio has been a 7th grade social studies teacher in New
York City for the past eleven years. She is passionate about teaching and
engaging students in critical thinking, discussion, and action around
social justice issues both in and out of the classroom. As a curriculum
writer and advisor for Teaching Tolerance, she contributed to their K–12
literacy-based anti-bias curriculum, Perspectives for a Diverse America.
Vanessa was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Awards in Teaching Program grant to pursue educational research in the Netherlands. Next year
she will begin a new position as coordinator in the Diversity, Equity, and
Inclusion (DEI) department at Fieldston School.
Note
1. Freire, P. (1985). Reading the World and Reading the Word: An Interview with Paulo
Freire. Language Arts, 62(1), 15–21. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/41405241
Essay #6
CRITICAL LITERACY
Imagining Other Ways of Being
María S. Rivera Maulucci
Arts and Humanities in the City is an elective offered in the Barnard Education Program that focuses on critical literacy, digital storytelling, and ways
to use New York City as a resource for teaching the Arts (Dance, Theatre,
Music, and Visual Arts) and Humanities (Social Studies, English Language Arts
and Foreign and Classical Languages) in grades K–12. The course begins with
an exploration of what it means to be literate in the Arts and Humanities.
Students critically analyze the content and pedagogical methods in standards
documents to uncover: What counts as knowledge and skill in each discipline?
Who decides? How inclusive is the vision for literacy? How multicultural are
the content and methods? How can the documents be used to inform teaching
for critical literacy? Then, we explore the storytelling model.
Over the course of four weeks, the students read a chapter in Storytelling for
Social Justice and one to two other chapters or articles that provide cultural or artsbased contexts to apply the story types. Then, using digital storytelling, students
unpack their critical literacy stories to understand the experiences that undergird
their visions of teaching and learning. Finally, connecting this work to urban
classrooms, students complete 35 hours of fieldwork, which serves as a space for
exploring how critical and digital literacies might enhance teaching and learning
in schools.
Storytelling Week 1: Stock Stories
During this week, the students read the introduction and the first two chapters
of the book. In groups, students explore one of five topics: color blindness; cultural conf licts; the meritocracy myth; low expectations and deficit mind-sets;
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and context-neutral mindsets (Milner, 2010), and discuss the following questions: (1) What are the stock stories about your topic that operate in our society
and schools to justify and perpetuate an unequal status quo? (2) How do people
learn these stories? (3) Who benefits and who pays? (4) To what extent might
curriculum standards contribute to these stock stories? Each group presents the
results of their discussion, and then students ref lect individually about how our
discussion connects to ideas about critical literacy. One student wrote:
People in between identity boxes are often left out of the conversation (color blindness
functioning on a more micro level). As a mixed-race Filipino/white woman, I often
feel that my ethnic identity is left out of the larger category of “Asian,” which often
posits East Asianness or full Asianness as the most legitimate form of “Asian.”
Storytelling Week 2: Concealed Stories
For this week, students read the chapter on concealed stories, and Rosemarie A. Roberts’ (2011) article, “Facing and Transforming Hauntings of Race
Through the Arts.” In class, students ref lect on stereotypes they have experienced and how they might have embodied them. Examples that come up
are mostly negative, including, “dumb blond,” “model minority,” “perpetual
foreigner,” “angry black woman,” “Americans” (when travelling abroad), and
the “ghetto.” The students connect their discussion of stereotypes to how they
might function as “social ghosts” or “concealed stories” ( Roberts, 2011) by
creating attributional ambiguity, self-fulfilling prophecies, self-stereotyping,
or stereotype threat situations.
After the discussion, students create tableaus, motionless group models of
a scene, to represent a stereotype situation they have encountered ( Bell, Roberts, Irani, & Murphy, 2008). Each group presents their tableau, holding the
still picture for one minute. The other groups discuss what they think the
tableau represents while the presenters circulate to listen to the conversations
about their tableau, but do not contribute to the discussion. The presenters then
resume their tableau, and I tap each of the group members who then explain
their characters in the tableau, what they are doing, how they are feeling, and
how they are embodying the stereotype. Two groups are then paired to discuss
how the arts might be a vehicle for exposing social ghosts and concealed stories
and students then ref lect in their journals. One student wrote,
From the readings for today and our class discussion, I have become more committed
to revealing concealed stories and for searching for people who tell concealed stories
through the arts, rather than through academic means. I also think it is important
for my students to have the opportunity to reveal their own concealed stories or the
concealed stories of others through the arts.
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María S. Rivera Maulucci
Storytelling Weeks 3–4: Resistance Stories
For this week, the students connect the description of resistance stories and
youth resistance to, “Where Is the Action? Three Lenses to Analyze Social Justice Art Education,” by Marit Dewhurst (2011), and “Engaging Public Space:
Art Education Pedagogies for Social Justice,” by Paul Duncum (2011). At the
Museum of the City of New York students circulate through the exhibits and
photograph images that represent resistance stories, youth resistance stories,
social justice art, and social justice art in a public space. They select images to
represent each topic and ref lect on how the image they chose represents the
concept.
In the next class, students form inner and outer circles to share their examples,
rotating to a different set of partners for each topic. Resistance stories that students
identified included Tania Bruguera’s, “From Havana, Cuba” (2011) that sought
to challenge the stock story that immigrants are scary or harmful to the US; Kara
Walker’s piece “A Subtlety . . .” in the Domino Sugar Factory (2014) in which a
huge sugar figure of an African woman symbolizes resistance against European
colonization and ignorance of a history that fails to acknowledge the role of African
slaves. Youth resistance stories included their involvement in the first Earth Day
in 1970. One image depicts youth with brooms sweeping the streets. Another
youth resistance story was the “Freedom Diploma” (1964). In ref lecting on the
diploma, one student wrote, “Raising the consciousness of the school board to
the inequities faced by New York City Public School students of color must
also be coupled with an attempt to improve the consciousness and capacity for
change within the students themselves, which this diploma represents.” Finally,
social justice art in a public place included a mural by Keith Haring, titled “Crack
is Wack,” because it was designed to create public dialogue. In interpreting the
image, a student wrote, “The right side of the mural showing a monster eating
the man acts as a metaphor for the destructive effects of crack. However, the
man’s legs are also tied together which suggests that his death is inevitable.
Perhaps this is a metaphor for the government’s slow response, which causes the
addiction to be inevitable.”
Storytelling Week 5: Transforming Stories
This week students read another text, “Enacting Democracy: Using Forum
Theatre to Confront Bullying,” by Karen M. Gourd and Tina Y. Gourd (2011). The
authors engage in practitioner research using forum theater to address the topic
of bullying. In forum theater, developed by Augusto Boal (1985), actors present
a social issue and the audience can freeze the action at any time and try out
different solutions to the problem. The authors sought to reject stock stories
that adolescents do not comprehend the impacts of bullying, that the way to
stop bullying is to tell an adult, and that students are either bullies or bullied.
Critical Literacy
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In a fishbowl discussion format, my students discuss how the forum theater
approach allowed the eighth-grade students to challenge stock stories of the
bullies and the bullied, amplify their personal experiences by revealing concealed
stories, try out different forms of resistance stories, and develop more complex
understandings of approaches to address bullying situations.
My students especially noted the importance of students being able to replay
the different scenarios and see the benefits and f laws of different approaches,
such as enlisting additional friends or bystanders. Despite the transformative
value of the work—enabling students to respond more creatively and proactively to bullying—by insufficiently addressing race and class in the resistance
stories, my students believed that the educators missed an opportunity to provide the eighth graders with more nuanced frameworks to understand who is
marginalized and targeted as well as some of the social inequalities embedded
in the scenarios. For example, one student wrote that the forum showed “bullying as a story that concealed racism.” And many noted, the need to provide
students with “language . . . to discuss race and class.”
Across five weeks, my students carefully unpack the storytelling model in
juxtaposition with other texts that provide cultural and arts-based applications.
They explore the value of the model as an interpretive lens, but also the ways in
which inclusive or justice-oriented efforts might fall short of achieving emancipatory goals. They gain a critical framework to use as they develop digital
storytelling projects that explore their critical literacy stories and as they engage
in fieldwork where they design and implement field trip units or digital storytelling projects in K–12 classrooms. In their final ref lections on the last day of
class, students wrote:
When I hear critical literacy now, I think of teaching strategies that help break
down structures of oppression—both in and out of the classroom. I think of the
problem-posing model of education, giving students agency over what they want to
learn and how they want to learn it, integrating activism into the classroom, and
refusing content-neutral or deficit mindsets. I think of Bell’s Storytelling for Social
Justice Unit and how just telling our stories in a world where they’re pushed to the
margins is a radical act.
Now, when I hear critical literacy, I think about a balance between understanding
what the existing structures of inequality are and finding ways to actively question and resist them—so an understanding of your own social situation in these
structures and then an understanding of how to advocate for yourself and for others
within this. It’s also crucial that critical literacy is a perpetual process, and never a
place to arrive.
Today, I define critical literacy as being culturally aware and understanding of
people’s concealed stories and using the concealed stories to create an environment,
where everyone feels welcomed and secure. It is not only understanding subject
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María S. Rivera Maulucci
matter, but also understanding how various stories/backgrounds influence the decisions and perceptions that people hold towards the subject matter. It is an evergrowing process of learning.
I think my mind has shifted away from simply viewing critical literacy as a tool
to confront the imposing structures of a student’s life within society. . . . Students
should not just be taught to analyze the world around them and the civic structures
that oftentimes serve as oppressive forces in their lives. Instead, students need to
be taught to imagine other ways of being in this world. This imaginative way of
thinking is what’s most central to my understanding and vision for developing critical literacy in the classrooms I hope to establish.
Across these ref lections we see how students embrace a narrative view of the
world that requires the telling of one’s story and listening to the stories of
others. We also see how critical storytelling fosters individual and collective
growth, imagines a better future, and engages actions that build towards more
emancipatory, agentic, and activist learning experiences. Moreover, students
see the arts as a key vehicle for imagining, uncovering, excavating, and expressing their critical literacy stories.
María S. Rivera Maulucci is Professor of Education at Barnard College.
Her expertise in teacher education draws on sixteen years of experience
teaching at the elementary, secondary, and postsecondary levels. Her
interdisciplinary scholarship focuses on how teachers learn to teach for
social justice and the role of language, identity, and emotions in teacher
development.
References
Bell, L. A., Roberts, R. A., Irani, K., & Murphy, B. (2008). The storytelling project curriculum: Learning about race and racism through storytelling and the arts. Retrieved from www.
racialequitytools.org/resourcefiles/stp_curriculum.pdf.
Boal, A. (1985). Theatre of the oppressed. New York, NY: Theatre Communications Group.
Dewhurst, M. (2011). Where is the action? Three lenses to analyze social justice art
education. Equity & Excellence in Education, 44(3), 364–378.
Duncum, P. (2011). Engaging public space: Art education pedagogies for social justice.
