Changing Hearts and Minds Through Narrative
On the morning of November 14, 1960, Ruby Bridges walked down North Galvez Street in the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, Louisiana. Armed with a determined resolve, expressed by the steeled look on her young face, she took a right turn down the street and then walked through the yard of William Frantz Elementary School.
That day, like all six-year-olds across the country, Ruby was walking to school. But this morning was a little different. On this morning, Ruby was challenging entrenched segregationist school policies, and she was on the way to permanently changing public education in this country.
Ruby was not alone. She walked cautiously with her mother by her side, tightly gripping her hand. Four federal marshals escorted them through the schoolyard. Crowds attempted to burst through the ropes that had been erected as protective barriers along their path. The protestors screamed vicious slurs and hurled bananas; they were objecting to the very fact that this six-year-old was about to enter a public school. Ruby walked forward, becoming stronger and more resolute with each step, only growing nervous when she saw a woman holding a black baby doll in a coffin. The doll gave her nightmares for the rest of her childhood.
She braved the crowds, and entered William Frantz Elementary. The moment she did so, Ruby became the first African American in the entire southern region of the United States to enter a previously all-white elementary school.
A six-year-old was playing a major role in breaking barriers and blazing a path for the entire civil rights movement. Ruby’s personal story demonstrated the value and importance of racial equality beyond talking points and policies. Her buoyancy, natural innocence, and energy drove home the very personal way that the civil rights movement could affect real lives. Ruby’s journey began to provoke a sentiment of empathy that would soon pervade society.
She was only six years old, but she was facing down a country built on generations of racism.
CHANGING THE STATUS QUO
We have chosen our issue. And we have begun to develop expertise through effective policy and research. Our next step in our political journey is to tell the story of why we started the journey in the first place.
Compelling personal stories are indispensable to changing and transforming hearts and minds, and they are a crucial component to a political journey that leads to lasting and systemic change. Ruby’s personal journey, which began after policy change mandated integration, inspired millions of people across the United States. Ruby put a face to the challenges of school segregation.
Ruby was born in 1954 in Tylertown, Mississippi, the oldest of five children. Her birth year coincided with the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which established the legal precedent for effectively ending racial segregation in schools. Despite the legally binding decision requiring schools to open their doors to students of all races, Southern states continued to resist integration, arguing that whites and African Americans should receive different schooling. This continued a policy of “separate but equal,” which implicitly, and even sometimes explicitly, argued that white children deserved a more advanced form of education solely based on the color of their skin. Segregation became a national spark plug, with Southern governors and states rebuking the federal government and refusing to follow the law of the land. The Eisenhower and Kennedy presidential administrations were forced to continually, and often times ineffectively, grapple with their role of enforcing the Supreme Court decision at the local level and effectively ensuring Southern states were compliant.
Amid this national turmoil, Ruby’s parents left Mississippi. In 1956, they attempted to find more lucrative employment and better educational opportunities for their children in Louisiana. While Ruby had attended a segregated kindergarten in Mississippi, her parents hoped that would not be the case in New Orleans. A 1960 federal follow-up ruling to Brown v. Board ordered Louisiana schools to desegregate immediately.
In their persistent resistance to legal compliance, the New Orleans school district created another work-around. The district created biased entrance exams specifically administered to African American students in order to assess whether they could compete at the same academic standard at all-white schools. Hundreds of students took the test. Ruby, along with five other students, passed. Technically speaking, Ruby was now free to attend the school of her choosing.
Ruby’s parents, however, were not in agreement on the decision for Ruby to attend the all-white William Frantz Elementary School, located just a few blocks from their home in New Orleans. Having witnessed the challenges of navigating a white-dominated society for his entire life, Ruby’s father resisted his daughter’s matriculation, asserting that it would be too dangerous for a six-year-old to fight against the historical oppression that had held him and his family back for so long. He did not want Ruby to face racism every single day she went to school.
Ruby’s mother, however, was adamant that her daughter should attend William Frantz. She wanted Ruby to have the educational opportunities that her parents had never been afforded, even if she would have to fight every single day for that right.
The state legislature, meanwhile, continued to drag its feet, passing numerous anti-integration bills in the late summer and early fall. The Louisiana governor, Jimmie Davis, indicated that he would go to jail before allowing black children to attend all-white schools. He went as far as to threaten to close down all public schools in the state if the federal law was implemented.
