Social Change Journey Narratives and Sustainable Progress

January 31, 20212 Comments

Written by Savannah Jackson; ed. assistance by Nancer Ballard.

As early as 1899, American geologist Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin proposed that changes in the climate could be the result of changes in the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Half a century later, Nobel Prize winner Glenn T. Seaborg warned that at the rate at which humans were emitting carbon dioxide, we would soon see marked changes in the climate that we would have no means of controlling or reversing. Another half a century, and numerous international efforts later, climate change today continues to accelerate rather than slow down.

Of course, the movement to protect our planet isn’t the only social movement that has struggled to achieve its goals. How is it that so many of us sincerely want social change, but find our goals so difficult to achieve?

One of the problems is that we—both social activists and the sympathetic public—are relying on social change journey narratives that do not support the goals we have.

Journey stories and narratives are important tools that we use to share ideas, convince others that they should be interested in our goals, and encourage others to actively participate in realizing these goals. Environmental protection, racial and gender equality, and other causes such as LGBTQ+ rights and income inequality, require large-scale, sustainable social change. However, the narratives that have been used to try to bring about these changes often focus on individual action and sudden high-profile moments of change that are presented as changing everything once and for all. In this post we will explore why these narratives are often counter-productive, and we will suggest alternatives that may be more realistic and beneficial for achieving meaningful social progress.

The Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, was signed by 196 countries in 2015 and became law in 2016. It was hailed as a landmark agreement to address climate change and its impacts on a world-wide basis. And it was. But signing the agreement did not change everything; in fact, it changed nothing. The goal of the Paris Agreement is to keep the global average temperature from rising 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But that can only happen if countries actually make consecutive five-year plans to control and reduce emissions, communicate their plans to the public, support one another, and implement their plans in a manner that is consistent with the longer-term goal. Transformational change requires a slow, tedious, inconvenient, no-guarantee commitment to engage in ongoing shifts in mindset and world-orientation alongside millions of other people.

*Heads of delegations pose for a group portrait at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21).*

We are not used to telling stories about transformational change until after the transformation has supposedly already happened and can be romanticized and mythologized. It is not hard to see why stories that focus on the achievement of a significant milestone are more appealing to us than stories that emphasize the need for long term commitment of personal energy and resources. Social change requires an enormous devotion of time, energy, and attention by thousands and thousands of people in order to achieve even the first remarkable milestone. Success is not guaranteed and the commitment inevitably costs more than we think it will.

When that first milestone is achieved—whether a law or treaty, or recognition of injustice with a pledge for reparations—we want to celebrate our success and assure ourselves that our effort was worthwhile and that our achievement will last. We also want to believe that the extraordinary level of sacrifice, time, energy, money, and uncertainty is at an end, or at least that the change we want won’t continue to require so much work from us. Once the emergency is over; we want to return to our “normal lives.” And so we deceive ourselves into believing that the first step or milestone achievement is instead the culmination of social change, or is such a momentous first step that everything else will roll out automatically.

When the Paris Agreement was signed, people worldwide believed that we had achieved a global commitment to combatting climate change and that success would follow as a matter of course. Each country set emissions-reduction pledges and many people took for granted the fact that these pledges would be met. A scant four years later, to the horror of many, former President Donald Trump pulled the United States, the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gasses, out of the agreement. In doing so, he demonstrated how fragile and relationship-dependent transformational change is. Signing an agreement, passing a law, or electing a new official is often a crucial achievement, but should not be confused with success or the guarantee that success will inevitably follow.

When Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008, many viewed the election of a Black American as evidence that the U.S. was finally becoming “colorblind” or “post-racial,” and assumed (erroneously) that the hard work of achieving racial equality was almost complete. It was not until twelve years later that widespread awareness of the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other Black Americans by police officers, and easy-access video proof and testimonies of the violent police response to Black Lives Matter protests, jolted many Americans into fully realizing and/or openly acknowledging that racism has continued to be present everywhere and that we have a long way to go in the fight for racial justice, equality, and equity.