Equity & Excellence in Education, 44(3), 348–363.
Gourd, K. M., & Gourd, T. Y. (2011). Enacting democracy: Using forum theatre to
confront bullying. Equity & Excellence in Education, 44(3), 403–419.
Milner, H. R. (2010). A diversity and opportunity gaps explanatory framework. In Start
where you are, but don’t stay there: Understanding diversity, opportunity gaps, and teaching in
today’s classrooms (pp. 13–44). Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.
Roberts, R. A. (2011). Facing and transforming hauntings of race. Equity & Excellence
in Education, 44(3), 330–347.
6
CULTIVATING A COUNTERSTORYTELLING COMMUNITY
The Storytelling Model in Action
We can negotiate a new understanding of democracy, but only if all of us are
stakeholders in a common civic project. . . . [W]hen the great wells of democracy
are renewed and expanded to include those once outside America’s social contract, a new history can begin.
(Marable, 2002 , p. 328)
The previous chapters have introduced the Storytelling Project Model and
defined and elaborated each of the four story types with examples to illustrate
some of the diverse artistic, literary, historical, social science and pedagogical
tools that may be used to examine each story type. In this chapter we come
full circle, back to the necessary first step of creating counter-storytelling
community—the essential foundation for exploring stock and counter (concealed,
resistance and emerging/transforming) stories. In order to highlight counterstorytelling community building in practice, I use the extended example of a
five-day, intensive summer institute for educators. I trace the evolution of group
dynamics as we create counter-storytelling community and move through the
four story types. Drawing on group dynamics and intergroup dialogue theories, I illustrate the evolution of counter-storytelling community as the group
explores the different story types and highlight the emotional and intellectual
insights expressed by participants at key points in the process.1 While I focus on
educators here, this process can usefully be applied to any group in any context
that is coming together to build counter-story telling community.
Group Dynamics and Intergroup Dialogue
The theory of small group dynamics developed by Tuckman and Jensen (1977)
provides one useful way to show the evolution of storytelling community and
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make sense of how participants respond to the Storytelling Project Model.
Tuckman and Jensen’s theory posits that groups typically move through five
stages: forming, storming, norming, performing and transforming, as outlined
in Figure 6.1.
The forming stage is the ice breaking or getting acquainted stage when a group
first comes together. In this initial stage, group members tend to be polite and cautious as they determine the purpose for gathering, feel each other out and tentatively explore what their own role might be. At this stage, participants tend to play
it safe and usually avoid controversy or open disagreement. The task for facilitators
includes providing an explicit agenda and creating an atmosphere where members
feel welcome and invited to participate and express themselves honestly.
The group enters the next state, storming, when inevitable differences in ideas,
opinions and perspectives arise and participants must work out ways to address
disagreement, controversy and conf lict. Facilitators can help by acknowledging the inevitability of conf lict and its value for group learning and by helping participants develop norms for addressing disagreements and differences to
work together productively. The third stage, norming, occurs as group members
perform the norms established for working together and begin to experience
themselves as a cohesive group with trustworthy members. Facilitators can help
by reinforcing norms that help the group work together constructively to air
and resolve disagreements and differences. In the performing stage, group members have established a sense of unity and are able to be highly productive
together and engage with new ideas and challenges to move learning forward.
The final stage, transforming, happens as the group experience comes to an end.
The group moves toward closure and a sense of completion where participants
recognize and appreciate what they have accomplished together. Facilitators
can help by explicitly inviting participants to comment on the process of their
work and give each other feedback and appreciation.
The theory posits that a group may be blocked at any stage in the process and
not move forward. For example, a group whose members are too conforming
or mistrustful may never move beyond the initial watchful stage as members
FIGURE 6.1
Productive group functioning
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113
fail to take the risks needed to move learning forward in the group. Or a group
can become mired in conf lict when there is not enough trust, skill or commitment to engage with and work through challenges that inevitably arise, and
thus not be productive or feel satisfied with their work together.
When we add race and other hierarchically structured social positions (such
as class, gender, sexuality, ability, age) these stages take on added weight as the
group negotiates asymmetric relations of power and historically/socially embedded patterns of interaction. Here, intergroup dialogue theories provide additional
insights for understanding group dynamics in diverse communities (Schoem &
Hurtado, 2001; Zuniga, Nagda, Chesler, & Cytron-Walker, 2007; Zuniga,
Nagda, & Sevig, 2002).
Romney (2005, p. 7) summarizes five key points central to my discussion
here:
(1) People enter into dialogue both as individuals and as members of social
identity groups; (2) power, privilege and historical/institutional oppression (recognized or unrecognized, acknowledged or not acknowledged)
are threads weaving through all dialogue among diverse groups; (3) moving from polite or angry talk to meaningful engagement requires time
and a carefully structured process which encourages questioning and
ref lection; (4) dialogue facilitators need not be neutral, but should act as
catalysts whose questions and probes deepen the dialogue; and (5) effective dialogue involves thinking and feeling, listening and learning, as
well as talking.
The first two points underscore the role that social group membership
and relations of power and privilege in the broader society always play in
the dynamics of a diverse group and thus require attention for a group to
be productive. Attention to these points is particularly important for creating a counter-storytelling community that can openly address issues of race
and racism. The latter three points refer to process issues that affect how a
group made up of diverse members will function and to conditions for productive dialogue. These include a carefully structured process that enables
questioning and ref lection, and facilitators who will push participants to
engage with each other in honest and thoughtful ways through conscious
self-awareness and careful listening. The goal is to enable participants to be
aware of what they bring to the dialogue from both their individual and group
experiences, remain open to multiple voices and perspectives, and consider
what they can learn from a spirit of “appreciative inquiry” and “responsive
understanding” ( Romney, 2005). Below I explore these issues in the fiveday, intensive summer institute focusing on the group dynamics and intergroup dialogue, and highlighting key issues that surfaced as we explored
the four story types.
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Day 1: Forming Counter-Storytelling Community
At the heart of the Storytelling Model is the creation of counter-storytelling
community in which race and racism can be openly discussed in a diverse
group and in which risks can be taken to expose how systemic racism operates in our daily lives and to consider our role in supporting or resisting racial
patterns ( Bell, 2016). This initial step in the model pays conscious and proactive attention to the forming stage of group dynamics and to acknowledging
the role that social group membership and social hierarchy play in interactions
with others.2 We open the institute by affirming these purposes and involve
the group in activities where they can get to know one another, enter the topic
of race and racism, and collectively consider and commit to explicit guidelines
for our work together.3
Interactive activities that include movement and interaction unsettle expectations that participants will sit passively and listen to experts, and encourage
people to interact with each other in a playful and fairly low risk way. They
provide a way to draw out shared experiences and interests as the first step in
creating a web of connection that can hold differences and challenges that arise
later.
In the Institute we draw on participants’ shared experiences of teaching to
introduce storytelling genres and devices. Small groups of three to four people
are asked to co-construct a story for advising an incoming group of novice
teachers about what to expect on their first day of teaching. Drawing upon
memories of what it is like to be a novice teacher each group creates a collective story. To add to the challenge, each group draws slips of paper from a hat.
Each slip names a vehicle for telling their story (puppets, rap song, poem, collage or dance) and a genre/purpose (comedy to entertain, mystery to frighten,
romance to invite, science fiction to question, and soap opera to exaggerate).
Each group then performs their story about what it is like to be a novice teacher
using the vehicle and genre/purpose, with much head-nodding recognition,
laughter and applause. This activity introduces the topic of storytelling and lays
the foundation for working with story types and different artistic genres, and
stimulates thinking about different methods of storytelling and the many ways
a story can be expressed and adapted to an audience to serve various purposes.
It also requires people to move out of their comfort zone and take a shared risk
in front of peers as each group dramatizes its story.
After more formal introductions (such as name, subject taught, school, and
something that intrigued them about this institute), followed by an overview
of the Storytelling Project Model and story types, we turn to the topic of race
and racism through an activity that asks participants to take a public stance on a
series of statements. Participants are asked to physically place themselves along a
continuum from “True for Me,” “Don’t Know,” “Not True for Me” in response
to statements such as: “You feel connected to the country from which your
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ancestors came,” “You speak a language other than English at home,” “You
worry about discrimination in your community,” “You have felt racial tension in a situation and were afraid to say anything about it.”4 Participants move
silently and publicly to a position after each question and then discuss with a person nearby why they placed themselves so. We point out that people may move
to the same location for quite different reasons and ask participants to notice
assumptions made on the basis of appearance or stance. We encourage them to
pay attention to and consider the sources of their own thoughts, feelings and
questions as these arise in dialogue with others. We also discuss how the stances
we take are affected by our experiences both as individuals and as members of
different social identity groups.
We introduce the concepts of comfort zone and learning edge ( Bell, Goodman, & Ouellett, 2016) as tools for tuning in to one’s own feelings and reactions as well as for paying attention to others in the room. Comfort zone refers
to playing it safe and holding on to what is comfortable and therefore not
really challenging. Learning edge refers to taking risks to consider new perspectives and ideas. Participants anonymously write on index cards their hopes and
fears about discussing racism in a racially diverse group. These are shuff led and
redistributed so that each person receives a different card to read aloud. The
statements become the basis for developing explicit guidelines to help group
members define their learning edge, deal with fears openly and take risks in
order to learn from others’ perspectives, experiences and ideas. We encourage
participants to use these concepts to push their learning edge and consciously
take risks to learn something new.
The forming stage is critical to the creation of counter-storytelling community. Taking the time to build connections and notice both commonalities and
differences provides a strong foundation for creating intentional community
in which members can be attentive to racial issues, open to what others have
to say and willing to accept challenges to their thinking. We explicitly name
problems that often arise in groups where asymmetrical relations of power
ref lected in the broader society are likely to be reproduced. For example, white
people often stay in a comfort zone that expects people of color to teach them
about race, while people of color, fearing that their honest thoughts and feelings about racism will be dismissed or downplayed, curb their responses instead
of openly expressing what they want to say.
We also point out that risk and comfort are relative—what may seem comfortable for one person can feel extremely risky for another—and are affected
by social position and power. We note that power dynamics are complicated by
the fact that our subject positions are partial and multiple and that each of us is
a complex of social identities that mediate our experience of the world and the
degree of risk we face as members of advantaged/disadvantaged groups. Racial
identity is always complicated and shaped by gender, class, sexual orientation,
and other aspects of identity. While we foreground race, we need to also note
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the background identities that inf lect experiences of race and racism, the partiality of our subject positions as participants and the relative nature of risk.
We ask participants to notice and consciously track feelings as the week
progresses as clues to whether they are playing it safe or staying on a learning
edge. We discuss how we can operate as a group in ways that do not reproduce
the status quo but rather encourage us to stay open to ambiguity and paradox,
so that we can embrace contradictions as seeds for developing a more critical
consciousness about racism in our society.