Finally, the federal district court struck down the state’s anti-integration laws as unconstitutional. United States district court judge J. Skelly Wright ordered the Orleans Parish School Board to put in a formal plan to desegregate, and President Eisenhower ordered the federal government to send federal marshals to New Orleans to protect the students.
And so came the fateful November day. Ruby was excited to attend her new school, but she was largely unaware of her looming role in a moment of national reckoning.
Ruby resisted the protesters and ignored the slurs as she entered the school. She recalled that her six-year-old self thought that it must be Mardi Gras. “I’m in a parade because that’s what happens in New Orleans,” she said in a recent interview. “We have Mardi Gras and the street is blocked off and people are standing there and there’s police officers everywhere and they’re throwing things, it’s a huge celebration. So in my six-year-old mind, we stumbled into a Mardi Gras parade.”
But after she passed through her “parade” and walked through the school doors, the unrelenting storm of racism continued. She spent her entire first day in the principal’s office, attempting to outlast the bedlam. But chaos ensued throughout the school, with many white parents pulling their children from school for the day. Some parents ultimately forced their kids to leave the elementary school permanently, unwilling to allow them to attend class with an African American girl.
Ruby was unable to understand the racism exhibited in the halls around her. She was confused as to why she was being treated differently solely because of the color of her skin. She said her parents did not even try to explain racism to her. “The only thing they said to me is, ‘You’re gonna go to the new school today and you better behave.’ That is what I was concentrating on.”
Only one educator in the entire school, Barbara Henry, a white Bostonian, was willing to teach Ruby. And so Ruby attended a class of one for the entire year. Her solitary education led to a gradual understanding of the fact that she was treated differently because of her skin color. Ruby ate lunch alone and attended class alone. But she did not miss a day of class the entire year.
Ultimately, neither Ruby’s determination nor her performance in school was enough to end the tensions surrounding the fall of segregation. Protests continued outside of the school building for months. Ruby’s father lost his job: his employer was unwilling to tolerate the hatred the Bridges family now engendered throughout the community. Stores refused to sell food and clothing to Ruby’s mom. Her grandparents were evicted from the farm where they had lived as sharecroppers for over twenty years. All because a six-year-old girl had torn down the artificially imposed walls that had come to define education in the United States.
But Ruby kept attending school, and ceilings kept shattering. Other African American students enrolled in public schools—in New Orleans and eventually across the entire South. Ruby ended up graduating from a desegregated school and became a national civil rights icon. Her journey through the school gates was memorialized in a Norman Rockwell painting entitled The Problem We All Live With. Decades later, she was awarded a Presidential Citizens Medal by President Clinton.
Although Ruby’s political journey was prominently featured in the news, it would be wrong to declare that Ruby’s story singularly changed the course of the civil rights movement. It’s critical, as we learned from Anthony’s story, that we don’t simplify individual stories into broad success narratives.
Ruby’s political journey, however, demonstrates the importance of storytelling, and the personal narrative, in creating change. When Ruby started school, morally just governmental policies were already in place. The ruling to desegregate schools had granted African Americans the educational equality they had long sought. Doing its part to enforce the law, the federal government sent in the National Guard to protect Ruby and fellow classmates as they entered school under extreme duress.
But in this case, policy was insufficient. Popular culture needed to change, and citizens needed to change their minds. Fair and just policy is critical to lasting social change, but a culture supporting the policies is just as important. Telling effective stories is vital in helping to persuade people of the validity of the cause.
Simply put, stories can change the status quo. Stories are a critical component to all political journeys.
THE PUBLIC NARRATIVE
Stories have been creating change since the dawn of personhood. The Epic of Gilgamesh, often regarded as one of the earliest surviving forms of literature, dates to 2100 BC, over four thousand years ago, and focuses on themes like the importance of wisdom and kindness that remain relevant in modern times. Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad are masterpieces created over two millenia ago; these texts contain stories about loyalty, family, and vengeance that we can still relate to and learn from.
Since before humans could write, we have inspired our brethren through stories. We grow to understand and appreciate our shared values through stories that inspire, teach, and entertain. Stories also inspire necessary empathy on the long road to political change.
Change in a democracy is ostensibly dependent on the will of the people. Thus, in order to enact real change, citizens must be able to convince one another to alter opinions and to adopt causes. To achieve progress, it is important not only to select an issue and develop expertise, but also to engage in the art of persuasion, influencing others to agree with your issue and join the cause.