So how do we change our social change journey stories and narratives to reflect the real world without becoming discouraged?

First, we acknowledge—and keep acknowledging—that lasting social change of any type occurs in increments over long periods of time through the prolonged efforts of many people. This shouldn’t discourage us; this is how it has always been. What does discourage us is when we treat milestone actions as ultimate victories, because then we are doomed to disappointment. When the next bump in the road comes, we think we have failed.

We need to adjust our attitudes and recognize that a milestone or first commemorable step is a significant action rather than the destination. Actions borne of great effort can be followed by a pause, but the exertion and subsequent rest must be seen within a narrative framework in which additional action is both necessary and assumed. Perhaps if we can see significant moments or events as actions rather than ultimate victories, we can avoid burnout and complacency.

Second, we recognize broad-scale public support and participation more, and mythologize leaders less. Social change narratives are often told as hero’s journeys and as such, focus on the efforts of a key individual actor and make that person into a mythic-like leader or hero. Mythologizing a leader is often done to inspire participation, but it can also weaken social movements. Believing that we have a leader who will save us allows us to deny the necessity of long-term commitment from “normal” people. Treating leaders as special heroes also encourages us to believe that only a few special people are needed to change the world, and that only such special people can change the world.

For example, activist Mohandas Gandhi has long been immortalized for his role in India’s anti-colonial civil disobedience movement. His leadership inspired and coordinated many to peacefully resist British control and create an autonomous India, but the tax boycotts, salt marches, home-spun cloth campaigns, and other means of peaceful resistance achieved their intended success because of the wide-spread involvement of “ordinary” Indians.

Individuals can serve as inspiration and can themselves take significant actions, but the truth is that it is the millions of ordinary people who devote their time and energy to a cause who together create change, not one special person. Narratives that encourage and enable large-scale, sustainable social change must be relationship focused. That is, narratives should recognize and emphasize the importance of the actions of a broad network of actors. Within movements working towards social change, relationships create networks of support, motivation, and accountability.

We must view milestones such as the signing of the Paris Agreement or the election of Barack Obama as actions located within a web of other actions that are brought about through a multitude of relationships. Only then can we begin to build social change journey narratives that recognize the achievement of incremental progress while renewing our commitment to our larger goals and strengthening our relationships with one another.

We’d love to hear your stories of how you have persisted and inspired others to value ongoing participation and incremental progress in long-term social change efforts. Let us know in the comments!

The Narrative and the Story

November 19, 20204 Comments

Written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson.

Stories are powerful ways to engage people, but they are usually a closed system, that is, they have a beginning, middle and end. This is part of a story’s appeal—the reader or viewer expects that whatever dilemmas the protagonist encounters will eventually be resolved physically or psychologically. Stories provide the reader with a sense of hope and completion—even if their own life feels like a tangled mess.

Stories have narrators, but a narrative is different than a story. A single series of events told by narrators with different perspectives makes each rendition of a story feel very different. The narrator’s perspective and motivations, the order in which events are told, and what events are included and excluded from the story shape the narrative and affect how we interpret the characters and events being described.

Narratives can also encompass multiple stories. Multi-story narratives can often be distilled into a single sentence or phrase, such as “The American Dream” or “Black Lives Matter.” Most importantly for our discussion here, multi-story narratives are often open ended—that is, they do not have a final resolution.

In a story or story-bound narrative, the reader enters the story-world by identifying or empathizing with the characters or situation. However, multi-story narratives often include an implicit or explicit invitation for the audience to become personally involved—e.g. to participate– in the narrative and to help determine the outcome of a story propelled by that narrative. For example, “Black Lives Matter” is a declaration about racial injustice, but it’s also a call for the listener to participate in social change.

As we’ve discussed in previous posts, narratives can operate at both personal and social/cultural levels. An example of a social narrative is the colonialist narrative that Indigenous peoples were better off being assimilated into the dominant European-derived culture because their native cultures were regarded as inferior. Another example of a social narrative is the American Dream’s promise that in the United States anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough.