While the concepts of comfort zone and learning edge provide a common
language for recognizing and working with discomfort, the arts inevitably
move us out of comfort with the known, create mind/body connections and
new awareness, and offer different metaphors for examining beliefs and experiences with racism. The time spent on discussing how we will work together
through consciously developing norms that encourage dialogue, careful listening and shared risk-taking will serve the group well as we move into more
challenging material about race and racism.
Participants confirm the value of explicitly addressing the forming stage of
group development and the emerging conditions for counter-storytelling community in their anonymous written feedback at the end of the first day:
People were much more honest when writing their hopes and fears on an index card
than talking in front of a group of people about race. When people speak everyone
seems like they don’t want to offend or hurt but on paper they were more truthful.
The most important thing I learned is that it is OK—people generally want to talk
about racism. It is not something to be feared as long as there are guidelines and
agreement of behaviors established.
One participant notes a willingness to be open to new perspectives and also
identifies a learning edge in how difficult this will be:
A statement that struck me the most from one of the participants is, “Humor is
offensive.” I never really put a lot of thought into it but now I see how that can
happen. Even though we came up with guidelines about how to become more
open-minded, I still feel that it is very hard for me to become more open-minded
and self-aware.
Another appreciates the connections beginning to develop among participants:
Creating new bonds with other highly creative individuals and sharing our experience [was a high point of the day].
To set the stage for stock stories, at the end of the day we provide copies
of the DVD Race: The Power of an Illusion (Adelman, 2003) for participants to
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watch at home (and to keep for their own classroom use). This DVD shows the
power of images and stories to name and challenge erroneous but popularly
accepted (stock) stories about race, including the very legitimacy of race as a
biological category. The DVD also reveals less well-known (concealed) stories
about how race and white advantage have been constructed through law, government policy and social practice. The DVD generates surprising information
for many and provokes dissonance for some as it challenges taken for granted
notions about race and racism people bring to the table.
Day 2: Stock Stories—Forming to Storming
We begin the second day by surfacing areas of disagreement or differences of
opinion as participants discuss reactions to the DVD: “What surprised you?
What assumptions were challenged? What feelings, confusions or questions
arose for you? How would you define race and racism based on what you
learned?” We introduce and define stock stories as participants join discussion
groups for identifying stock stories about race in the DVD.
The format of Conversation Café sets up multiple discussion options around
café tables with coffee and cookies. Each table has a different question written on a sign in the middle of the table. Participants can join any one of four
conversations, knowing that there will be three rounds and an option to either
move to a new table/topic in each round or remain with the same table/topic.
The conversation topics we used are:5
1.
2.
3.
4.
What is the difference between a biological and a social view of race? How
have biological assumptions about race become taken for granted “common knowledge”? How might these assumptions be challenged?
How has whiteness been defined historically? What purposes have changing definitions of whiteness served in American society? To whose benefit?
Why do the stories we tell about race matter? What purposes do they serve?
How do we negotiate the fallacy of biological race with the reality of race
as lived experience?
What stories are erased, trivialized or concealed by the dominant story?
How does this happen?
These discussions draw out opinions and ideas about race, racism and unearned
white privilege/advantage; surface disagreements, questions and confusions for
further exploration; and begin to develop shared knowledge about patterns and
practices through which racism functions historically and today.
To complicate and further unsettle stock stories, artists on the team lead participants through a series of theater games ( Boal, 2002) using generative words
and phrases from the morning discussion: “power,” “domination,” “segregation,” “resistance,” “whiteness.” In groups of three to four, participants create
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a series of tableaux in which they nonverbally position their bodies to represent
still images of each term. Observers comment on the image and offer their
interpretations. At different points, individuals step into the tableaux to alter
the image and inject different meaning. Through stepping in to participate and
standing back to observe, group members explore emotional connections and
associations with racism, open up taken for granted ideas about how racism
works, and consider how location/position differentially affect individuals and
the meanings drawn from different tableaux.
Small groups meet separately to create an embodied way to enact a term or concept for the rest of the group: racism, social construction, prejudice, discrimination, and
white privilege. The ensuing performances physicalize what participants have drawn
from the previous activity. Participants begin to cohere as a group through taking
risks, openly discussing disagreements and considering alternative perspectives.6
The low point of the day was feeling a sense of discomfort . . . the most important
thing I learned was that discomfort has the opportunity to bring forth change.
The most important thing I learned today was being much more aware of what I
don’t have to think about as a white person.
I learned a lot from the conversation café but I was frustrated at not having answers
for all of the questions. I have more questions than answers right now.
It’s hard to share your experience without generalizing, but important to do so.
To see each group compile their talents, thoughts and knowledge was wonderful!
Also the story café was so intimate and brought out so much I could never have
known. The assigned readings are always wonderful—the video was so informative—
I can’t wait to use it to interact with my students.
Day 3: Concealed Stories—Storming to Norming
As homework and to introduce the idea of concealed stories, participants are
asked: “Bring an artifact/physical object that represents race in your life; something that
is personal/special and that you wouldn’t mind sharing with the group and would allow
other people to touch or handle.” The next morning they arrive with their artifacts
and are invited to place them somewhere in the room that seems appropriate.
Once all the artifacts have been placed, participants silently walk around and
observe the display. Next, again silently, they create collections of pieces that
seem to belong together. Some silent struggle occurs as disagreements arise
and have to be nonverbally negotiated to establish what items should be placed
where. Once collections are arranged, participants form small groups around
each collection of artifacts and create a story about the meaning and significance of the collection. Each group relates their completed story to the whole
group. Individuals then have the opportunity to respond to the placement and
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rendering of the artifact they brought and to clarify and/or contradict interpretations that have been made about their piece. This process of clarification
introduces concealed stories and raises questions about what it is like to expose
a personally meaningful story and have it interpreted, or misinterpreted, by
others. One participant says:
Sharing the artifacts and stories and having people understand was powerful. I often
feel misunderstood and I was impressed how the class community embraced me.
Another notes,
The high point was sharing the artifacts. I think it was a very sensitive activity for
all of us and helped us to understand the power of concealed stories that we often
don’t share with others.
The exploration of concealed stories continues as Rosemarie Roberts and
Roger Bonair-Agard, artists who worked on the Echoes Project, show and discuss pieces from the DVD Echoes of Brown (Fine, Roberts, Torre, with Bloom,
Burns, et al., 2004) of youth reading original poetry about their experiences and
frustrations in school. One poem read by two young women, one Latinx, the
other white, challenges the hypocrisy of their school’s public image as integrated
in the context of its pervasive practices of tracking and exclusion. A second poem,
read by an African American young man, relates his experiences of shame, confusion and anger at having to sit in the balcony with other “special ed” students
while his girlfriend sits in the auditorium below. He compares tracking in special
education to racial segregation and describes how an encouraging teacher who
taught him African American history helped him discover his own previously
unrecognized capacities. His poem is provocative, poised, deeply moving and
eloquently critical. Some participants comment, “He can’t be special ed!” leading us to unpack what this suggests about the stereotypes and assumptions that
govern how certain students are viewed and treated in our educational system.
Participants discuss these evocative poems in small groups, identify the concealed stories about education and race ref lected in the poems, and comment
on the challenges these young people raise for them as teachers. Each participant then writes a poem or short story about race and education in which they
respond to youth concerns from a teacher’s perspective. Volunteers read their
pieces aloud to the whole group. Some teachers find it quite challenging to
consider how racial ideas and stereotypes affect how students are tracked and
labeled in schools. They clearly find themselves on a learning edge as they witness the world through the eyes of students so affected and consider their role
as teachers in either perpetuating or challenging these practices.
These explorations lead to an examination of white privilege/advantage,
beginning with the “crossing the room” activity using the list of privileges
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developed by Peggy McIntosh (McIntosh, 1990). In our version, we ask participants to hold hands and try to maintain connection, as individuals step
forward for each statement that is true for them: “Move forward if schools in
your community teach about your race and heritage in positive ways throughout the year,” “Move forward if you can go shopping and be assured most of
the time that you will not be followed because of your race,” “Move forward if
you never have to think twice about calling the police when trouble occurs.” 7
Inevitably, the distance between white participants and participants of color
increases, eventually forcing people to let go of each other’s hands. In an immediate and physical way this activity illustrates the disruption of community that
is created by unequal advantages based on race. Participants discuss their feelings and reactions to the exercise and whether individuals considered resisting
or refusing to participate. We discuss stock stories that rationalize and encourage those who benefit from unearned advantages to feel OK about moving
forward, unaware of or ignoring what is happening to those left behind. Several
participants find this a personally powerful and revealing activity. White participants comment on the visceral recognition of how white advantage operates, often out of conscious awareness, but with very real consequences in the
lives of others. Participants of color note the usefulness of literally seeing and
naming patterns and practices they experience but that are so often denied or
underplayed by mainstream society.
We replay Part III of the DVD Race: The Power of an Illusion, which illustrates
how white advantage is constructed in law and public policy. The fishbowl
discussion following the DVD proves to be a critical turning point when the
value of our guidelines becomes apparent. An African American woman speaks
tearfully about her shock at discovering the degree to which racial advantage
and disadvantage are constructed, newly recognizing ways that her own life
has been affected. Before she can finish, a white participant interrupts and asserts
that she too has experienced disadvantage and that the problem is really class
not race. One can feel the entire room hold its collective breath. Clearly this
is a crucial moment. Will we move on with the discussion, as often happens,
smoothing over tension and disagreement? Instead one of the facilitators quietly asks the white participant to repeat what she heard her African American
colleague say. When she cannot do so, it becomes clear that she had tuned out
the first speaker.
By pausing the action and preserving space for the African American woman
to fully express what she wants to say, the facilitator makes it possible for the
white participant to listen more carefully and take in the pain, anger and sorrow expressed by her peer. The group experiences viscerally what can open up
when we interrupt and bracket patterned racial interactions and take the time
to analyze them in a more focused and thoughtful way. In this instance, pausing
and rewinding the conversation enables the group to consider how white people, when they are uncomfortable with discussions of racism, often interrupt
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people of color and re-center their own concerns. The group discusses how this
pattern ref lects the privilege of white people to ignore or minimize the pain
of racism, reinforcing white numbness and lack of awareness, and to shift the
focus away from the uncomfortable dynamics of positional power. Through
the discussion participants become more conscious about naming this pattern
when it arises in the group so as to interrupt it and change the dynamic in future
discussions.
Once the group fully acknowledges the first speaker, understanding the
connections she has made between information in the DVD and the racial
underpinnings of her experiences as a black woman, it becomes possible to turn
to the reactions of the second speaker. We are able to help her figure out what
in the DVD triggered her feelings and reactions. We can then have a grounded
discussion of the experiences of guilt and denial that exposure to racial privilege so often evokes in white people, as well as examine the confounding experiences of class that inf lect racial experience.
