The Power of Story

Paper delivered at the President’s Retreat
Normandale College, Minneapolis, September 21, 2005

More and more we are acknowledging the crucial role story plays in the human experience. In fact, psychologists insist that a “coherent narrative,” a story that gives expression to one’s circumstance and anticipates one’s future is a necessary requirement for mental health. Otherwise, on what basis would we make our choices in the world?

In fact, people who have experienced severe emotional trauma cannot heal until they can integrate the experience into their life’s story. They have to be able to talk about it, communicate in words what happened. This is the only way they can eventually master the experience rather than letting it consume and ultimately define them.

We are all in search of our own story, a narrative that gives our lives meaning, a glue that holds together all the disparate pieces of our individual histories and makes sense of the time we spend on earth. A story not only provides a coherent way to view the past, but enables us to anticipate the future. It gives us our “outlook.” Our story is also our bridge to other people. For us to be known, our story must be known.

A shared story is what holds cultures, nations, families, together. It gives people the “sameness,” the unity of experience, shared assumptions and common ground that allows a people to think and act as an entity. It is as if a culture is a myriad of mirrors, all facing outward. When members look at each other, to a large extent they see themselves reflected back. The more unified the culture, the less dissention about what the story is. It is just “understood.”

It should come as no surprise that an essential step in creating intimate, trusting relationships, is the exchange of stories between people. “This is who I am,” we are saying. As we listen to another person’s experiences, their motivations, their history, their dreams and aspirations, their fears, and they listen to ours, a brand-new story is forged, our shared story. This shared story is called a relationship, that collection of common understandings and mutual expectations. With a common pool of understanding we can more effectively think and act together, plan for a shared future.

Creating relationship can be a one-time event or a process that evolves over a lifetime. What is required is a mutual sharing and listening. It doesn’t mean we like each other, or even support one another’s goal, but we can more clearly “see” each other. We become known to one another.

Stories Across Race
A very disconcerting thing happens when whites and blacks sit down to share their stories as it pertains to race. More times than not, Blacks and Whites have contradictory stories about life in America. They draw startling contrasting conclusions about the same country. The variable of race makes the difference.

African Americans usually have a lot to say about race and how the concept of race has defined their reality. As a friend of mine says, “There is not a day goes by that I am not reminded that I am black.” It is a central component to her narrative.

Yet when they share openly and honestly, whites more times than not become mute. Why? Most whites often don’t even have the words to discuss race. And why should we? Race plays a very small part of the story we tell ourselves about the world and our place in it. We struggle to talk about what it means to be white in America. They say Eskimos can identify 32 types of snow. If they tell you their story, snow will certainly be an integral part of it. We sit and listen in muted amazement as African Americans effortless reel off the dynamics of color in this country. They might as well be talking about some alien world.

Our reaction often turns to discomfort—sometimes pity, sometime frustration and impatience. Whites are clearly disturbed and seem unable to respond empathetically to what they hear. The atmosphere can become so charged, many times we mishear what is being said as an attack. Often we want to argue, or counter their experiences with our own, to show them how their stories are in someway flawed. We want to bring them back to reality. To get them to stop making excuses. To stop reading so much into things. To understand that we all have our burdens. Sometimes we just nod sympathetically, feeling badly that they have interpreted the world so erroneously, with so much paranoia, and we hope they don’t pass it on to their children. Don’t they realize things have changed? The black story raises our defenses like no other. Like a white friend of mine says, “It’s a shame their parents didn’t tell them they are free now. That slavery is over.” When they tell their stories, somehow we feel our stories are being challenged.

As a result, Blacks, if they have trusted us with the truth of their lives, often leave the conversation feeling condescended to, blamed, minimized, discounted, invisible. They swear they will never bare their souls in front of a white person again. Around whites, most just stick to the accepted script.

Just what has happened here?