Broad cultural narratives can be true, false, or true in some but not all situations, and they always contain a value-laden message designed to drive attitudes and/or behavior. Individual personal narratives include statements that you repeat to yourself to explain behavior and outcomes in multiple situations such as, “I just didn’t work hard enough,” “Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” “I should have seen it coming,” or “So it goes.”

Personal narratives that are generalized from incident to incident also contain prescriptive messages that can be helpful, harmful, or both. And, of course, personal narratives are influenced by social narratives, and personal stories and personal narratives can become part of group narratives and gradually alter broad social narratives.

In between social/cultural “master” narratives and individual personal narratives are what can be called “group” or “local” narratives. Local narratives interpret contemporary events in light of master narratives and encourage individuals to align their personal narratives with group and master narratives. Such alignment can be a powerful force for social change and/or extremist zealotry.

In Master Narratives of Islamist Extremism, Steven Corman of Arizona State University describes how Islamist extremists used narratives to interpret contemporary events as threats in order to enlist local participation. The extremist narrative was designed to entice Afghan civilians into seeing themselves as defenders of Islam against the international forces assisting the Afghan government, although the international forces were in fact there to provide security against terrorists. The Taliban portrayed international forces as modern-day Crusaders bent on subjugating and exploiting Muslims, and portrayed themselves as champions of ordinary Afghans, in order to encourage Afghans to take up the Taliban’s cause. By encouraging Afghan civilians to align their personal narratives with the Taliban master narrative the Taliban hoped to create the means to expel foreign forces and replace the democratic government with a pro-Taliban Islamic Emirate.

The recently-defeated American President Donald Trump has demonstrated a similar ability to lead a significant percentage of Americans to align their personal frustrations and anger with his narrative. Trump’s social narrative contends that those who disagree with him are “elitists” and socialists who are trying to destroy America. He also claims mainstream journalists who question his misleading statements or false claims are spreading “false news.”

In his narrative trope, the President simultaneously casts himself as the victim of those who challenge his view of himself and as the protector of true patriots. The fact that the President’s policies are often less favorable for his supporters than the policies of the Democrats, and that many of his claims are grounded on implausible or demonstrably false statements is a testament to the power that socially embedded narratives have to drive beliefs and belief systems. People of all political persuasions can interpret facts to fit their narratives rather than change their belief systems to accommodate inconsistent facts. When narratives operate independently of facts or when facts are treated as fuel for a narrative agenda rather than used to test its validity, then prejudice, rigidity of thought, and polarization inevitably follow.

None of us are immune to narratives that are nonsensical or overly simplistic, or not suited to the facts of the situation. What are your personal narratives—those slogans that you find yourself repeating aloud or to yourself? Where did they come from? Do these catch-phrases serve you? Insult you? Or both? Only when narratives arise from a genuine open-minded inquiry into events rather than a pre-determined or pre-loaded interpretation of meaning and motive, do we have a chance to enlarge our understanding of humanity. How do you fight narratives that aren’t supported by facts? We’d love to hear from you.

Harriet Tubman’s Storied Journeys

February 13, 2020March 3, 2020Leave a comment

written by Nancer Ballard; ed. assistance by Savannah Jackson

Araminta “Minty” Ross, born into slavery in 1820, flees her plantation in Dorchester, Maryland and somehow manages to make her way 100 miles on foot to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where she takes the free name that we know her by today—Harriet Tubman.