By freezing the action and taking the time to unpack triggering comments
we can more clearly pinpoint differences in perspectives and be more attentive
to racial positionality, intersecting aspects of social identity, and individual
experiences as they affect intergroup dialogue. This discussion proves to be
a pivotal turning point for the group as participants are called upon to listen
across racial experiences with greater care, to examine how racial positionality
impacts their ability to listen to and learn from one another, to own their
ability to either collude in or interrupt such practices, and to explore more
deeply patterns we typically take for granted or pass over that enable racism
to continue.
As participants write about their learning edge they speak to the impact of
the activities and discussions from this pivotal third day:
The low point of my day was the fishbowl. I felt uncomfortable and pissed off that
people still don’t get it. I wanted to cry but tears don’t prove any points. Funny
enough my learning edge was the fishbowl. Go figure. The thing that made me
want to scream and cry was relevant. That is the point. And yet I still found myself
silencing myself because I don’t want to be seen as bitter and unreachable.
Why do we choose to remain silent?
Realizing the privileges I experience from being white! Knowing now what the
government has done to us!
Seeing people in our group realize that there is whiteness.
Getting too uncomfortable seems to be OK.
Being able to be honest and open and not feel like I offended anyone.
I learned that patience is needed and that this struggle is not a quick fix.
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Summative evaluations at the conclusion of the five-day institute also recalled
this particular day, the third day, as marking a turning point for participants—in
their willingness to take risks with one another, express disagreement thoughtfully, invite new perspectives, and consciously and openly work through tensions that arise.
Day 4: Resistance Stories—Norming to Performing
By the fourth day of the institute, the group has begun to take more risks, to
act on norms of honesty and careful listening, address racial positionality and
acknowledge privilege and disadvantage, and work through disagreements and
divergent perspectives in ways that open up new learning. We turn to an exploration of resistance stories through the practices of various artists, including the
artists on our creative team.
Rosemarie Roberts, drawing on her experience as a dancer, begins with
video clips of African dances, tracing their historical uses in slave society to
covertly express resistance in a situation where overt resistance was deadly. She
engages the group in learning some aspects of African dance, an activity that
pushes everyone to a learning edge as the physicality of dance, awkward for
most of us. This activity provides both a shared experience of vulnerability and
a tiny glimpse into how dance can express covert and overt resistance to racial
domination, attuning the group to the many ways that resistance can operate
and the variety of ways it can be expressed.
Roger Bonair-Agard performs a dramatic reading of his poetry, sharing
two powerful and moving pieces, one about his mother’s instructions to her
black male child about how to negotiate a racist world, the other about his
experience as the only black person in a bar with a group of white friends when
a racial epithet is directed at him, and no one says a word. The poems are
direct, angry and powerful, asserting Roger’s refusal to quell or silence the
truths of his experiences as a black man. He provokes his listeners to consider
their own silence as witnesses, and the collusion with racism that occurs
when people stand by and let it happen without comment or intervention.
The group experiences at a visceral level how doing nothing is all that is
required to keep racism going, and the terrible cost inf licted on others when
we do so.
Kayhan Irani performs a segment from her one-woman show in which
she dramatizes the experiences of various people in NYC following 9/11. We
watch Kayhan become a Sikh woman responding to an angry phone call from
a white man who claims he will bomb her temple (confusing her religion and
ethnicity in his search for someone to blame). She transforms into a young Arab
girl whose father is taken off for questioning and never returns. With a change
of stance and voice she becomes a white guard at a detention center (where
Arab men, or men of color thought to be Muslim, have been told to line up)
Cultivating a Counter-Storytelling Community
123
who feels compelled to comment on the injustice of treating innocent people
as terrorists simply based on skin color or national origin. Through these characters, Kayhan inspires her audience to resist simplistic stories and images, to
empathize with the individual and collective plight of others we do not know,
and to respond emotionally to the injustice of their treatment. We are invited
into a visceral experience of resistance through art forms that call out and challenge racism and provoke us to consider our own action/inaction and collusion
when we remain silent.
In recognition of brimming and often divergent emotions following these
performances—for white participants, guilt, fear, numbness; and participants of
color, anger, sadness, frustration—we separate into white and people of color
caucus groups led by facilitators from the same racial grouping. The caucus
groups provide an opportunity to express feelings and reactions in response to
the performances they have witnessed and to begin a discussion of resistance to
racism with members of their racialized group. Despite initial hesitation, participants unanimously conclude that, while uncomfortable—especially for the
white group—this is another important learning/turning point. Participants
say they are able to express thoughts, feelings, questions and confusions shared
by other members of their group and help each other think through how they
might constructively act on their feelings to resist racism. When we reconvene
as a whole, each small group spends twenty minutes or so in a fishbowl surrounded by the other group, and summarizes highlights from their discussion
while the other group listens quietly.
In their evaluations at the end of the day, members from both groups name
the caucus groups as both challenging and a high point of the day:
The high point of the day was the caucus group because it gave an arena for concerns that could probably be heard better [in “same race” groups].
When we broke up into groups we got to express a lot about the legacy of colonialism and slavery.
The high point was the caucus groups. I was able to speak much more freely than
in the whole group.
The high point of the day was the caucus group. The group discussion resolved
some issues about which I was confused.
The caucus group really worked for me because the facilitators addressed issues that
personally affected me.
To bring the day to a close and think more personally about resistance, each
participant creates a collage that tells a story of resistance to racism either in
her/his own life or through a historical example that is meaningful as a guide
for what they might do in the future. Participant feedback indicates that not
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only do the collages help them think about the forms of resistance stories, they
also find the exercise personally meaningful and a source of useful ideas for
how to incorporate resistance stories in their classrooms and personal lives.
Several cite a chapter from Race Rebels ( Kelley, 1996), from their homework the
previous evening, a reading that clarifies the notion of resistance and feeds into
the performance aspect of the day. They also express pleasure in integrating
what they have learned to create their own resistance collage:
Making the collage was a high point. At first I thought I wouldn’t be able to come
up with anything for the collage, but once I got started I had a real message of
resistance that I wanted to share.
A high point was creating the collages. The feedback and presentation of the art
pieces was wonderful and expressive.
The collage was powerful. We are all creative and we all have stories of resistance
that are different but that we can all relate to.
Constructing the collage was great. It helped me express my views on resistance and
helped me see if people understood what I was trying to say.
I enjoyed the whole day but especially the collage because it gave me a chance to
express myself artistically.
For most participants, the same-race caucus groups are especially meaningful.
They note that speaking with members of their own racial group helps them
express feelings and confusions and gain support that enables them to feel more
open to and prepared for cross-racial group discussions. A running theme as we
close is also anxiety about how all of the issues we have opened up for discussion will reach resolution with only one day remaining.
Day 5: Emerging/Transforming Stories—Performing
to Transforming
On the final day of the institute we turn to emerging/transforming storytelling
as participants develop and present action plans to apply what they have learned
from the institute to back home situations in their classrooms, schools and personal lives. Participants bring in drafts of action plans developed at home the
previous evening and share these in small groups to get feedback and support
from peers. After revising and elaborating further, they share their plans in the
broader group and receive more suggestions and feedback. They end up with a
fairly well developed sequence of steps that they commit to enacting back home
in their schools and communities. Examples include: developing new lessons in
English and Social Studies that focus on the social construction of race in American history and literature and using the four story types to engage students in
Cultivating a Counter-Storytelling Community
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critical analysis of stock stories; a plan for working with students and colleagues
to proactively surface and address racial issues in their schools by creating
counter-storytelling communities where talking critically about race and racism
is invited and supported; personal action plans to continue to develop their own
knowledge about racism through further reading, courses and conversations.
Participants see these action plans as the impetus for taking a stance against
racism and positioning themselves as responsible agents of change. They appreciate the opportunity to think about and plan next steps and see this is an
important part of gaining closure for the institute while maintaining momentum to continue the work beyond.
I really felt a connection to the project and incorporating my action plan. Thank you
for this experience of awareness.
Presenting and getting feedback on my action plan was such a great feeling.
I love listening to the presentations. To me, this is very important because you
hear the actions of how each of us will be implementing to make the world, or our
classroom, a better place to be in. I love that the facilitators showed us, shared their
work with us.
In final evaluations, teachers write about connections between individual high
and low points and learning edges. The majority of participants focus their
comments around Day 3 activities—what I have called the storming to norming stage. Several list this day as both the low and high point for the week;
low because of the discomfort and tension related to misunderstandings and
conf licts in the room and high because engaging these tensions pushes them to
their learning edge and moves them to reexamine racism on a far deeper level.
The storming process seems to have incorporated conditions for more honest
intergroup dialogue and propelled movement into the norming and performing stages to open up deeper learning.
Another high/low example mentioned in evaluations is the final project.
Though a few participants express frustration at time constraints and confusion
about the form of the project, they are ultimately pleased with the final presentations. Ref lecting on the concept of learning edge, a few people make direct
connections about how to bring the Storytelling Project Model into their own
classrooms to invite students to critically examine racism in literature, art, history, music and other subjects.
Most of the learning edges described by participants speak to the individual
and collective journey they have taken during the week. Mentioned as key are:
learning about white privilege and seeing how it works in their lives; drawing
on resistance stories to consider purposeful actions they can take to address
racial dynamics and racism in their classrooms and schools; dealing with anger
and frustration and working towards a productive solution in a racially diverse
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group; realizing one’s own prejudices and limitations; and the most frequently
stated learning edge, a challenge to not stay silent and to continue to work
towards making a difference in their schools, classrooms and personal lives.
These ref lections speak to a sense of resolution, even transformation that brings
the group to closure but with ongoing reverberations for new action in their
personal and professional lives going forward.
Participants describe the Storytelling Project Model as a valuable tool for analyzing racial issues and for personalizing an understanding of systemic racism.
Through learning about the different kinds of stories, they say it is easier to dissect
stereotypes, take responsibility for addressing racism and think about concrete
ways to take action. One participant discusses the sense of personal ownership
that talking about racism through stories creates. Others talk about how much
clearer the problem of racism becomes when it has a human face and that stories
and story types provide a lens for seeing and addressing racism more directly.
Conclusion
I have focused here on the process of creating a counter-storytelling community in which productive discussions about race and racism in a racially diverse
group can occur, drawing on group dynamics and intergroup dialogue theories
as an organizing frame. I have also referenced arts-based activities through
which we approach different story types—specifically poetry, dance, drama,
theater games and collage. As facilitators, we learned a great deal from this
first unveiling of the Storytelling Project Model. We could see that the arts
play an important role in building a community where risks can be taken and
shared, and new norms established for acting against racism. We learned that
experiencing the arts directly can be transformative for helping people look at
racism within themselves and in the broader society in more honest and meaningful ways. From participant feedback we also learned that the Storytelling
Project Model makes sense to people and offers useful guidelines and strategies
for teachers to take back into their own personal lives and the classrooms and
schools where they teach.