More often than not, the black story and the white story can’t stand up to each other. We seem to be talking about two separate realities. For a group of people to have a story driven by race and for their fellow Americans to have a story devoid of race, the simple fact is, both stories cannot be true if their histories took place on the same soil. They are mutually exclusive.

The White Story
White people have a well-told story, and it has little to do with race. As white people we know we belong because we see ourselves reflected in all of our culture’s mirrors—its written history, its institutions, its monuments, its art and literature. We are given the raw materials from which to create a coherent narrative filled with the confidence that can come only from precedent, a sense of worth, destiny and entitlement. Even the poorest of white children can see their faces reflected in the American Dream. There is a richness of color upon our palettes from which to fill our canvasses with masterpieces of consequence. We see our reflections in everything that matters. Our story is designed to instill within our children a confidence and a belief in the future. They sense that there is indeed direction, a historical wind at their backs, a push along a path upon which they know they belong.

I took an African American friend with me to my home state of Mississippi. Sondra was raised in the north, but her parents had been sharecroppers in the South. Like so many other blacks of that era, they migrated to the North in search of new lives, freedom and opportunities for their children, and desire to garner respect. They did not speak much to Sondra about their lives as sharecroppers. It was too recent and raw, full of the humiliation of Jim Crow. To their way of thinking this was an ordeal filled with disgrace and was best not mentioned. Why saddle their children with such baggage, goes the thinking. They “whitened” the narrative for her. As a result, Sondra felt an emptiness as a result of the editing out of this part of her parent’s story, and the loss of her own sense of self that family story provides.

The purpose of the trip to Mississippi was to fill in some of the blanks for her. She wanted to understand the courage and dignity of a downtrodden people who came up from slavery, survived Jim Crow and then united during the Civil Rights Era to face down their oppressors.

We drove through small towns, looking at courthouses and the requisite monument to the Confederate soldiers, statues to their mothers, their sisters, their wives, driving through counties named after slave-holding governors, the founder of the Ku Klux Klan, the President of the Confederacy, a massive reservoir named after the obstructionist governor who fomented a murderous riot to keep a black student out of the state university, government office buildings bearing the names race-baiting segregationists, confederate flags on bumper stickers proclaiming, “It’s not about hate, it’s about heritage.” Finally, dejected, looking up at yet another statue dedicated to the ideal of white southern womanhood, Sondra asked, “So, where are the monuments to my people?”

I have heard the same comments from African Americans who visit Washington, D.C. Or read a textbook on American history. The truth is, the contributions of Sondra’s ancestors had been “soaked up” into the landscape, the architecture, the economy, the culture that surrounded us—without attribution.

Absorption
Dominant culture is like a sponge that absorbs what is of value in order to confirm its own dominance. White is the dominant culture. Even the designation of “White” is a bestowed title of value. No one is born white. They are made white. When the Irish were perceived as finally having high value, they became white. The Slavs, Jews, in turn took their place in the white pantheon. A white woman can have a black baby, but a black woman cannot have a white baby. Value travels in one direction and that is toward the white end of the
Race/Color continuum.

Blacks came over with the first whites. We have never lived in isolation from one another. Our lives have been intricately bound. Slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, laws barring intermarriage, economic and class distinctions—none could truly keep us apart. Yet, if this thing we call the American Story was created by both races, so how come it looks so white? Because the relationship has been corrupt, abusive, immoral and intrinsically shameful, with secrets held by both blacks and whites. And most importantly the writing of the “official story” has been the white man’s prerogative. As is the nature of official stories, above all else, their function is to validate the status quo. In America that status quo is white supremacy.

Once in a while we may come across a little known fact that causes us to second guess our history. Like a recent discovery that the Carolina rice plantations, for centuries extolled as engineering marvels and credited to early plantation owners, were actually modeled on farms in Sierra Leone, the original home of the slaves who labored on those Carolina plantations. Or that Washington’s crack infantry, the one he used for the most strategic battles of the war, was made up of African Americans. In their diaries, Europeans lauded their bravery and genius, but their white American officers were reluctant to acknowledge these contributions lest they upset the theory of white supremacy.