Tubman’s life as an agent for the Underground Railroad is the subject of the Academy Award nominated movie, Harriet, and she also has a key role in Ta -Nehisi Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer, which tells the story of a young man with a similar background and talent who also becomes an agent for the Underground Railroad. harrietdirector

Harriet, directed by Kasi Lemmons and starring Cynthia Erivo, tells Tubman’s life story as a fairly classic Hero’s Journey. As a girl and young woman, Minty Ross watches several of her sisters being sold to far away slave owners and being taken from her and the rest of her family. She marries a free African American, John Tubman, and obtains legal documents that confirm that her mother’s previous owner granted her children freedom—only to have her current plantation owner rip up the documents. Cynthia Eviro as Harriet Tubman Unable to bear a lifetime of enslavement, she flees north on foot (leaving her husband behind because she does not want to endanger his free status) and makes it to Philadelphia, a “free” state. Tubman joins the Underground Railroad and repeatedly risks her life to bring hundreds of black slaves to freedom even after her former owner places a large bounty on her head. Her ability to guide so many runaway slaves to freedom earns her the nickname, “Moses.” How does an actual person, rather than a mythical god or cartoon character pull this off? harriet-1563893309

Although the movie focuses almost exclusively on Tubman’s near magical successes, it provides a few hints on how a real person could become Harriet Tubman. When Tubman returns to Maryland after becoming a free woman, she discovers that her husband had presumed her dead and is now wed to another woman who is pregnant with his child. Tubman leaves him to his new family and now, single and childless, can take life-threatening risks without being psychologically torn apart by conflicting maternal loyalties and obligations. From the time that she gives up on her husband and marriage, Tubman is portrayed as being more devoted to freeing slaves than to personal relationships.

Tubman is also depicted as having extraordinarily strong faith and intuition that manifests as spiritual visions and premonitions that forewarn her of imminent danger. Although the exact nature and origin of her visions is not explained (she is religious and also had a severe head injury as an adolescent), they seem to have given Tubman a combination of intuition and decisiveness that led others to trust her in the face of formidable odds. In the movie, her former master’s mother declares that she wants Harriet caught so she can be burned alive at the stake, “like Joan of Arc”—another well-known vision-driven crusader.

A final element that may explain Tubman’s intense focus is suggested in a short scene in which Tubman is shown in a stately Philadelphia home, crying while working as a domestic alongside another maid who looks at her quizzically. It’s not hard to imagine that, having risked her life multiple times and survived a perilous solo escape to Pennsylvania, Tubman would not be satisfied with a “free” life of making beds for a wealthy white family. But what can an illiterate runaway slave without any family do? Tubman decides to become a freedom fighter.

At the end of the movie we are told that Tubman went on to become a spy for the Union Army and the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. In her later years, she worked for women’s suffrage and started a rest home for former slaves. She lived to be ninety-one.

Although the movie follows a Hero’s Journey narrative arc, I suspect that Tubman’s lived experience was at least as much a heroine’s journey as hero’s journey. Her headaches, trances and visions were likely the result of the severe head injury she suffered when a slave owner threw a metal weight at another slave and hit her by mistake. She suffered from epileptic-like seizures and hypersomnia—the inability to maintain normal consciousness during waking hours—for most of her adult life. Perhaps the adrenaline produced by being in terrific danger played a role in helping her feel alive and engaged after her head injury.

Tubman was periodically recognized for her contributions to the Underground Railroad and the Civil War as a spy, nurse, scout, strategic advisor, and troop leader. However, she never received any pay for her work in the war and was denied veteran’s compensation for many years. After being heralded by newspapers for her work in the war, she was accosted by a train conductor while riding back to New York, where her parents lived, and was instructed to move to the less desirable smoking car. She produced government papers entitling her to ride in the car she was in and refused to move, whereupon the conductor enlisted several other passengers to help him force her to move, breaking her arm in the process. Most of her life, Tubman was penniless or nearly so, and what money she had was often spent providing food to the boarders who had even less than she did.

The movie, Harriet, depicts many of the amazing feats this determined woman accomplished. I look forward to another telling that shows the complexity of strategies Tubman used to persevere through her many challenges, hard times, tough decisions, physical and emotional stresses, simple pleasures, and heartbreaks. I would welcome another story that depicts the myriad of ways Harriet Tubman helped herself and others who once were counted as only 3/5 people to believe and experience themselves as whole.