Harvard professor Marshall Ganz learned the importance of persuasion through effective political storytelling while working with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers in the 1970s. Ganz and Chavez helped to revolutionize rights for workers in this country through organizing, unionizing, and fighting for farmers’ rights. Storytelling was critical in the effort to persuade the American public that the farm workers were worthy of equal rights. Many Americans believed that the lives of migrant workers were worth less than ordinary citizens, and thought that they could carry out only the most menial of tasks. Americans did not consider that these humble migrants were worthy of receiving the same rights as the majority of American workers.
Using the art of storytelling, Ganz and Chavez helped to tell the real story of the migrant workers, ensuring that the American people saw them as laudable individuals who merited equal treatment under the law. Storytelling helped spur a national movement to unionize, which changed how farm workers were treated and how employees organized in the face of oppression in the workplace.
Ganz used his observations to develop a technique he has called the art of public narrative. For Ganz, “Stories not only teach us how to act—they inspire us to act. Stories communicate our values through the language of the heart, our emotions. And it is what we feel—our hopes, our cares, our obligations—not simply what we know that can inspire us with the courage to act.”
This rhetoric, while inspiring, is not just Ganz’s philosophy—it is empirical truth. Scholars at one point believed that people process messages in two fundamental ways. The first is “centrally,” in which we critically examine a message. The second is “peripherally,” in which we do not pay substantive attention to the message and focus more on the speaker or our mood.
If they are to be convinced to care about an issue, audiences must process information centrally. For people to viscerally understand the importance of desegregating schools, they must examine why such a change is warranted—they cannot reluctantly or passively engage with the issue.
The problem, however, is that people engage centrally only if they have a personal stake in the issue. This truth becomes a challenge. How can you convince people to engage centrally in an issue like racial equality if they do not have anything at stake? Relatedly, how can you convince white people to allow an African American girl to attend their school if they feel like their own well-being is at risk, as irrational as that might be?
An answer (not necessarily the answer) is public narrative. Researchers have found that we actually process stories not centrally or peripherally, but through a third route. When we hear powerful narratives, like that of Ruby Bridges’s travails, we personally empathize with the subject, and, in a way, we process the actual events and emotions that the narrator experiences. This type of visceral immersion can lend itself to persuasion and the changing of opinions, even when people are not personally invested in the subject. The brain itself processes stories empathetically, relating to the narrator and diving to a level deeper than solely connecting to the facts at hand.
Politicians buy into this reasoning. Listen to any political speech, and you’ll see this logic at work as elected officials use stories to engage in the art of persuasion as they attempt to solidify support. At any given State of the Union, the president will (quite literally) point to people present to illustrate broader points. This is exactly why Anthony was in Michelle Obama’s box—his rags-to-riches story illuminated the potential of any young person in this country to emerge from a challenging past, achieve success, and attend college.
Telling Anthony’s narrative is more powerful than regurgitating statistics. Stories persuade where statistics exhaust. This is why nonprofit organizations plaster stories of kids like Anthony on their promotional materials; they create an emotional connection with the audience that can lead to real change.
But of course, compelling stories don’t always work.
Stories can become overly didactic and high-minded. Research has also demonstrated that stories actually have no effect if the message is too explicit. People want to come to their own conclusions—they do not want to be beaten over the head with a moral argument. They do not want to be told that they are a bad person, or less than, if they do not empathize with the protagonist. They do not want to be shamed into a specific position. We can see this play out with Ruby’s predicament in the desegregation of schools. Citizens did not want to be thought of as deplorable humans because they did not immediately buy into the moral argument about the importance of diversity and inclusion.
Often, political messages play to the lowest common denominator and apply guilt to force agreement with a certain position. Politicians will play on either-or narratives, simplifying complex stories into dichotomies in an attempt to achieve marginal political gains. For example, politicians can sometimes blame the entirety of a family’s financial challenges on the greed of Wall Street. This story can be overly simplistic and can lead to mobilizing a base more than it effectively convinces others to join a particular side.
