Exploring Narrative Patterns in Parallel Fights for Freedom
“Our concern for Black power addresses itself directly to this problem, the necessity to reclaim our history and identity from the cultural terrorism and depredation of self-justifying white guilt. To do this we shall have to struggle for the right to create our own terms through which to define ourselves and our relationship to the society, and have these terms recognized. This is the first necessity of a free people, and the first right that any oppressor must suspend.”
—Stokely Carmichael, 1966
by Shanelle Matthews
When Black power orator and organizer Stokely Carmichael wrote these impassioned words in his pointed and urgent essay “Toward Black Liberation,” for the Massachusetts Review in 1966, the domestic and global political conditions rivaled those of today. Back then, cries of dissent and yearnings for freedom bellowed from the fields of Vietnam to the factories of Detroit, as imperialist forces oppressed Black people and people of color in the U.S. and abroad. One of many ideological and material confrontations in the U.S. during that time—three years after the March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs—was whether or not assimilation and integration, or self-determination and self-governance, were the future for Black people in America. Carmichael represented the self-determined, who refused to assimilate into a narrow definition of what it means to be a U.S. citizen; he challenged the underlying assumptions and legitimacy of American ideals. He used the inches in this essay to assert that, in order to thrive, Black people require institutions that represent our “communal needs within larger society.”
The wars oppressed people fight have distinct features, but all power relations have a narrative dimension, and there are parallel fights for narrative power and sovereignty. Today, as the people of Ukraine resist violent, deadly Russian aggression, they also fight an ideological battle against mythologies of manifest destiny (a cultural belief launched in the U.S. during the 19th century that promoted rampant expansion and settler colonialism as a moral imperative of “superior” white Americans, which can also be seen in current attacks on the sovereignty of Indigenous people and marginalized groups across the world) and widespread Russian supremacy propaganda. This propaganda recasts Russia as the world superpower and erases the hard-fought identity and history of the Ukrainian people and the geographic borders of Ukraine altogether. As communicators, we can identify narrative patterns in these parallel fights and expose oppression within and across regimes, while simultaneously communicating a shared liberatory future.
Narrative power for social justice is a framework for social movements to take advantage of political opportunities; construct narrative interventions; disrupt hegemonic thinking; and intervene to expand the collective perception of what is socially, economically, and politically possible. We use the practice of communications to define what our future society looks, feels, smells, and tastes like; how we treat one another; what we do and do not believe; and how we understand the individual and the collective’s value in relation to social structures.
Our humanity, freedom, and self-determination are directly connected to the power and resources we have to distinguish ourselves from our oppressors. Carmichael argues that white supremacy is systemic and patterned. As long as the white community controls and defines “the forms that all institutions within the society make,” Black people will be “excluded from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society.” In other words, we do not want your culture, values, and institutions. We want our own, and we will go to great lengths to define ourselves and our histories, interpret our own experiences, and determine our fates.
A similar, interethnic demand echoes from the rubble in Ukraine.
How we define the problems we are working to solve, and whom we collectively agree has the power to define them, matters. The same is true of the solutions. For example, Putin’s war is a deadly power grab with the goal of Russian expansion, but to justify the war at home, Russian propaganda stokes fears of fascism and vows to “denazify” Ukraine by exaggerating the number of right-wing dissidents and vowing to stomp them out. In the 60s and 70s, U.S. propaganda stoked fears of communism, and the FBI pejoratively declared the Black Panther Party a communist organization and an enemy of the U.S. government. The goal was to delegitimize the group’s demands and to justify brutal violence and assassinations. The strong identities of Black Power organizers and Ukrainian nationals, among other things, represent a weakening of the old world order and threaten the power of the dominant groups. In response, the old order spreads messages to delegitimize the groups, justify violence against them, and gain ordinary people's support in their pursuit of power and resources.
Whether the war oppressed people fight is ideological, geopolitical, or both, it presents an opportunity to intervene in hegemonic thinking, which is how dominant groups wage cultural and political ascendancy. Narrative opportunities materialize from our sociopolitical conditions, and when there is sociopolitical disruption, we can weaken dominant narratives or insert a new narrative. This is what Carmichael did through his essay and what the Black Power movement did broadly.
Narrative power for social justice is a framework for social movements to take advantage of political opportunities; construct narrative interventions; disrupt hegemonic thinking; and intervene to expand the collective perception of what is socially, economically, and politically possible. We use the practice of communications to define what our future society looks, feels, smells, and tastes like; how we treat one another; what we do and do not believe; and how we understand the individual and the collective’s value in relation to social structures.
Our humanity, freedom, and self-determination are directly connected to the power and resources we have to distinguish ourselves from our oppressors. Carmichael argues that white supremacy is systemic and patterned. As long as the white community controls and defines “the forms that all institutions within the society make,” Black people will be “excluded from participation in the power decisions that shaped the society.” In other words, we do not want your culture, values, and institutions. We want our own, and we will go to great lengths to define ourselves and our histories, interpret our own experiences, and determine our fates.
A similar, interethnic demand echoes from the rubble in Ukraine.
How we define the problems we are working to solve, and whom we collectively agree has the power to define them, matters. The same is true of the solutions. For example, Putin’s war is a deadly power grab with the goal of Russian expansion, but to justify the war at home, Russian propaganda stokes fears of fascism and vows to “denazify” Ukraine by exaggerating the number of right-wing dissidents and vowing to stomp them out. In the 60s and 70s, U.S. propaganda stoked fears of communism, and the FBI pejoratively declared the Black Panther Party a communist organization and an enemy of the U.S. government. The goal was to delegitimize the group’s demands and to justify brutal violence and assassinations. The strong identities of Black Power organizers and Ukrainian nationals, among other things, represent a weakening of the old world order and threaten the power of the dominant groups. In response, the old order spreads messages to delegitimize the groups, justify violence against them, and gain ordinary people's support in their pursuit of power and resources.
Whether the war oppressed people fight is ideological, geopolitical, or both, it presents an opportunity to intervene in hegemonic thinking, which is how dominant groups wage cultural and political ascendancy. Narrative opportunities materialize from our sociopolitical conditions, and when there is sociopolitical disruption, we can weaken dominant narratives or insert a new narrative. This is what Carmichael did through his essay and what the Black Power movement did broadly.
“…I can see very clearly the discrepancies between what happened, and the versions that are finding their way to general acceptance as a kind of popular mythology,” Carmichael writes in the essay about how mainstream media distorts the conditions and experiences of Black people and Black power-building efforts in real-time. We have to look further than conventional news and memes on social media, at the network of intersectional and systemic narratives that justify oppression and the social structures that codify and enforce it. Professor and narrative researcher Ken Plummer reminds us that “out of deep conditions of domination and exclusion, people create their own insights, understandings, knowledge, and narratives,” which are fundamental to the fight for the interests and self-determination of future generations.