In Ta-Neshi Coates’ novel, The Water Dancer, protagonist Hiram Walker is portrayed as a male soul-kin to Harriet Tubman. Both were born slaves and both have similar talents for feats of miraculous transportation. In the magical realism of the novel, this talent is referred to as “conduction”—the ability to move people “magically” from one place to another based on the strength of the conductor’s desire and memory. Coates portrays Tubman as a mythical figure who appears and disappears and reappears at important moments. Hiram Walker, her psychic kin, is much more humanized and his story allows Coates to explore the psychological implications of post-freedom identity and purpose. Walker, too, becomes a daring agent for the Underground Railroad and much of the book leans toward a hero’s journey until he must confront how to integrate his family and community ties into his quest to fight slavery and re-connect families separated by it. I believe The Water Dancer is ultimately more of a heroine’s journey than a hero’s journey.

And, of course, the struggle continues.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, author of The Water Dancer

“Gloria: A Life”: “Lead with love, low ego, high impact, and move at the speed of trust”

June 10, 2019June 10, 2019Leave a comment

By guest blogger Maureen Murdock; editorial review by Nancer Ballard and Savannah Jackson.

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Last year my partner, Bill and I went to a matinee performance of “Gloria: A Life, ” Emily Mann’s play about Gloria Steinem. The setting at the Daryl Roth Theater in lower Manhattan was arranged as if we were in a consciousness-raising group. The stage area was in the middle, carpeted with Persian rugs like Ms. Steinem’s own apartment. We, the audience, sat around the stage in bleacher-style rows covered with multi-colored pillows. Six aisles allowed for non-Gloria characters to come and go as scenes changed. Images of Gloria’s life were projected above the stadium seating on two opposite walls. Christine Lahti, looking exactly like the feminist trailblazer in black bell-bottoms and tinted aviator glasses played Gloria.

The first act traced Gloria’s life from small town girl taking care of her mentally ill mother in Dayton, Ohio through her rise to become an icon of the Second Wave of Feminism. What was poignant is that Gloria became a journalist to get away from her mother and found out years later that her mother had been a newspaper journalist herself before Gloria was born. Her mother was then abandoned by her husband and became terminally depressed. Gloria realized, like so many of us who have had depressed mothers, that she ended up living her mother’s “unlived life.”

Film clips of Gloria from her time undercover as a Playboy bunny, to her early reporting on the women’s movement, to her involvement in the creation of Ms. Magazine (with many others in her living room), to images of her addressing the crowd at the 2017 Women’s March in Washington D. C. appeared on the walls around us as the play evolved. Other actors played many other feminist leaders such as Florynce Kennedy and Wilma Mankiller, black and Native American leaders often left out of standard histories.

When her husband of three years died of cancer, Gloria turned to Wilma Mankiller. Wilma told Gloria a story about her own near death experience in her forties which included such a feeling of ecstasy that she didn’t want to return to the living when given the choice. However, she did make the decision to live and assured Gloria that her husband probably was also gifted with an ecstatic release from his suffering in death. The whole idea of death being an ecstatic experience gave me hope.

Gloria had her own #MeToo moment before the movement was named. A New York Times editor suggested to Steinem that they “discuss her work in a hotel room this afternoon”; and in 1963, when she was sitting in a cab ride in between Gay Talese and Saul Bellow, Talese said, “You know how every year there’s a pretty girl who comes to New York and pretends to be a writer? Well, Gloria is this year’s pretty girl.”

Perhaps the most important part of Gloria’s coming of age was finding her voice by listening to others in consciousness-raising groups and speaking with other women. It surprised me to learn that she had a fear of public speaking and so she always invited another feminist like Florynce Kennedy or Bella Abzug with her colorful hats to share the stage with her. “Social justice movements start with people sitting in a circle,” she says in the play and that’s exactly what the second act consisted of. At the end, there was a 20-minute talking circle in which we, the audience, were invited to share our own responses to what we had seen in the play or what we had lived. The guidelines were principles enunciated by Black Lives Matter projected on the walls in big letters: “Lead with love, low ego, high impact, move at the speed of trust.”

