The Moral Precarity of Telling our Stories
Sharing our personal trauma can risk turning our stories into tools of argument instead of complex experiences with meaning unto themselves.
Meghan Markle sharing a widely-held view about storytelling to Oprah Winfrey.
For the past few years, I have been a proud organizer with the Sunrise Movement, the youth movement that is fighting for a Green New Deal. Beyond deeply believing in the movement’s goals, what attracted me to Sunrise was its organizational culture. Sunrise wanted to learn from the mistakes of the climate movement. Instead of centering the science of climate change and stories from the natural environment, Sunrise decided it would create a climate movement that centered human stories. To connect with the public, the organization would tell the human story of the climate crisis, which yes, is the story of carbon emissions and trees on fire, but is also the story of burning homes, polluted neighborhoods, lives lost, stolen land. Storytelling is even enshrined in the Sunrise movement principle as the following:
We tell our stories and we honor each other’s stories.
We all have something to lose to climate change, and something to gain in coming together. We tell our individual stories to connect with each other and understand the many different ways this crisis impacts us.”
Storytelling, to Sunrise and so many other prorgessive organizations, is an important way of seeing into larger concerns. From individual personalized narratives, we can better understand the vague, abstract story of a planetary crisis and dig into the specifics of how it plays out in daily life.
One of the first viral actions that Sunrise held was a sit-in in Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018. That sit-in became such a momentous occasion partly because of the deft and moving storytelling by movement leaders such as Jeremmy Ornstein. In a beautiful and galvanzing speech, Ornstein connected the story of his family fleeing the holocaust to the rise of the hate-fueled politics that were succeeding in the US. He importantly noted that this hateful style of politics was also moving in tandem with a pro-fossil fuel agenda. Through his own unique narrative, a thread was shown between facism, climate change, corruption. And it made me as a listener and protest participant, feel as if I was part of a larger spiritual movement. As he told that story, I felt that our demands for a bolder response to climate change was part of a transhistorical call for justice and healing. It galvanized me.
All of this is to say: Storytelling matters. Storytelling works. But as I’ve spent these last few years working as an organizer, observing our growing digital culture, and thinking about how we get out of this mess of a society, I’ve been struck by how this notion of storytelling’s power has hindered our work for justice, healing, and reform as much as helped. The hindrance comes from an overreliance on storytelling that, when done en masse, turns us all into storytelling machines, exposing our own trauma in exchange for being heard. I’m not talking about being vulnerable as a cynical device to garner empathy and then act in one’s narrow self interest. I’m talking about personalized narrative becoming the dominant way of being heard by others, which in turn trivializes all of our stories and turns our trauma into functional tools for political expression.
As a culture of progressives, we are deeply uncomfortable with making universal truth claims. Increased attention to identity has stressed the importance of personal experience and de-emphasized the idea of asserting universal values. The recognition that so many overarching philosophical statements from the past were riddled with blind spots (for example, the constitution says “liberty and justice for all” while condoning chattel slavery) has encouraged many progressives to root their positions in their own experience and narrative as to avoid erasing or ignoring others’ reality. Further, the right has cynically cornered other ways of expression. For example, “facts and logic” has become a tagline of rightwing commentor and feaux-braniac Ben Shapiro. He, and others like him, posit that liberal arguments are rooted in emotions, that they use anecdotes in order to avoid the hard, cruel logic of numbers. This is only a piece of the puzzle, but the deployment of “data” has in many ways become culturally aligned with rightwing arguments.
In progressive spaces, it is thus seen as insensitive to make bold, philosophical, or policy-wide proclamations on a given topic without identifying your own personal stake in the issue. And let me be clear that the impulse behind this is spot on. We should be aware of our own limitations, biases, positions; we should be interrogating who should be leading the charge of what, ensuring that those with intimate experiences with a given crisis have the first and final say on policy proposals and ideas. But, and I know this is in tension, we should not expect all of us to disclose these connections in order to say something on a given topic.
This is tricky. If we truly want the ones most affected by an issue to be shaping policy solutions or movement strategies, there will have to be some sort of disclosure around who each person is. Sometimes it seems clear what someone’s stake in a given issue is, but most identity markers are far less straightforward then they are presented to be. And specific identity markers such as being a survivor of trauma, class position, educational background, religion, ability, and many more, are usually not easily apparent from one’s outside presentation. And thus, in a culture where personal experience is centered, some disclosure of one’s relationship to a given topic is required.
But what if one does not want to disclose their story and rather simply speak on an issue? I worry that in a culture that asks us to tell our stories in exchange for the ability to speak on certain topics, many are pushed into telling their story when they truly don’t want to. What if, for example, you want to speak on sexual assault without discolsing your status as a survivor? Is that not a valid desire? I have often noticed that if someone speaks on sexual abuse without specifying their relationship to it, they are met with a pervasive tone of skepticism, specifically if they are male-presenting. In this situation, the implicit question of a skeptical, progressive audience is: Who are you to be saying this? But what if the answer to that question is unbearably painful to recount? The person sharing their perspective is then put in an impossible situation. Remain silent on a topic they have real stakes in dealing with, or offer up their trauma in exchange for credibility, in turn exposing themselves.
All of this has a broader effect. If we are all always disclosing our personal stories in order to speak on wider topics, we are functionalizing our personal narratives, turning them into mere stepping stones towards making our next point. Stories still hold the power of connecting hearts and minds, but when storytelling becomes so widespread and expected, it becomes harder and harder to distinguish in ourselves and others why we tell our stories. Are we doing so to connect with our fellow humans, or rather, are we telling our stories to make it clear that we are credible? The lines all become blurred. And in a culture that demands personal identification, it is not cynical to deploy one’s narrative to express one’s political point; it is actually realistic. But what’s lost in that shuffle is our right to privacy and disclosure, autonomy and integrity. To tell my own story for a moment: There are many, many topics I would love to discuss that I have personal experiences with. But the story of that experience is mine to tell alone. And frankly, I don’t want to. So I stay silent.
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Did you disagree? Agree? Have a story (ironic, I know) that illustrates this? Comment below and share your thoughts!