We also learned that constant vigilance and courage are required to challenge patterns of domination and subordination. The guidelines must be called
upon and used the very first time they are forgotten or violated, or participants
will distrust the process and pull back to safer ground. It takes time to build
community in which risks can be taken, but devoting time to this task is essential. We also learned that teachers need lots of support and information about
historical examples of stock and concealed stories, about how to use the arts
in their teaching, and about how to make sense of their own racial positionality. Many teachers are eager for this knowledge and willing to take risks to
learn about and find ways to act against racism in their classrooms and lives.
They see the Storytelling Project Model as a useful framework for motivating
Cultivating a Counter-Storytelling Community
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commitment and generating action. Ideally, teachers who hold these commitments can create race conscious counter-storytelling communities in their
schools, among colleagues and with students, parents and community groups.
Such communities that can help them sustain the vision and persistence to
work against the grain of stock stories, uncover concealed stories, draw lessons
from resistance stories and generate emerging/transforming stories that can
lead toward a more just society shaped by all as active and valued compatriots
in multiracial democracy.
Notes
1. Background: In summer 2005, we offered a weeklong summer institute for educators in New York City to introduce the Storytelling Project Model and test its accessibility and usefulness for teachers. Teachers throughout the city were invited to sign
up for the institute and could receive in-service credit through the New York City
Department of Education. We asked participants to fill out a questionnaire about
their interests in and knowledge of racism prior to the institute to help us assess their
entering knowledge and to build activities around their questions and concerns.
Given our limited space and our desire to build community in which risks could be
taken, we closed the institute at twenty participants. The group was a diverse mix of
elementary and secondary teachers (though primarily secondary), with one librarian
and one social worker who taught incarcerated youth. The group was about onethird male and two-thirds female, and included whites, blacks, Asians and Latinos.
Five members of the creative team facilitated the five-day institute, two artists (Kayhan Irani and Roger Bonair-Agard) and three educators (myself, Rosemarie Roberts
and Zoe Duskin). Two student interns (Brett Murphy and Ebonie Smith) documented
our work as we proceeded by keeping notes and videotaping parts of the proceedings.
We met in the same generative space where the creative team had worked so productively when we were developing the model and we used many of the activities developed and honed further in our work together. We met for eight hours a day, Monday
through Friday, for a very intensive week of exploration and engagement.
2. The Storytelling Summer Institute for New York City teachers deliberately sought
a racially diverse group of teachers and the facilitation team was equally diverse.
3. Many of the activities we designed are available in the Storytelling Project Curriculum.
A free downloadable PDF is available at www.barnard. edu/education/storytelling.
4. A version of this and the next activity is available in Bell, Love and Roberts (2007).
5. Adapted from the online guide accompanying the DVD, available from California
Newsreel at www.californianewsreel.com.
6. All quotes are taken from evaluations participants completed at the end of each day
of the institute and summary evaluations after the five-day institute.
7. See Bell, Love and Roberts (2007), Appendix D, for additional questions.
References
Adelman, L. (Producer, Writer). (2003). Race: The power of an illusion (DVD). California
Newsreel.
Bell, L. A. (2016). Telling on racism: Developing a race conscious agenda. In H. A.
Neville, M. E. Gallardo, & D. W. Sue (Eds.), The myth of racial color blindness: Manifestations, dynamics, & impact (pp. 105–122). Washington, DC: American Psychological
Association.
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Bell, L. A., Goodman, D., & Ouellett, M. L. (2016). Design and facilitation. In M.
Adams & L. A. Bell (Eds.), Teaching for diversity and social justice (3rd ed., pp. 55–93).
New York, NY: Routledge.
Boal, A. (2002). Games for actors and non-actors (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.
Fine, M., Roberts, R. A., Torre, M. E., with Bloom, J., Burns, A. et al. (2004). Echoes
of brown: Youth documenting and performing the legacy of Brown v Board of Education (DVD
and accompanying book). New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
Kelley, R. D. G. (1996). Race rebels: Culture, politics, and the black working class. New York,
NY: The Free Press.
Marable, M. (2002). The great wells of democracy: The meaning of race in American life. New
York, NY: Basic Civitas Books.
McIntosh, P. (1990). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent
School, 49, 31–36.
Romney, P. (2005). The art of dialogue. In P. Korza, B. S. Bacon, & A. Assaf (Eds.),
Civic dialogue, arts and culture: Findings from animating democracy (pp. 57–79), Washington, DC: Americans for the Arts.
Schoem, D., & Hurtado, S. (Eds.) (2001). Intergroup dialogue: Deliberative democracy in
school, college, community and workplace. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Tuckman, B. W., & Jensen, M. A. C. (1977). Stages of small group development revisited. Group and Organizational Studies, 2, 419–427.
Zuniga, X., Nagda, B. A., Chesler, M., & Cytron-Walker, A. (2007). Intergroup dialogues in higher education: Meaning ful learning about social justice. San Francisco, CA:
Jossey-Bass.
Zuniga, X., Nagda, B. A., & Sevig, T. D. (2002). Intergroup dialogues: An educational
model for cultivating engagement across differences. Equity and Excellence in Education, 35(1), 7–17.
Essay #7
THE CLASSROOM IS N
A Structured Approach for Cultivating a
Counter-Storytelling Classroom Community
John Madura
In the first edition of Storytelling for Social Justice, an entire chapter is dedicated
to outlining steps for cultivating a counter-storytelling community drawing
on social psychological theories of group membership. As a teacher educator, I
have found this roadmap for progressing through the storytelling cycle indispensable as a guide for understanding when students are likely to feel particularly vulnerable and where groups are most likely to experience conf lict.
With the model explicitly in mind, I pay special attention to the early
“forming” and “storming” stages of community development. While all the
elements of group function are essential in the model, my experience in the
classroom suggests that a weak structure in these two phases often proves to be
most responsible for derailing group progress. Where there is often the opportunity to refocus and retry movements through the “norming,” “performing,”
and “transforming,” stages of the model with students, it can be difficult to
rebuild a counter-storytelling foundation cracked by poorly managed efforts
to elicit the individual retelling of “stock” and “concealed” stories that shape
our collective understanding about power and oppression. If the mechanism by
which stories gathered locks group members in a “comfort zone” rather than
a “learning zone,” it is difficult to recover the trust necessary to create risktaking conditions.
My desire to “get this part right” led me to explore different structured
approaches for facilitating the collection of stories in my classroom. When students are first getting to know each other, they are reluctant to share their
honest feelings about social justice issues. Students of all ages want to fit in
with their peers and they are concerned that directly sharing possibly unpopular feelings about race, poverty, and drug addiction threatens to place them
at odds with other members of the classroom. I view this as being consistent
with Habermas’s theory of communicative action. In Habermas’s framework,
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John Madura
communicative action requires “actors” capable of self-criticism (1981). Selfcriticism, however, is not something individuals entering a newly formed group
are immediately able to engage in. Experimenting with structured communication approaches allowed me the opportunity to preserve the opportunity
for self-criticism while offering some personal to those that may feel insecure
about being honest with the group in the early stages of community building.
It also offered me a possible framework for managing discourse in order to meet
the goal of nurturing a counter-storytelling community.
Structuring “Forming” and “Storming” in the Development
of Counter-Storytelling Communities
In forming counter-storytelling community students begin to orient themselves to the task of identifying “stock” and “concealed” stories, voicing their
own understanding of the stories and managing possible within-group disagreement or conf lict—steps that correspond to the “forming” and “storming”
phases of the development cycle. I have designed tools for structuring the communication that takes place during these stages in the formalized setting of the
classroom using statistical methods.
One structured communication technique I use is the Delphi method. Decades
before the advent of crowdsourcing in decision-making, the Delphi method was
conceived as a forecasting technique that operated on the assumption that group
Group evaluations
round 1
Definition of items,
interaction structure,
evaluation scales, etc.
Provide feedback
facilitate, summarize,
monitor
Group evaluations
Adjourn*
round n
FIGURE 6.1A
Delphi method (based on Dalkey & Helmer, 1963)
*Adjourn phase is terminology used by the revised Tuckman-Jensen model (1977).
The Classroom Is N
131
judgments could prove to be more valid than judgments made by individuals
( Dalkey & Helmer, 1963). The original articulation of the method (Figure 6.1a)
worked by connecting “experts” together, through a facilitator, with some level
of anonymity in order to achieve consensus on a topic or predict future trends
(Cassino, 1984; Hsu & Sandford, 2007).
Over the years, however, the Delphi method has been adapted to structured communication applications that extend far beyond forecasting ( Rowe,
Wright, & Bolger, 1991). For example, it has been used as a method to organize politically or culturally sensitive discussions in order to minimize domination by strength of personality (“bandwagon effect”) and allow space for
dissenting narratives. Where the method was once used to connect disparate individuals and protect anonymity, it is now also used, with the help of
technology, to create anonymity within groups where individuals have full
knowledge of the other members. This particular characteristic makes it a
viable technique for use in the development of counter-storytelling community in the classroom.
Operationalizing the Delphi Method for Gathering
“Stock” and “Concealed” Stories: Stories About
Race Operating in Schools
I introduce and explain the Delphi method to my class and describe my role as
facilitator for the group, and their responsibility as group members, to respond
honestly to the prompts. My responsibility as the facilitator, or teacher, in this
method is to manage the f low of communication (the presentation of questions
and management of responses to the questions) by structuring (and restructuring) it for the group. Group members are then able to review this “feedback”
and revise or refine their opinions, beliefs, or solutions.
The prompt is typically open-ended and delivered using an electronic survey format. Typically, I will ask students to consider a social justice topic, or set
of topics, and their task is to identify and share the narratives they are aware of
related to the topic. The idea is to keep the topic as open-ended as possible, so
that students supply as many narratives as possible. An example of this Delphic
method approach to the Storytelling Model can be seen through an application
to the topic of race in schools. Pre-service teachers are often required to complete a course that examines social issues facing schools, and the issue of race is
usually one of the leading topics.
In this example, I prompt students (in my case, pre-service teachers) to list
any narratives or societal beliefs they are familiar with that pertain to the topic
of race in schools. Figure 6a.3 provides the survey structure typically employed
during this first stage. The three responses listed in the figure (“Black students
are difficult to manage in the classroom,” “Black students are focused on sports
FIGURE 6.2A
Student
responses
(round 2)
Student
responses
(round 1)
Student Activity
Ranking & ratings example
Strongest: “Difficult in classroom”
Weakest: “Focus on sports & entertainment”
Closed-ended:. Ranking & rating example
1. Ranking task of narratives
2. Certainty of ranking
3. Truth measure (how “true” is the
statement for yourself?)
1. 3 = “certain of ranking”
2. 2 = “somewhat true” (for each)
Rating only example
Focus on sports and entertainment
1. 4 = “agree”
2. 2 = “somewhat true”
1. Black students are difficult to
manage in the classroom
2. 3 = “highly certain”
Example options
Closed-ended: Rating only example
1. Closed-ended response prompt (rate)
2. Truth measure (how “true” is the
statement for yourself?)