Nonprofits can engage in similarly deceptive and moralistic behavior: simplifying their narrative in a way that implies their intervention quite literally transforms the lives of their constituents. Go to any nonprofit gala—the organization will parade its stakeholders (oftentimes brown and black young people) in front of wealthy individuals (usually white older people) in an attempt to dictate the moral argument that the nonprofit has unilaterally changed their lives. This simplistic act is demeaning to constituents and can (and should) come across as shallow to the audience. To an extent, GC did this through our telling of Anthony’s story.
Along these lines, it can be easy to oversimplify a story and suggest that it is the only story. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian American writer, calls this “the danger of the single story.” In a 2009 TED Talk, Adichie used her complex personal history as a woman from Nigeria who grew up in the United States to make the case for the richness of individual human stories, and she warned about the danger of reducing nuance into a single narrative. Adichie declares that, “The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”
Adichie argues that Africans are much more than poor starving children with flies on their faces—even if this narrative may motivate a donor to give more upon seeing a nonprofit annual report. When using narrative to persuade, Adichie argues, we cannot reduce people to one single story and essentially take away their humanity. Thus, we need to engage in narrative storytelling that captures the essence and complexity of the protagonist and does not hit the audience over the head with an overt morality tale.
As Adichie concludes, “Stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity.”
One way to tell personal stories that persuade others while respecting the humanity of the subject is to engage in the narrative framework that Ganz has attempted to perfect and popularize over time, which includes three elements: story of self, story of us, and story of now. This method of storytelling is a critical component to any political journey. It allows us to explain why we care about a specific issue, relate how this issue affects a community, and provide specific action items that relate to the current moment. This form of storytelling can inspire, inform, persuade, and eventually lead to action. The framework also builds upon the first steps of our political journey, utilizing the issues we have chosen and the expertise we have developed in a compelling, accessible format.
The story of self involves articulating why you have been called to the work, or why the issue affects you. In a sense, you’re articulating the elements discussed in chapter 7: explaining, on a personal level, why the issue matters so much to you. We can look to Cristina’s staunch advocacy for immigrant rights through the lens of her own family background as an example of the story of self.
The story of us incorporates elements to explain how the issue affects the broader community and describes the shared purposes and values related to the issue. Effectively articulating a story of us ensures that the issue becomes about more than a story of self and appeals to a broader segment of the population. We are all part of multiple communities, so it becomes critical to determine the identity you wish to call upon in this story of now. It could be a family, a school environment, a city, or even the state and country.
The story of now relates to the specific action that we can take in this moment to further the issue and make a difference. Here we can call upon the expertise we’ve developed on the issue. This part of the narrative ensures that the people you’ve inspired can take concrete action in the moment.
Ruby’s story fits into this narrative framework. Her story of self is that of a six-year-old girl fighting to enter an elementary-school building and receive an education. But her story of self is more than this simple narrative. Her family suffered tremendously while standing up for Ruby’s right to go to a white school. And Ruby herself spent much of her childhood being scrutinized by the media. We celebrate Ruby’s story now, but her story of self, in 1960, was not necessarily a cause for celebration. She was a six-year-old subjected to daily abuse because of the color of her skin. Ruby’s story of self has had zigs and zags, like any political journey. She encountered many setbacks on the road to real change.
For Ruby, the story of us focuses on a society, largely, and a community, specifically, forced to grapple with whether the words our founders once memorialized—that all of us are created equal, with certain inalienable rights—are just a creed or are a reality. The story of us compels us to ask if a true democratic and equitable society can hold if it causes a forced separation of young people from public institutions of education.
Ruby’s story touched multiple communities: the school, which was forced to decide whether it would actually work to educate all young people; New Orleans, which unwittingly became ground zero for the desegregation fight in the South; and the United States, which, through the civil rights movement, continued to reckon with the entrenched, racist institutions and policies that accompanied the white supremacy and legacy of slavery upon which this country was founded.
Ruby’s story of now called for concrete action: desegregating schools and ensuring that African American children had the same educational opportunities as their white counterparts. Ruby was a model and a catalyst for change, demonstrating to other children and their families that they too could begin the process of desegregation.
Ultimately, this led to a cultural shift in which Ruby’s journey became seen not as the exception but as the norm. While the courts and the federal government had mandated desegregation, Ruby’s political journey, which is memorialized through her personal narrative, played a pivotal role in making the policy a reality.
Ruby herself may not have articulated this personal narrative when she was going through her political journey. But the facts of her story, which fit into Ganz’s public narrative framework, did play an integral role in persuading others of the validity and importance of desegregating schools.
