New Narrative
Culture Collaborative
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Children's Crusade, Birmingham, AL, 1963.
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"Once you label me, you negate me." Soren Kierkegaard
New Narrative Culture Collaborative's
work focuses on helping each of us realize the many everyday ways we shape both our culture and our society, and to learn to use our vast powers for good.
Though we don't often realize it, our every social interaction, from the language we use to the preconceptions we hold, from the constructs we adopt to the paradigms we reinforce, essentially gets uploaded into the cultural "cloud", where it becomes part of the social air we all breathe and climate in which we all live. Smokey the Bear said, "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." The same thing holds true for social toxicity.
New Narrative
creates tools that help each of us become shapers of society -- detoxifying our social atmosphere, eliminating verbal violence, strengthening human regard, fostering a culture of kindness and building up a resistance to actions that weaken us by dividing us.
Priime
An education initiative focused on empowering you to own your diversity, the way you're your own prime number. Doing so not only unlocks your superpowers, it's like a bigotry vaccine, enabling us to be our best, most authentic and most fulfilled selves and allowing everyone else to do the same. This work stands on the belief that, collectively, we can never be who we’re meant to be without you, individually, and the diversity you bring. All of humankind is enriched when you live into the fullness of your own personhood; when you deftly write that line in the human story that only your life can write.
Diversity often shows up as the outlier; the left-hander or epileptic, the introvert or highly sensitive person. Or as the “only”; the only Asian, only Muslim, only student on the free lunch program, and in a context that deems that bit of diversity significant. Or the othered; the fire engine in a group where being a food item is preferred, or green beans in one where the color red is preferred. It’s the person with bodily differences or whose mind works a different way, or who has already outgrown our constructs; whose birth certificate says “boy”, but who knows they’re a girl, or that says “white”, but who has realized they’re black.
It shows up in our embodiment of things we’ve been told don’t go together; the poetry-writing soldier and the girl on the boys’ wrestling team, the atheist chaplain and the religiously devout scientist. It’s the person with more than one ethnic heritage and who refuses to choose, or who defies convention, but who refuses to wear the label “weird”. Even time and life, by our existing, diversify us; everything from teaching us to adjust, adapt, and evolve, to how, in our own bodies, we’re not the exact same people we were just yesterday. And, of course, it’s the full range of diversity embodied by Generation Alpha. The goal of this initiative is to help us become a society where all this diversity, and more, can thrive.
Words Matter.
Despite the children's rhyme about sticks and stones and bones, words have the power to be far more destructive, and to inflict injuries that can last for a lifetime. Language can be weaponized in all manner of ways from shifting what words mean to making up new ones, from careless comments to curated propaganda, from pejoratives to the corrosive constructs we adopt, from dehumanization to micro-aggressions embedded in commonly used terms and phrases -- damage we can inflict without even knowing we're doing it. In every case, words matter. As society’s trustees, we're as accountable for what we facilitate as what we do, for both our direct actions and those we set in motion. Just because we didn’t anticipate where it would lead doesn’t absolve us of responsibility for what was done. So, when we comment that “someone should do us all a favor and put a bullet in [a particular person’s] brain”, we share culpability when someone tries to do just that.
Race. Isn't.
"I believe there is only one race – the human race." – Rosa Parks. We Americans built our society on the idea of multiple "races" in general, and on a belief in the supremacy of the self-designated "whites" in particular. The "white race" idea rose to prominence out of the ashes of slavery. This Land Is Your Land describes it this way:
"Prior to the Civil War, whiteness had no real meaning and few people cared. That’s because the dividing line was between slave and free. Slaves were property, not people. But with the Thirteenth Amendment, that line was erased. Everybody was free. And in the aftermath, knowing who was white became not just an economic imperative, but a political one. That led to formulas that ingeniously tied race right back to slavery, where one was deemed white only if all your great grandparents were of European heritage; essentially that none of one’s ancestors at the Revolution could have been slaves. But the construct’s true power was in how it positioned them. Simply by rebranding themselves, by overwriting nationality with continentality, they’d crafted a political ruling class, and both segregated and elevated the group in the process. Because as anyone who’s ever done laundry can tell you, whites and colors don’t mix."
Yet, on everything from census forms to job applications, we continue to reinforce the idea that there are multiple human races, which becomes the framework we use to treat cultural differences as if they're biological and innate. But in the same way we made this mess, we can un-make it. “There are differences, though,” we often point out, with respect to racial groups. And there are. But those differences are cultural, which is why farmers, regardless of racial identity, will always have more in common with each other than corporate raiders who share their lineage, and why there’s a cultural chasm between black-identifying Americans and African immigrants; despite a common ancestry.
The way forward really isn't complicated -- we could just stop -- give the word "race" a timeout and replace it with whatever we really mean; ethnicity or heritage, ancestry or lineage. And that one change helps us shift from something false (that we exist as different species or subspecies) to something true -- that we're the same people from the same place. We talk a lot about racism, which is a good thing. But the only way we'll ever leave racism behind is if we also start to talk about how race isn't.
"Dark" isn't a four-letter word.
Conscious campaign that raises awareness regarding the social ramifications of language choices, including how using darkness as a pejorative is a micro-aggression; one that has devastating effects, especially on our kids, as evidenced by the doll studies. As far back as the first such study in 1954, we knew what vilifying darkness - treating it as an euphemism for evil and sin, as evidence that someone is "bad, ugly and dumb" - was harmful. Yet, we keep using it this way. It especially falls on writers and shapers of language to see what we're doing to our children and do better. Vindicating darkness is but one example of how we can commit to consciousness. The campaign includes a petition to get Webster's to remove the negative connotations associated with darkness, a "Dark Dolling" Registry for cataloging infamous uses of "darkness" as a substitute for "evil" (like the Washington Post slogan, "Democracy dies in darkness"), a usage checker for darkness and other racialized terms, and a "Darkness Substituter", which suggests other, more accurate words we can use instead of "dark music" or "dark secret".