1. Open-ended response to prompt
2. Certainty measure (how “certain”
other’s believe narrative?)
Response format options
Delphi method adapted for developing a counter-storytelling community in a classroom setting
Summarize closed-ended responses
Summarize belief ratings
Summarize open-ended responses
Summarize ratings (central tendency)
Generate narrative themes for
evaluation/ratings & add belief ratings
Generate topic prompt(s)
ex. “What are the stories about race
that operate in U.S. schools?”
Teacher Activity
FIGURE 6.3A
1
Untrue
1
Untrue
1
2
2
2
3
3
3
4
4
4
5
True
5
True
5
First round, open-ended topic prompt and closed-form certainty measure
Weakest: “Bullying is easy to spot.”
Middle: “Bullying is a rite of passage.”
Strongest: “Bully victims ask for it.”
1
2
3
4
Uncertain
Untrue
5
Certain
Directions: Use the scale below to express
how certain you are about your rankings.
Directions: Use the scale below to express
how true you believe each statement to be.
Directions: Please rank the statements on bullying
from strongest to weakest by of narrative strength.
True
Certainty measure
Truth measure
Topic ranking
Example: Narratives or stories about bullying
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John Madura
and entertainment careers,” and “Black achievement lags behind white peers”)
would be supplied by the individual within an anonymous electronic survey
platform. Ideally, students would to supply between three and six key stories
related to the issue of race and simultaneously rate how certain they are that
others believe this narrative. I ask about the beliefs of others (and not their own
beliefs) in the first stage because if offers psychological protection (beyond the
anonymous electronic survey platform itself ) against the anxiety that accompanies sharing possibly unpopular narratives.
The narratives that emerge in this first round of data collection represent the
“stock” and “concealed” stories that define the narrative space of the classroom.
In an effort to better understand the stories, I apply qualitative data analysis
approaches to summarize the individual responses into more general narrative themes. There is no discussion of the results of the first phases. Instead the
narratives are simply structured into overarching statements. To better understand our particular group, I find it helpful define the narrative space by using
simple descriptive statistics to quantify the frequency of the themes. In the race
example, it is likely that several students identify the various narratives related
to the general overarching narrative that “Black achievement lags behind white
peers.” Grouping similar individual responses under one theme helps me identify “narrative signal through narrative noise.” In addition, measures of the
variety and intensity of the themes help me understand how prepared students
are to engage in critical ref lexive praxis.
There is no formula for determining how prepared the group is to move out
of the “forming” and “storming” phases into the “norming” phase of community formation, but simple statistics like frequencies can provide some window
into how familiar students are with various narratives. In the “race in schools”
example, for instance, responses from particular classes can vary greatly in their
knowledge and comfort around the issue. There are times when the responses
are consistent with common perceptions and misperceptions about the topic,
but there also many times where responses are idiosyncratic or display atypical
gaps in the narratives identified compared to the literature or past experience
with the topic. For example, students often do not share stock stories as characterize Black families as “poor” or “disinterested in education.” The omission
of key narratives must be remedied. The set of closed-ended statements must
contain a robust set of narratives for consideration; therefore, if critical narratives are missing from the student responses, then they should be added by the
teacher. It is the responsibility of the facilitator to ensure the narrative space
contains narratives that must be confronted whether the individuals are willing
to acknowledge them or not. To that end, it is not uncommon for me to add
omitted narratives in the second stage in order promote ref lection of a richer
landscape of narratives.1
Figure 6.4a represents the conceptual evaluation task presented to students
in the second stage. On the surface, the second set of evaluations is simpler
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135
Example: What are the stories about race that operate in U.S. schools?
Topic rating
Truth measure
Directions: In the list of narratives below, please
select the response that best represents your belief
about each statement.
Untrue
True
1. Black students are difficult to manage in the
classroom.
1
2
3
4
Untrue
5
True
1. Black students are focused on sports and
entertainment careers.
1
2
3
4
Untrue
5
True
3. Black achievement lags behind white peers.
1
FIGURE 6.4A
2
3
4
5
Second round, closed-form measure for narratives
than the original narrative generation step in round one. In this second stage,
all the students need to do is select the response option that best describes their
certainty regarding the narratives presented. On the conceptual level, however,
this is likely to be a more difficult task. In this step, students are asked to take a
step toward accepting responsibility for the “stock” and “concealed” narratives
by evaluating truth content with respect to their own mind.
The responses that students supply can be quantitatively summarized using
many of the same descriptive statistical techniques used in the first round.
Once the data collection over the two stages is complete, it is possible to
share the results with the group. This stage can be emotional, exhilarating,
or both. For me, this initiates the “norming” stage of group development.
The presentation of the results is the first time that students publically engage
with the stories and it is an effective way to initiate discussion of the narratives. Almost without exception, the quantitative presentation of the “stock”
and “concealed” narratives, along with summaries of truth content evaluation for self and others, spurs students to interrogate the results. When the
hurdle of publically expressing any narrative is removed, students appear more
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John Madura
willing to transition from their “comfort zone” to a “learning zone.” In my
experience, this structure does not absolve students from ownership of the
narratives—quite the contrary. The organization of the stories catalyzes analysis
discussion of stories that oftentimes never receive a voice. For me, this moves
the group efficiently through the “storming” and toward the “norming” phase
of development.
Forming the Counter-Storytelling Community
The movement out of the “forming” and “storming” phases into the “norming” stage is always a challenge because many students are often uncomfortable
sharing beliefs that may run counter to other members of the class. It is this
precisely this challenge that motivated my use of a structured communication
format for community development. I attribute much of the effectiveness of the
approach to the idea that the organization of communication in this takes the
emphasis off the person sharing the story places it on the story itself.
I have found that numbers can be another lens for understanding stories.
Numbers can help us express value, convey importance, and understand scale.
In statistics, for example, we use the variable n to represent a sample and the
variable N to represent the population. Many can never get comfortable with
the idea that some subset of people can be used to describe the whole. The
classroom is like many groups that come together to reach a goal. But in many
ways, classrooms are different from many other groups in society. They cannot be compared to other groups, and they cannot even be compared to each
other. Nobody knows this better than a teacher. Over a career, a teacher will
have many classes, and none are the same. For all teachers, the classroom is n;
and the classroom is N.
Additional Note on Quantitative (Visual) Approaches
for Providing Feedback
Descriptive statistics are helpful for providing feedback to group members. Traditional summaries, such as measures of central tendency, are often the most
effective approach for understanding the state of a group. The plots in Figure 6.5a
compare the results from the first and second rounds. The first plot provides a
simple summary of the frequency of topics identified plotted against the certainty
about the belief of others regarding the story.
The second plot can be interesting to share with students because it plots
personal beliefs about narratives against the perceived beliefs of others. Typically, there are certain narratives that diverge on this comparison, but there
are many that do not. Students are often surprised to see that their responses
converge for a set of narratives.
FIGURE 6.5A
Topic with
highest
frequency
“low frequency”
“low belief certainty”
Bullies
are easy
to spot
Rite of
passage
“low frequency”
“low belief certainty”
Bullies
are easy
to spot
Victims
ask
for it
Narrative belief (self)
“I do not believe narrative”
“others do not believe narrative”
“I believe narrative”
“others do not believe narrative”
Topic frequency vs. belief certainty (others); narrative belief (self ) vs. narrative belief (others)
Certainty others believe narrative
“high frequency”
“low belief certainty”
Victims
ask
for it
Topic frequency
Narrative belief (others)
“I believe narrative”
“others believe narrative”
Rite of
passage
138
John Madura
John Madura teaches secondary mathematics at The Morgan School in
Clinton, CT.
Note
1. Depending on the narratives, students could also rank the strength of the narratives
they encounter and then evaluate their own certainty about the ranking and even
the truth content of each story.
References
Cassino, K. (1984). Delphi panel: A practical “crystal ball” for researchers. Marketing
News, 18, 10–11.
Dalkey, N. C., & Helmer, O. (1963). An experimental application of the Delphi method
to the use of experts. Management Science, 9(3), 458–467.
Habermas, J. (1981). The theory of communicative action. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York, NY:
Routledge.
Hsu, C.-C., & Sandford, B. A. (2007). The Delphi technique: Making sense of consensus. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 12(10).
Rowe, G., Wright, G., & Bolger, F. (1991). Delphi: A reevaluation of research and
theory. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 39(3), 235–251.
Essay #8
STORYTELLING GIVES THE
SCHOOL SOUL
Creating Counter-Storytelling Community
Zoe Duskin
As a teacher, instructional coach, and principal I have found that the work of
school improvement hinges on leaders’ ability to connect the technical aspects
of schooling, such as curriculum, instruction, and assessment, to the cultural
aspects of each school, such as campus values and vision. For the last fifteen
years, I’ve used the Storytelling Project Model for creating a socially just learning community in schools to help me forge this link.
My first job out of college was as a research assistant supporting The Storytelling Project’s team of artists, educators, and academics. We offered the team
provocations of art to discuss, data to debate, and questions to journal about.
We read and played and danced and sang and argued and cried together. I participated in the work and took notes on the process, documenting how using
the arts allowed for a diverse group of individuals to form enough connection
and trust to have a substantive conversation about race and racism. Much as a
native language is always the one in which you think and dream, the four story
types are how I now frame social justice issues. Creating a community where it
is safe to tell stories about race and other dimensions of our identities has been
central to my school leadership since then. Telling stories and just as importantly
creating safe spaces to tell stories has been a cornerstone of my leadership efforts.
At the Inspired Teaching Demonstration Public Charter School in Washington, DC, I had the opportunity to build the professional community from
the ground up. We opened the school with just seven classrooms in a rented
basement. Our students came from each one of the city’s wards. We aimed
to show that inquiry based learning and progressive teaching practices could
serve all kids, not just privileged ones, well. We were well versed in datadriven planning, and since we didn’t have our own students yet, we looked at
publicly available outcomes for DC’s public schools to inform our planning.
We cringed at the grotesque achievement gaps within the District, let alone
140
Zoe Duskin
when comparing the District schools to local private schools or surrounding
suburban public schools. We focused our professional development on what the
data said about our society. In the summer before we opened we dug heavily
into the community building needed to be able to talk about race and equity
in education. We used theater games and art projects to hone our teaching
skills and to get to know each other’s stories, sometimes loving and laughing
our way through the exercises and sometimes dreading the courage needed to
share imperfect work or more painful pieces of our past. On top of this deeply
personal work we also felt the urgency of opening a school, had units to plan,
needed to assemble furniture, and had plenty of checklists to complete.
In retrospect, there were two significant impacts of integrating the Storytelling approach during that hot summer in DC. First, storytelling made the team
strong and resilient. When we had hard days, and there were more than I can
count, the depth of our relationships and trust pulled us through and made it
possible for us to be resilient beyond any team I had been on previously. Second,
because we spent time considering the counter stories we wanted to create—the
new narratives of justice and opportunity we wanted to write and the stories
we hoped our students would be able to tell in time—our day-to-day decisions
were aligned. Whether selecting classroom supplies out of a catalog or finding
the words for a discussion question in a reading group, the faculty and staff were
able to make choices independently that aligned and built on each other to create
a school with a singular narrative around equity and excellence for all students.