SEGREGATION REEMERGES
Ruby’s story is powerful. But just like any story on the political journey, it is incomplete.
Segregation continues to be a rampant problem in public education. Today, schools are actually resegregating; they have become as separated as they were about fifty years ago when Brown v. Board was first ruled on by the Supreme Court. We cannot reduce the story of segregation into a single story, as the reality is much more complex.
In the mid 1980s, after significant progress, 40 percent of African American students in the South attended a formerly all-white school, while less than a third of all African American students attended African American–only schools. Since the 1990s, however, the trend has almost completely reversed. In the South, more than 75 percent of African American students attend majority-minority schools, and 38 percent attend schools with a white population of 10 percent or less. In other words, schools are becoming segregated by race anew. And the issue is not particular to the South—school resegregation is happening across the country.
Despite an American public that can sometimes claim racial enlightenment, a more perverse, soft form of racism has led to some of the resegregation of our schools today. Many communities say one thing about diversity in schools but act in another way when the issue hits them personally. Many white families claim to support policies that integrate schools and provide more diversity, but their actions speak louder than words. Too often they opt to put their children in predominantly white schools with better funding, rather than promoting fully diverse schools that actually statistically can produce better academic outcomes.
Writer Nikole Hannah-Jones offers her personal narrative to shine light on this hypocrisy. Hannah-Jones engages in the art of persuasion in a 2016 New York Times Magazine article entitled “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City.” As her African American daughter came of age in a predominantly black, low-income neighborhood in Brooklyn, Hannah-Jones noticed that, “In one of the most diverse cities in the world, the children who attend these schools learn in classrooms where all of their classmates—and I mean, in most cases, every single one—are black and Latino, and nearly every student is poor.”
Hannah-Jones and her spouse were doing well financially and interacted with neighbors and peers of a similar economic status. None of Hannah-Jones’s middle-class neighbors sent their kids to lesser-resourced schools. Instead, they found more prominent magnet schools, which require admissions tests, or even private, progressive schools with a majority white student body.
Hannah-Jones’s story of us demonstrates that this school segregation reality is not just germane to her neighborhood: New York City has one of the most segregated school districts in the United States. According to a report released by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, 85 percent of black students and 75 percent of Latino students attend “intensely” segregated schools in New York City, which are less than 10 percent white. This self-segregation occurs despite study after study demonstrating that more diverse schools lead to better learning outcomes. The city, while claiming to be a beacon of progressivism, has become increasingly segregated in recent years precisely because concerned parents voice one opinion about supporting and wanting diversity in schools and then act in a divergent manner.
Hannah-Jones and her husband intentionally fought against this new reality by sending their daughter to a neighborhood public school. They did this despite the fact that their economic status would have allowed them to send her elsewhere. Their story of now encourages families to abide by their own philosophies and rhetoric, bucking current trends to fight for a more equitable education system by speaking truth to power.
By publishing this piece in the New York Times Magazine, Hannah-Jones hoped to use her story, just like Ruby did, to persuade others to adopt her cause. She wasn’t only trying to create policy change. In New York City, some of the right policies already exist to encourage school integration. More than pushing for a policy, Hannah-Jones was trying to use her narrative to cause a culture shift: she wanted to convince parents to send their children to neighborhood schools to desegregate the system.
It is a rich personal narrative when contrasted with Ruby’s. Ruby’s family had her attend a majority-white school in order to begin to desegregate the United States’ schools. Hannah-Jones and her husband sent their daughter away from a majority-white school in order to fight against the increasing ability for wealthier parents to send their students wherever they wanted.
Of course, no single story is adequate. We must tell many personal narratives. The constant with both Hannah-Jones and Ruby, despite the fact that their narratives occur decades apart, is the power of story.
Approaching the challenge of segregation with open eyes, and as an ongoing conflict, is not meant to denigrate or dismiss Ruby’s efforts. It is also worth noting that although Ruby embraced her role in the national racial justice efforts, her family did not ask to be the national face of desegregation. They simply wanted Ruby to receive a high-quality education. Oftentimes, because of the power of personal narrative, we put all of our hopes and dreams on one story, without recognizing the players’ own agency in the story or others who may have helped pave the way.
Ruby’s narrative made a real impact in terms of convincing the rest of the United States of the merits of desegregation. But just like so much progress we see on the political journey, the path to change is not linear. Rather, the journey, pushed forward by Ruby Bridges, continues today.
