Storytelling for Social Justice

Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist Teaching

Lee Anne Bell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351587914
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

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:

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• Social science examples, in addition to the arts, for elucidating the storytelling model;

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• Short essays by users that illustrate some of the ways the storytelling model has been used in teaching, training, community building and activism;

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• Updated examples, references and resources.

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 reflecting 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, 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.

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, reflected 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 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 influenced by a range of resources and writing that I discuss briefly 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 self-hood. 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 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 hege...