Partial Repost: Milky thighs and ivory towers
Narrative Change Part 2: What we can learn about narrative bias and word choice from the playground, romance novels and a humanities nonprofit
This is a partial repost, re-contextualized to make up Part 2 of a four-part series on Narrative Change. Read the first part, Let Me Tell You About my Invisible Labor, here.
My family spent the Fourth of July driving back to Boston from rural Ohio, where we’d been on a long visit to my in-laws. Our toddler especially had a wonderful time; in a place where land isn’t such a tight commodity as it is in the city, the playgrounds felt immense and the splash pads sprawling.
But as I watched my son dash about the park with uninhibited joy, I felt my body tense up with fierce protectiveness. I kept thinking about how much he stuck out among all the fair-skinned, blond-haired, and blue-eyed children. An older kid approached him in the splash pad and I watched, irrationally fearful that the child would say something mean. He didn’t. He held out a ball that my son had dropped and asked: “Is this yours?”
On the drive home, I asked my husband whether he’d experienced any anxiety seeing his son stick out like that on the playground. “Stick out like what?” he asked, bemused.
“Like I’ve never seen him look so Asian,” I said.
“What do you mean? He looks the same to me,” Mark said. “Fricking adorable.”
I meant, I realized, that I’d never seen my toddler in a situation where his skin and eyes seemed so comparatively dark. Or, in a situation where his babbling seemed so starkly foreign; seven of his ten words are in Mandarin. I realized that I’d been afraid that the other children on the playground would be mean to him. I also realized my fear came from the assumption that white children living in rural Ohio grew up hearing negative language about Asians during the pandemic. And as I sat down to write this Substack, I realized that both my fear and the assumption I made were deeply rooted in problematic social narratives, that either I’d subscribed to or worried that others had subscribed to—e.g. that dark skin is not as good as fair skin, or that white people in conservative rural counties are bigots.
This summer, I’m writing about the concept of narrative change. The basic premise is that stories shape the way we view and move through the world, so in order to bring around social change, we need to first shift which narratives dominate.
In the previous issue, I looked at how narrating process—rather than just need or impact—makes visible stories that have previously been invisible. This week, we’ll dive into how examining the language we use is instrumental in shifting stories. We’ll start by looking at one predominant narrative about darkness and beauty.
the narrative about darkness
I’m a big reader and amateur writer of romance novels. For much of my twenties, I used Asian skin brightening cosmetics (and by brightening, I mean whitening; iykyk). These two fun facts are related.
I found my first Harlequin paperback romance between the mattress and box spring on my mom’s side of my parent’s bed. I don’t remember the title, but I vividly remember the main characters being a ruthless business tycoon and his shy secretary. The tycoon was bad-tempered and handsome, and—most memorable to an eight-year-old—he could perform unimaginable feats with his strong, white teeth… 👀
As for the shy secretary—it was the first time that I’d heard thighs described as milky. As I continued to devour the paperback romances that appeared beneath my mom’s mattress each week, I realized that the heroines’ thighs were almost always milky and their breasts almost always creamy. I’m Chinese—92% of my people are lactose intolerant—so this was really discouraging. But it wasn’t just the lactose. It was also that the heroines’ eyes were sapphire blue, their hair golden, and their nipples like strawberries. I’m no psychologist, but it’s a solid guess that when I started using whitening lotions in my twenties, I was subconsciously striving to acquire the “alabaster skin” of those biddies.
If I asked the average reader today for reactions to that tycoon novel, they’d probably point out the problematic gender dynamics. He was her employer! He was an asshole! After all, these glaring instances of bias are fundamental to the plot premise; the secretary supposedly uses her virginal fragility to win and reform him. But the average reader is less likely to point out the pervasive racism, because race feels absent from the story—when, in fact, a million little word choices imply that beauty is white. (Check out this fantastic article by Lois Beckett about pervasive racism in the romance novel industry. It’s a few years old now, but still resonates.)
A lot of people have expressed interest in narrative change, but when we talk further, I usually discover that their concept of narrative change work is often relegated to a DEI exercise in semantics. “We now say emergent multilingual rather than English Learners,” they’ll say. Or: “We say underserved communities, never underprivileged communities.” Or, they’ll incorporate pronouns into staff bios. Or, they plug anti-bias-signaling words like “equity” into their mission statements (see my post re: this particular phenomenon).
But narrative change is hard work. But before adding words from the social justice vernacular to their vocabulary, social sector orgs need to examine the implicit bias conveyed through the “neutral” words they currently use —words that may seem innocuous or detached from issues of identity.
for example…
When Brian Boyles joined Mass Humanities as the new Executive Director in 2018, he was eager to redefine its approach to the humanities. Rather than disseminating ivory tower ideas to the common masses, he and newly hired Director of Grants Katherine Stevens saw the organization’s role as gathering communities together to tell, share, and reimagine the diverse stories and ideas of the Commonwealth. Talk about narrative change!
The shift has been tangible. A quick search of pre-2010 grants yields such projects as An Audio Tour Through the Life and Works of Jack Kerouac, Mapping Henry David Thoreau’s Travels in Massachusetts, and Community Conversations with the Actors’ Shakespeare Project. Contrast those with projects Mass Humanities has recently funded, such as: Resiliency in Chinatown: Stories of Survival and Community Building, Untold Histories of Black Cambridge; and Telling the Underrepresented Stories of Latinos in Lawrence.
This past winter, I partnered with Mass Humanities to reflect its new approach in its storytelling. While we drafted new storylines that drew from the current social justice vernacular—“we amplify the diverse ideas and stories that shape Massachusetts; redistribute the power of who creates, curates, and benefits from those stories; and uplift safe spaces for rich and productive community conversations,” etc.—we spent even more time reviewing and discussing the seemingly neutral language that the org used in day-to-day communications like grants, emails, program descriptions, and newsletters. And by “we,” I don’t mean just the Mass Humanities staff, but also program alumni from diverse communities across the state.
The result of this review? A long list of words that Mass Humanities would either eliminate from or replace in its day-to-day vocabulary. For example, the team decided to never use the word “canon.” They also also decided that instead of saying:
citizens, which excludes members of the community, or residents, which sounds sterile; they would say neighbors, which connotes a sense of warmth and togetherness
enrich lives/ communities, which assumes that communities lack rich histories, stories, and ideas; they would say champion opportunities, which assumes historical/ systemic barriers to access
academia and scholarship, which connote higher education affiliations and credentialing; they would say expertise and experiences of community members, which includes neighbors, educators, and tribal elders as well as scholars and academics
This attention to bias in “regular” word choice is far more effective than the most adamant mission statement in conveying that the humanities are by and for everyone.
long story short…
One thing that amazes me is how confidently my son moves through the world. He thinks he’s the world’s handsomest and most brilliant little man (he is), a fact that doesn’t change based on who else is in the vicinity. My husband and I work hard to keep it that way. We send him to a Mandarin immersion daycare where his emerging bilingualism is celebrated. We stock his bookshelf with books that celebrate “eyes that kiss in the corners, and glow like warm tea.” If one day he decides to pilfer Mama’s romance book collection, he’ll find Jasmine Guillory and Talia Hibbert alongside Julia Quinn.
I’ll end by reiterating that narrative change is hard work. And while it does require a thoughtful examination of the language we use, it also requires a whole lot more than that. After all, we don’t debunk centuries of storytelling by changing our vocabulary.
In the next issue, we will explore another strategy for narrative change: socializing the new narrative. Until then!