EXPERIENCE TO ACTION
Lexie Tesch, a Berkeley High School student, used personal narrative to motivate others to care about an issue close to her heart—homelessness.
Lexie grew up in a single-mother household. Her mother worked in the catering industry, and, according to Lexie, she saw politics as “one giant mess.” But Lexie ran for student council in fourth grade, though she lost by one vote. She ran again in fifth grade, and she lost by two votes. She began to doubt that the whole notion of youth change would lead anywhere. After her second heartbreaking loss in two years, she decided her days in politics were over. Who could blame her?
Disappointment at school turned to even more disappointment at home. Lexie’s mom lost her job and was unable to afford rent. Before long, Lexie and her mom were evicted from their house. Lexie spent the next three years floating around the homes of family and friends, effectively homeless. At the time, Lexie could not comprehend why they had been evicted in the first place.
“I did not understand why,” she told me. “Why would they take my home from me and my family? I was really confused. I was upset at the system.”
Lexie, like so many of her young peers, was disenchanted with politics. The public system had consistently told Lexie that she could not do anything to change her situation. She could not do anything to secure housing. Politics and government became defined as nameless but malevolent institutions that had forced her and her mom away from her childhood home without any reason.
In eighth grade, Lexie’s home life finally became more stable—her mom found employment and was able to rent a new house. At school, in one of her classes, Generation Citizen entered, and she began an Action Civics project, embarking on her political journey through the Advocacy Hourglass.
When it became time to choose a focus issue, Lexie’s classmates wanted to explore homelessness. Lexie did not want to go along with the issue: she was embarrassed and ashamed by her past. She felt that if her class chose the issue, she would be forced to talk about her experiences.
“I just felt really weird about it,” she admitted.
Against Lexie’s protests, the class did select homelessness as their issue. Soon after, in front of the entire class, Lexie found the strength to talk about her experience being temporarily homeless. She admitted how challenging it was as a young person, moving from home to home, devoid of stability. She admitted she was ashamed. She thought being homeless was partially her fault, since she did not think many other young people were homeless.
This was the first time she had told others about her family situation. Talking through the experience was liberating. Opening up allowed Lexie to feel like her voice really mattered. She began to appreciate that her personal experience also gave her valuable expertise that she could use.
As her class engaged in research on the issue, developing their expertise, Lexie recognized she was not the only young person in such a situation, especially with rising housing costs and an unemployment crisis in the Bay Area.
“I realized that I was not the only one who had been homeless,” she told me. “Eventually, I felt a sense of closure. I wasn’t alone; there were so many people like me in my situation.” In fact, thousands of youth were homeless in the area, despite the fact that the Bay Area is a paragon of immense wealth. It has become an epitome of the realities of massive economic inequality that have come to define the modern United States.
She began to recognize that her experience was a way to elicit empathy. “People never would have suspected that I used to be homeless,” she said. “It allowed me to connect to other people. They were moved by my story.”
The class realized that Berkeley had only one homeless shelter, and it was open for only half of the year because of a lack of funds. The class decided to focus on convincing the city council to fund the shelter year-round. While this would obviously not solve the homeless problem in its entirety, it was a necessary step to helping young people throughout the region.
The class met with the city council, and Lexie put her expertise to work. She used her story and public narrative to make the case:
The issue is particularly personal for me because I was homeless for about three years. If it wasn’t for my family, I would have needed to stay in that shelter. But where would I have gone during the time it was closed? This is what other real youth have to go through.
We need to fix it. As a community, we need to ensure that all young people are cared for and valued. We can take a step in the right direction by making sure that this shelter is funded year-round.
Lexie’s storytelling did more than guilt the council members through a moral imperative. She helped them to empathize with her plight. Here she was, an eloquent and compelling young woman standing before them who had been homeless only a year earlier.
Additionally, rather than focusing only on her story, she told a story of the entire community. She then gave a specific way that the council could take action.
The city council was startled that these middle school students were advocating so forcefully for the measure. “People were shocked that we were trying to do these things,” Lexie said. “We showed how young we were, but how much we cared about the issue, and how much we wanted the shelter for those who needed it.”
Largely because of the work of the young people, the city council ended up passing legislation to increase funding for the homeless shelter, which is now open year-round.