When I joined The Primary School a strong community already existed, and
there was a general interest in and readiness to dig into conversations about issues
of race and equity. The school is nestled within Silicon Valley and is funded with
philanthropy from the technology sector. Educational equity conversations are
complicated by the fact that the staff (beautifully diverse and deeply committed to the mission of the school) feels immense pressure from the high cost of
living in the Bay Area. Tensions about gentrification and community change
stress the families we serve and also our own professional community, albeit in
different ways. In each step of our professional development this year, our team
has included storytelling to connect the unspoken but ever present social issues
the staff lives and sees to the quotidian practices of running a school. Storytelling yields empathy rather than offense; it creates opportunity for common
ground rather confirmation of bias; it distributes responsibility for respect and
learning. When every person on a team participates in storytelling, the burden
of educating the staff about race, racism, or oppression more broadly, is spread
evenly across the staff rather than sitting heavily on the shoulders of people of
color since the learning process happens through listening and self-ref lection.
As the faculty has shared their stories the leadership has been able to listen and
understand how we can refine our practices and priorities to best support them.
Conversations about identity like the ones we have at The Primary School
are an essential part of professional development that promotes social justice and
equitable practices in schools. In order for schools to avoid replicating social ills,
Storytelling Gives the School Soul
141
teachers must have the time and space to come together to unpack their experiences and create a common vision for how they hope a younger generation will
learn together. Getting people talking isn’t easy, and when you add to the mix
familiar patterns of privilege and bias, it gets harder. Imagine how unenthusiastic a
typical faculty (mixed ages, disproportionately female, with a divide between those
whose identity reflects the students’ and those who are outsiders in the community)
might feel when a principal blurts out “for today’s staff meeting we’re going to talk
about race.” Storytelling for Social Justice kept me from being that well intentioned
but ineffective principal. Instead, by focusing my work on creating a storytelling
community among the faculty, and then weaving opportunities for each person
to speak and also see their story as a part of a broader narrative, the staff naturally
starts to connect large sociological forces to their day-to-day experiences. No one
has to start with “my parents were racist.” It hurts too much to jump to that label
for people we love. But, we also cannot allow ourselves to hide from the painful
honesty and awareness that promotes learning and change. If we understand the
life we have lived as a function not just of our own pathologies, but as a chapter in
a longer narrative, we can find enough breathing room to plan how we will sculpt
the story’s end. We can create counter stories and social change can occur as the
product of each of our individual choices and actions to be and do differently.
The most significant resource in a school is usually time, and principals get
to determine how time is spent: in the classroom, during school events, and in
professional development. We cannot use time well unless we know what we
value. “Best practice” suggests that decisions about how to allocate time should
be data driven: teachers and administrators should review student outcome data
and then allocate learning time, both for kids and teachers, to the areas where
student outcomes are weakest. It is hard to argue against this logic, but if this
is where instructional leadership begins and ends, it is insufficient for creating
a vibrant and equitable school. To that end, I think my job as a principal is to
get people talking, and storytelling is not just pedagogy but also a management
strategy, leadership skill, and way to inspire others. As people tell their stories
and listen to others’, the community is able to form around a new shared story.
In other words, storytelling gives the school soul.
Zoe Duskin is the principal of The Primary School in East Palo Alto,
California, a school that integrates education, health care, and family
support services to improve outcomes for underserved children. Previously, Zoe was San Francisco Site Director at College Track, a nonprofit college access program serving low-income students on the path
to becoming first generation college graduates. Before joining College
Track, Zoe was the founding principal at the Inspired Teaching Demonstration Public Charter School in Washington, DC.
INDEX
“40 Years Later: Now Can We Talk?”
film 50, 51
African Americans: economic mobility
56; history 28 –30; police treatment
46; residential segregation 35
all-white towns 54
American Dream: accumulation and
transfer of assets 35; analyzing
the stock story 34 –38; Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s speech to
presidential convention in 2004
36 –38; aspiring to 34; Barack Obama’s
speech to presidential convention in
2004 36 –38; black people’s beliefs 34,
35; critical analysis 27, 36; distortions
and traps in 35; economic mobility
central to 55; home ownership 35;
ideology of 35; Langston Hughes
poem “A Dream Deferred” 38;
Native Americans 36; Opportunity
Atlas (The) 55, 56; people of color
embracing 29; poetry and art 18;
poetry and literature 57; residential
segregation 35; stock story 18, 34 –38,
69; unpacking 36 –38; Venn diagram
37, 38; white people’s beliefs 34, 35
Anderson, Lauren 4, 43
Angelou, Maya, “Still I Rise” 78, 79
anti-gun violence 75
arts: transformative learning, as 13, 14;
vehicle for memory work, as a 48;
visual art, used to retrieve stories
51–53
Asian American resistance 62 – 65
asset accumulation 35
Avalos, David, “Wilderness” 51
Baca, Judy, essay on mural paintings
expressing resistance 79
Bell, Alexandra, “Counternarratives,”
critical reading of newspapers and
other media 79, 80
binary thinking limitations 42
Birmingham, Alabama, community
relationships 87
Black Lives Matter, efforts to highlight
systemic racism 46, 73
black people: American Dream beliefs
34, 35; police killing of 46
Boal, Augusto: Feeling Power 93; Theatre
of the Oppressed 77
Bonair-Agard, Roger, concealed stories,
visualization and writing exercise
48 , 49
boundaries, transcending, use of
Storytelling Model 42
Brown, Michael, killing of 46, 79, 80
bullying, example of narratives or stories
about 133
campus gender violence 75
Central High School National History
Site 63, 64
Index
Chinese immigrant men, concealed
stories 51, 52
Civil Rights Educator Institute,
Narrative Strategy approach 62 – 65
Civil Rights movement 12
coerced free labor of black people 54
color-blindness: historical knowledge 12;
Martin Luther King’s vision 12; stock
stories 29, 94; teachers 94; viewed as
solution to racial problems 29
Columbus Day 45
community storytelling for racial
reconciliation 84 – 88
concealed stories: arts as a vehicle for
memory work 48; Asian American
resistance 62 – 65; Avalos, David,
image of “Wilderness” 51; BonairAgard, Roger visualization and
writing exercise 48, 49; challenging
stock stories 45; Chinese immigrant
men 51, 52; choice of term 44;
“community cultural wealth” 45;
contrasting/comparing stock stories
with 19, 58; countering mainstream
accounts of racial reality 47; counterstorytelling community, storming
to norming 118 –122; critical literacy
107; Delphi method, use for gathering
stories 131–136; education resources
on hidden histories 47; embeddedness
45; exploring genealogy of racism
through 48 –58; finding concealed
stories in history 53 –55; “40 Years
Later: Now Can We Talk?” film 50,
51; historical knowledge 47, 53 –55;
memory stories 47, 50; memory work,
revealing stories through 48 –51;
narrators 45; Native Americans 45,
51; overview 19, 44 – 48; policeinvolved death by race/ethnicity
46; remembering 47; retrieving
concealed stories through visual art
51–53; revealing concealed stories
through memory work 48 –51; schools,
course readings 93 –97; social science
data, finding concealed stories in
55 –57; “subjugated knowledge” 45;
suppression 48; “survivance” 45; visual
art, used to retrieve stories 51–53;
visualization and writing exercise 48,
49; white people’s stories 46; Wong,
Flo Oy artist, “Baby Jack Rice Story”
and “Made in USA: Angel Island
Shhh” installation 52; Zendejas,
143
Rodrigo Lara, “Deportable Aliens”
exhibit 52
conf lict resolution, use of Storytelling
Model 42
counter-storytelling communities:
bullying, example of narratives
or stories about 133; comfort zone
concept 115, 116; concealed stories
48 , 50; concealed stories–storming
to norming 118 –122; creation of
16, 17, 92 , 94, 111, 114 –117; Critical
Race Theory 17; Delphi method
130 –132; drawing on participants’
shared experiences of teaching 114;
Echoes Project 119; emerging/
transforming stories–performing to
transforming 124 –126; forming stage
112 , 114 –117, 136; group dynamics
and intergroup dialogue 111–113;
interactive activities 114; learning
edge concept 115, 116; norming
stage 112; performing stage 112;
quantitative (visual) approaches for
providing feedback 136, 137; “Race:
The Power of an Illusion” DVD 116,
117, 120; resistance stories–norming
to performing 122 –124; stock
stories–forming to storming 117, 118;
storming stage 112; storytelling gives
the school soul 139 –141; structured
approach to cultivating 129, 130;
transforming stage 112; young people
and resistance 75 –77
critical literacy: concealed stories 107;
resistance stories 108; stock stories
106, 107; transforming stories 108 –110
Critical Race Theory (CRT): counterstorytelling in 17; inf luence of
scholarship in 12 , 13; value of
experimental knowledge 19; value of
stories 15
curriculum design 97–99, 102 –105
Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL)
Protests 74
“Day Without Immigrants, A” 57
D’Egidio, Vanessa 4, 105
Desai, Dipti 51
Diallo, Amadou, killing of 46
dialogue, intergroup 6, 111–113, 121,
125, 126
drug prevention, use of Storytelling
Model 42
Duskin, Zoe 5, 127, 141
144
Index
Echoes of Brown Project 119
education: critical literacy 106 –110;
resistance and democracy 75 –77;
resources on hidden histories 47;
see also schools
Education Trust (2018) report 56
Emeagwali, Philip, “A World Without
Black People” 57
emerging/transforming stories: Boler’s
Feeling Power 93; color-blindness 94;
concealed stories 95, 96; counterstorytelling community, performing
to transforming 124 –126; creating
curriculum 97–99; critical literacy
108 –110; diagram of Storytelling
Project Model (Figure 1.1) caution
90; different groups of learners 93;
empathy, notion of 93, 94; meaning of
emerging 89; meaning of transforming
89; Morrison, Toni, Nobel Prize
acceptance speech 93; Native
American students 93; overview
20, 89, 90; Perry, Theresa, essay 96;
problematizing storytelling 92 –97;