Even today, the Civil Rights era is in danger of losing its black heroes in a story retold to reflect how liberal whites stepped in to “save” the poor, helpless blacks. Their brave actions are still being absorbed into a story of white supremacy.

I recently viewed a play that “documented” the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a summer when local black activists initiated a massive voter registration drive in 1964. During that year, hundreds of northern white college students came to help, but that is only a small part of that experience. The major part of the story is that thousands of blacks boldly challenged, at the risk of their lives, a system of brutal tyranny called Jim Crow, a sadistic, inhumane condition that was tolerated by a nation mostly complacent to black suffering.

But the way the play interpreted those events, the white students came down to “save” the poor, ignorant, downtrodden black victims, to “give” them their freedom. The truth is, the white students, as brave and idealistic as they were, did not save the blacks. What they added was this: in the eyes of the nation, the lives of the white students had value. So finally America paid attention. Blacks had been fighting back, getting attacked, raped, and killed, ingeniously surviving a system of legislated evil for centuries and the nation was complicit. Not until white students were threatened did the country’s eyes turn to Mississippi and to them go the glory.

White is considered valuable. And white absorbs what is valuable. The White Story absorbs what it needs to validate the underlying premise of white superiority. Blacks are left to make their narrative out of the remnants: iron chains, subservient roles throughout history, ignorance, long suffering, victims waiting patiently for their salvation to be handed out to them.

John F. Kennedy, like Lincoln, had to be dragged kicking and screaming into a struggle blacks had been fighting for centuries, but are now icons of the Official Race Story, while the names of the black heroes are getting lost, or consigned to the quarantine ward of the American story called Black History Month. (Give them a course in Black History, give them Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, but do not infect the underpinnings of the official American story.)

We will never know how many such stories have been absorbed without leaving a trace because the essence of this peculiar American relationship is the black slave whispering his wisdom into his master’s ear. Agricultural ingenuity, plantation management, military heroism, statesmanship, artistry, childrearing and domestic sciences, healing and business acumen, patriotism—how many acts of black genius and heroism and invention have been absorbed unattributed into the white story? We will never know, because, as an old black southern ditty has it, when possessions were handed out “the white man got pencil and the black man got the hoe.”

Telling My Race Story
The remedy is not to tell a better Black Story, or to cut and paste history so that we reach some kind of editorial balance. Rather, the goal is to tell a more accurate American story. To do this, we have to take on the task of undoing 300 years of editing. Where do we begin? By being rigorously honest with our own stories.

I must never forget that I live in a world where the rules were created by people who look like me. Every unearned privilege I accept without my questioning is another chapter I have stolen from someone else’s story. I can never forget that every unearned privilege I get shows up a deficit in somebody else’s column. Every time I assume I deserve my unearned privileges, I reinforce the story left to African Americans that they do not deserve that very same privilege.

The show of respect I am accustomed to, the fair treatment I assume, the deference paid by law enforcement, doors that are automatically opened for me, every leg up I get from other privileged people who look like me, every entitlement I need to question. And when I see so many others not receiving those privileges, I should not defend my good fortune by blaming them for being undeserving or attribute it to “good luck.”

This doesn’t mean I deny the privilege or refuse it, or even hate myself for accepting it. It just means that when I tell my story about race, I need to include that part of the story as well. I need to tell an honest story. There is relief in this for everyone. My black friends do not want me to feel shameful, to give it all up, to justify my good fortune. They just want me to stop pretending that the world is not the way that it is. To admit that I get some pretty good stuff for being white and to include it in my story as well.

The more we investigate the source of our privilege, and the more honestly we share our discoveries, the richer our stories become. We eventually learn to think and act together. This is how we learn the language of race. In the process, our racial stories, black and white, become less contradictory and more complementary. And best of all, we are more able to weave a common American narrative.