Still, youth homelessness continues to be a problem. As the Bay Area continues to develop with a presence of wealthy technology entrepreneurs, this wealth is not trickling down to the majority of citizens, and economic inequality is worsening. Many are struggling to afford basic housing. As a result, in 2017, more than fifteen hundred young people in the Bay Area were homeless, one of the worst per capita rates in the entire country. Lexie’s work made a difference, but the political journey continues, both for her and for homeless youth across the area.
TELLING STORIES IN A POLARIZED WORLD
While stories matter and can change minds, and ultimately, policy, it is increasingly complicated to use stories in a country in which we often are not even able to agree on the same facts. Personal narrative, rather than being a persuasive storytelling technique, can sometimes alienate and divide people.
We can look to NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s story as an example. A successful quarterback who led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2014, Kaepernick began sitting during the National Anthem in the lead-up to the 2016 NFL season. Kaepernick stated that his intention was to bring attention to racial inequality in this country through his action.
After the first game in which his sitting was noticed, he remarked, “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
Kaepernick was, perhaps without realizing it, telling his personal narrative. His story of self, growing up as a mixed-race athlete in a divided country, worked as a window that displayed racial tensions across the United States. His story of us focused on the community of people of color, shining light on the police shootings of African Americans. And his story of now demanded concrete action: sitting for the anthem and making specific policy demands of law enforcement. Kaepernick soon began to work more extensively with different racial justice groups and to direct his personal philanthropy to community groups across the country.
Kaepernick’s story inspired millions—other NFL players began to sit or kneel, and Kaepernick became a racial justice icon, with many young people pointing to him as their reason for engaging in activism. At the same time, many believed that sitting for the National Anthem was blasphemous and that Kaepernick had committed the equivalent of treason. During the 2016 presidential election, then candidate Donald Trump urged NFL owners to never sign Kaepernick and to keep him on the streets. Trump’s rhetoric may mark a principal reason that Kaepernick remained unsigned for the duration of the 2017 NFL season while much less skilled players were picked up by franchises week after week.
Kaepernick demonstrates that while having a personal narrative is critical, it can be challenging to deploy effectively. It does not always work. Kaepernick, like Ruby Bridges before him, shows that when you are engaging in your political journey and telling your story of self, us, and now, there is no guarantee that everyone will find it persuasive. Indeed, some might push back and tell completely different stories.
It is challenging to promote individual narratives that inspire action without alienating fellow citizens. But storytelling remains an incredibly important and powerful method of persuading citizens to care about your issue.
DEVELOPING YOUR PERSONAL NARRATIVE
Here are some potential questions you can ask when developing your story of self, your story of us, and your story of now:
TELL WHY YOU HAVE BEEN CALLED TO SERVE
To begin your story of self, recall your own moments of political awakening. Focus on moments in your life when you had to choose values in the face of uncertainty. Consider potentially including the answers to the following questions in your story of self:
• When did you first care about being heard?
• When did you first care about the issue you’re tackling?
• When did you first feel like you had to do something?
Answering these specific questions will allow you to relate your story and tell people why you care passionately about the issue. To relay my story of self, I began this book with my story of starting Generation Citizen and my story of becoming inspired to engage politically through observing elections in Kenya.
DEFINE THE COMMUNITY IN “US”
As you define the story of us, it’s critical to define the specific community you want to care about the issue. Tell a narrative that focuses on specific people—the folks that have shaped your community—and ensure that your story invites others to join you. This could be your school. It could be your larger neighborhood. It could be your city or even your state.
For Hannah-Jones, this community was New York City parents. For Lexie, this community was her city of Berkeley.
Ensuring that you concretely define your community will allow you to tailor your story to motivate a specific segment of society.
FOCUS ON CONCRETE ACTION
As you close with your story of now, focus on the choice you are asking others to make. Incorporate a concrete invitation to action in your story, like Lexie did in asking for funding for the youth homeless shelter.
You’ll be able to draw upon your developed expertise to think about the concrete action. It should relate to the root cause you’ve determined for your issue. The more specific the action, the more effective your request will be. Don’t ask to end climate change. Ask people to support the specific carbon bill that your state is considering. The more specificity you’re able to provide, the more people will be able to join in your journey.
An effective political journey requires that you engage in real persuasion. Using the personal-narrative framework to tell your story is an indispensable tool in ensuring that others are compelled by the same issue and expertise that drives your work.