resistance stories, building on 97;
Sarris article 93; schools and teachers,
focus on 90 –92; stock stories 95;
student population 91; student teachers
94 –99; teaching population 91, 92;
using Storytelling Project Model to
prepare educators 92; young teachers,
focus on 90
environmental justice 75
facilitation 127
film and social science data 56, 57
fishbowl discussion 109, 120
forming stage 112, 114, 115, 116, 125, 129
Freire, Paulo 102
gender roles and stereotypes 104
gentrification and displacement of people
of color 76, 77
GLBTQ people 75, 90, 104
Glisson, Susan M. 4, 87– 88
Great Wall of Los Angeles 79
Greene, Maxine 14
group dynamics 6, 111–113, 114, 126
guided visualization 48 – 49
guidelines 16 –17, 84, 94, 114, 115, 116,
120, 126
history of racism 28 –30, 47, 53 –55
HIV/AIDS, use of Storytelling Model 42
Hochschild, Jennifer L. 32 , 35
home loans between 1934 and 1962 54
home ownership 35
Homestead Act of 1862 54
hooks, bell 14, 15, 16, 75
Hughes, Langston, “A Dream Deferred” 38
Hurricanes Katrina and Sandy 42
“I Have a Dream” speech 12
immigrants: “A Day Without
Immigrants” 57; Chinese immigrant
men, concealed stories 51, 52; United
We Dream 74, 75
immigration laws from 1790s through
1965 54
Indian Removal Act of 1830 54
inequality, economic 28, 31
integration illusion 33
International Center for Tolerance
Education (ICTE) 9
Irani, Kayhan 4, 65, 77, 122 , 127
Japanese-American internment 62 – 65
jobs: discrimination in hiring and
promotion 35; racial segregation 35;
unemployment/underemployment 35
Kelley, Robin D. G. 28, 73, 123
King, Martin Luther, Jr., “I Have a
Dream” speech 12
King, Rodney, killing of 46
Ladson-Billings, Gloria 12
Latinos, police killing of 46
learning edge 94, 115, 116, 119, 121, 122 ,
125
Levins-Morales, Aurora 13, 15, 19, 44,
45, 47, 48
LGBTQIA people 75, 90, 104
literature: concealed stories in 57;
resistance expressed in 78, 79
local community resisters as role models
and mentors 81
Madura, John 129 –138
mainstream discourse 17, 44, 46, 58
marginalizing social and political claims 33
Martin, Trayvon, killing of 46
mass incarceration 75
master narratives 32
memory work, revealing stories through
48 –51
meritocracy 18, 28 –29, 30, 31, 32 , 34,
58, 95, 106
Index
Mexican people, mural paintings affirming
history and indigenous roots of 79
Montgomery bus boycott 72 , 86
Morrison, Toni, Nobel Prize acceptance
speech 93
Mothers on the Move (MOM) 81
mural paintings expressing resistance 79
Murphy, Brett 21, 55, 75, 107, 127
National Conference for Race and
Ethnicity in American Higher
Education 66
Native Americans: American Dream
stock story 36, 45; concealed stories
45, 51, 53; Dakota Access Pipeline
(DAPL) Protests 74; economic
mobility 56; historical accounts of
treatment 53, 54; Homestead Act of
1862 54; image of “Wilderness” by
David Avalos 51; Indian Removal Act
of 1830 54; photographic record of
tribes 51; police killing of 46; removal
of stereotypical and racist symbols
in sport and culture 47; resistance to
domination 73; Southern Homestead
Act of 1866 54
negative stereotypes, drawing upon 31
newspapers and other media, critical
reading 79, 80
New York Collective of Radical
Educators (NYCORE) 102
norming stage 125, 135, 136
Obama, Barack, speech to presidential
convention in 2004 36 –38
Opportunity Atlas, The 55, 56
perception gap 33
Perry, Theresa, essay 96
Pietri, Pedro, “Puerto Rican Obituary” 57
plantation economy 54
poetry: American Dream 18, 19, 36;
concealed stories in 45 – 48, 57;
developing story types 17; resistance
expressed in 78, 79; transformative
learning, as 14
police-involved death by race/ethnicity
46, 79, 80
political speeches 36 –38
“Polling for Justice,” youth participatory
research 80
polls showing white American opinions 28
power of storytelling: analytic tools,
stories as 13; problematizing story 14,
145
15; transformative learning, the arts
as 13, 14
professional development 1, 8, 21, 69,
140, 141
public schools see schools
race, as a social construction 10
“Race: The Power of an Illusion” DVD
54, 116, 117, 120
racial identity 10
racism: conceptualizing 10, 11; conscious
awareness 11; “embodied and
ideational” 13; polls and statistics
showing white American opinions
28; “structural and institutional” 13;
system that operates on multiple levels,
as a 10, 11
residential segregation 35
resistance stories: Angelou, Maya,
“Still I Rise” 78, 79; Baca, Judy,
essay on mural paintings expressing
resistance 79; Bell, Alexandra
“Counternarratives” 79, 80; Black
Lives Matter 73; community
storytelling for racial reconciliation
84 – 88; “Complete the Image” activity
77, 78; contemporary resistance
movements 73; counter-stories
72 , 79, 80; counter-storytelling
community, norming to performing
122 –124; critical literacy 108; Dakota
Access Pipeline (DAPL) Protests
74; definition of resistance 71, 72;
education for democracy 75 –77;
emerging from concealed stories
71; focus 72; gentrification and
displacement of people of color 76,
77; learning about resistance through
poetry/literature and public art 78,
79; lessons from past movements 75;
literature, resistance expressed in 78,
79; local community resisters as role
models and mentors 81; Mothers on
the Move (MOM) 81; mural paintings
expressing resistance 79; overview
20, 71–73; participatory research,
learning through 80; poetry, resistance
expressed in 78, 79; “Polling for
Justice” 80; Rosa Parks and the
Montgomery bus boycott 72 , 86;
sources 71; Theatre of the Oppressed
77; United We Dream 74, 75; youth
participatory action research 80; youth
resistance 75 –77, 80, 81, 108
146
Index
“reverse racism” and “reverse
discrimination” 29
Rethinking Schools 100
Rivera Maulucci, María S. 4, 110
Roberts, Rosemarie 107, 119, 112 , 127
Rohwer Relocation Center 62 – 65
Rosa Parks story 72 , 86, 97
Sarris, Greg 93
schools: course readings 94; curriculum
design 97–99, 102 –105; Education
Trust (2018) report 56; emerging/
transforming stories, schools as sites
for 90 –92; Freire, Paulo, Reading
the World and Reading the Word
102; historical failures 90, 91; public
education and reform 91; reading the
written word and the world beyond
the classroom 102 –105; re-segregation
56; stock and concealed stories 93 –97;
stories about race operating in U.S.
schools 135; student population 91;
student teachers 94 –100; teaching
population 91, 92; using Storytelling
Project Model to prepare educators
92 –100
school to prison pipeline 75
Schwarzenegger, Arnold, speech to
presidential convention in 2004 36 –38
Sealey-Ruiz, Yolanda 70
sensory engagement 13
Silko, Leslie Marmon 13, 15
single story, challenging 66 –70
slave ownership 31, 50, 54
social action projects 99
social justice education paradigm, starting
point for Storytelling Project 9
social science data, finding concealed
stories in 55 –57
Social Security Act 1935 54
Southern Homestead Act of 1866 54
Standing Rock protests 74
stock stories: American Dream (see
American Dream); challenging
32 –34; collective but spoken through
individuals 28 –30; color-blind
story 29; contradicting dominant
narratives 32 , 33; contrasting/
comparing concealed stories with
19, 58; counter narratives 33, 34;
counter-storytelling community,
forming to storming 117, 118; critical
literacy 106, 107; deconstructing
32; definition 27; Delphi method,
use for gathering stories 131–136;
historical context 28 –30; immutability
33, 34; innocence, perceptions
of 30 –32; integration illusion 33;
learning to teach courageously 41– 43;
marginalizing social and political
claims 33; meritocracy naturalizing
“maldistribution of opportunity” 32;
negative stereotypes, drawing upon
31; neutralizing challenges to their
authority 32 , 33; operating to advance
particular goals and interests 30 –32;
overview 18, 27, 28; perception gap
33; personalized story lines about
other groups 31; resisting 41– 43;
schools, course readings 93 –97;
social data base creation 31; “stock,”
meaning 27; white people presented in
a favorable light 30 –32
stories: aesthetic experience of 14;
analytic tools, as 13; concealed stories
(see concealed stories); critical analysis
of 15, 21; direction of 21; emerging
stories (see emerging/transforming
stories); link between 20, 21; power of
storytelling 13 –15; problematic form
14, 15; resistance stories (see resistance
stories); sources of crucial information
21; stock stories (see stock stories);
transforming stories (see emerging/
transforming stories); types of 17–21
storming stage 4, 129
Storytelling Project Model: “boundary
artefact” 42; Civil Rights Educator
Institute, Narrative Strategy approach
62– 65; collaborative theory building
process 9; concealed stories (see
concealed stories); creation of a
community of diverse members
16, 17; creation of the model 8, 9;
creative team 9; counter-storytelling
communities (see counter-storytelling
communities); developing story
types 17–21; diagram of (figure 1.1)
18; direction of stories 21; emerging
stories (see emerging/transforming
stories); facilitating challenging
conversations 16; generative process
8, 9; ground rules, development of
16, 17; identification of barriers to
dialogue 16; important pillar of postgraduation critical professional practice
43; key concepts for understanding
race and racism 9 –13; learning to
Index
teach courageously 41– 43; power of
storytelling 13 –15; resistance stories
(see resistance stories); single story
4, 67; starting point 9; stock stories
(see stock stories); teachers, use by
92–100; “terms of engagement” 16;
tools for developing a critical lens 21;
transforming stories (see emerging/
transforming stories); use in education
programs 41– 43, 66 –70, 92; users of 21
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC) 84, 85
summer institute 6, 21, 111, 113, 127
“sundown towns” 54
teachers see emerging/transforming
stories; schools, emerging/
transforming stories
“Teach Us All” documentary 56
Thanksgiving 45, 53
Testimonials 31
Theatre of the Oppressed 77
Third Millennium Foundation grant 9
Till, Emmett, murder of, defacement of
memorial 47
transforming stage 129
trauma 45, 48, 50
understanding race and racism: colorblindness 12; critical race theory 12 ,
13; key concepts 9 –13; race as a social
construction 10; racism as a system
that operates on multiple levels 10, 11;
white supremacy and white privilege/
advantage 11
147
unemployment/underemployment 35
United We Dream 74, 75
Unpacking the American Dream 36 –38
urban schools 31, 92 , 95, 96
van Dijk, Teun A. 11, 15, 28, 31
Venn diagram 37, 38
Victim, blaming the 32
visual art, concealed stories, use to
retrieve stories 51–53
visualization and writing exercise,
concealed stories 48, 49
Wagner Act 1935 54
wealth gap 35
West African history 103, 104
white advantage 5, 10, 19, 34, 53, 57,
117, 120
white antiracism work 46
white people: concealed stories 46; stock
stories 28 –32
whitestream 15
white supremacy and white privilege/
advantage, key concept in
understanding race and racism 11
Williams, Patricia 12 , 94
Wong, Flo Oy artist: “Baby Jack Rice
Story” 52; “Made in USA: Angel
Island Shhh” installation 52
Yosso, Tara 12 , 13, 19, 45
youth and resistance 75 –77, 80, 81
Zendejas, Rodrigo Lara, “Deportable
Aliens” exhibit 52