The lights came up and the first person to raise her hand for a microphone was a 16-year old girl. I was pleased to see such a young woman present because most of the audience—almost all women and the few men—looked like survivors of the nineteen sixties. She said, “ I’m 16 and I grew up with a mother who always told me I could be anything I want to be. I appreciate the sacrifices that Gloria made for all of us and I’m really grateful to my mother for giving me the confidence that I can be anything I want to be.” Impressed by how articulate she was, we all clapped as Christine Lahti said, “There is the next Gloria Steinem!”

An older woman, sitting high up in the bleachers said, “I want to tell you what it was like in the ‘60s. My husband was a student at Yale and I worked in the library to support us. There was a man who worked with me in the library and I found out that he was making more money than me. I talked to some of the other women who worked there and we went to our boss and asked for a raise. Our supervisor said, “Well, he’s a man. Someday he will have to support a family!” The woman replied, “Well, I am supporting a family. My husband is a student and I work to support us both.” (I nodded, thinking back to how I worked on a psych ward while my first husband was in law school). Having received no satisfaction from her supervisor, she went above him to one of the Deans, who eventually gave her a raise. She interrupted our applause by saying, “Wait! There’s a happy ending to that story. I got promoted and now that man works for me!” We all roared with approval.

There were a couple of men who raised their hands to speak. One man, who appeared to be in his early ‘50s, said, “I work for a company whose name is not important. I wanted to give a woman who works with me a 20% raise. I was told by the HR department (managed by a woman) that I could only give her a 10% raise. So I said, ‘Oh, I see. She’s a woman. We always pay a woman less.’ We all groaned. As he gave up the mic, he said, “She got the 20% raise. It works every time.” We hooted and hollered!

Another man, with thin graying hair, on the other side of the theater, took the mic and slowly said, “I have been crying throughout this entire performance. It touched me deeply.” We all got quiet and the woman sitting next to him put her arm around him. He continued through his tears. “I have been thinking about how oppressed I have felt throughout my entire life.” His comment surprised me.

When he spoke the word “oppressed,” I thought he was going to admit to situations in which he had oppressed women and apologize. Or that in seeing the play and identifying with women, it began to dawn on him that he had been oppressed during his life as well. But he didn’t explain how he felt oppressed and I began to feel cynical. This show was about how women have struggled against inequality and I felt that he was co-opting Gloria’s story for himself. He continued, “I’m 72 years old and I was a feminist before any other man was a feminist.” The audience sighed. I wanted to scream. How dare he claim that for himself.

Here was a man pulling on our heartstrings by comparing what he saw as his own oppression to the oppression of women we had just witnessed on stage. The principle of Low Ego had been abandoned: instead the man was inducing the audience into expressing sympathy and taking care of him. Christine Lahti could have explained that the play wasn’t about male oppression, or called attention to the message on the wall. She didn’t do either, at least not on this afternoon. Instead, she fell into the trap of equating men’s and women’s circumstances by saying–with great warmth–“Thank you so much for your courage and your tears.”

He successfully hijacked the moment. But I am sure I wasn’t the only one who had noticed that the self-proclaimed first male feminist hadn’t grasped the concept of low ego. And a moment is not the journey. As Gloria—A Life, Gloria Steinem herself, and many of the other speakers that day showed us, when you encounter high egos blocking the way, it’s a call to step around them–and keep moving.

Maureen Murdock, Ph.D. teaches memoir writing at UCLA and in Pacifica Graduate Institute’s memoir certificate program, “Writing Down the Soul.” She is the author of the best selling book The Heroine’s Journey, which delineates the feminine psycho-spiritual journey, as well as four other books: Unreliable Truth: On Memoir and Memory; Fathers’ Daughters: Breaking the Ties that Bind; Spinning Inward; The Heroine’s Journey Workbook, and Blinded by Hope: My Journey through My Son’s Bipolar Illness and Addiction published under a pseudonym.