Fighting Back By Telling Our Stories

If you're a boomer, you probably grew up hearing your parents tell stories about living through the Depression. My mother's story of how FDR's New Deal saved her parents' factory jobs and kept food on the table is the foundation of my own liberalism.

You can't tell me the New Deal failed or was bad for the country because I know better.

But real stories like the ones my mother told are few and far between today, and that lets the lies take the lead.

In The Nation, Melissa Harris-Perry explains that we can't win this fight if we can't tell our story:

The Democratic Party has largely failed to counter these well-spun fictions. The Democrats’ poor story-telling is going to have long-term consequences. It is a mistake to think false storylines are easily forgotten or that they can be swiftly overturned by simple recitation of countervailing facts. Today’s observance of the Civil War is a perfect example. Reconstruction was a short-lived effort and Confederates were given leave to (re)write the story of the Civil War from their own perspective. Thus Southern states still fly the flag of traitors and school kids are still taught that it was the “War of Northern Aggression.”

So what are we to do? It is time to take back the narrative. Time to tell our stories.

One organization with a commitment to precisely this kind of effective, progressive story telling is The Opportunity Agenda. Just last week The Opportunity Agenda celebrated its fifth anniversary. Their work focuses on framing our pressing national issues in the language and narrative of shared American values and identity. The Opportunity Agenda’s Communication Institute works with nonprofit leaders to give them comprehensive training on a variety of communications skills, including framing and narrative development, using public opinion and media research, and persuasive writing. Community leaders have a keen understanding of our challenges and important ideas about how to solve these problems, but they sometimes lack the ability to convey this information in memorable, convincing stories. The Opportunity Agenda is working to build our capacity to challenge the false narratives of the right and to offer our meaningful, substantive and engaging stories of our own.

Theirs is one of the crucial efforts to take back public space and to tell our stories. We need many more.

What is your story?