“We tell outselves stories in order to live.” — Joan Didion
There is a famous quotation from Joan Didion, which opens one of her most famous essays, “The White Album”: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” The quotation often is used to fete the writer, to proclaim the essential nature of what we do to the culture at large. But that distorts what Didion is saying, which is relevant to the damaging narratives we use when discussing race in America.
Didion is not celebrating the storyteller, but deconstructing the need to tell stories. We seek to apply narratives, construct tales, explain the world in ways that will allow it to make sense to us when so much of what is happening makes little sense.
“We look for the sermon in the suicide,” she writes, “for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five.”
We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. (11)
Doubt, she says, is often buried under these narrative, a sense that becomes the theme of the essay itself, the searching for answers that comes as the mythology begins to fade and crack apart. Didion describes needing to “revise the circuitry of (her) mind.” She no longer cared about the woman on the ledge, whether she would jump or be saved by the firefighter-priest, but the picture Didion held of the woman in her mind. “In this light all narrative was sentimental,” she writes (43), and “all connections were equally meaningful, and equally senseless.”
So we crave explanations. We gravitate to conspiracies. The son of a federal judge was killed a few days ago, the judge’s husband injured. The judge was in the basement when a gunman, dressed as a FedEx delivery driver, opened fire. Not much else was known, or is known almost a week later. That is not good enough. Perhaps she was in on it. Maybe the husband was the target. We have ready made narratives at out disposal, crafted by novelists and television producers, and they allow us to connect dots even when the dots should not be connected. This is part of the human condition, I think, but also a product of our addiction to stories.
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We tell them, as well, so we know how to live and what we should think about the world. And we are loath to abandon these stories, even when their falsity is apparent. It’s why there were two separate and distinct reactions to the killing of George Floyd, to the killings of Eric Garner, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, Tamar Rice, Sandra Bland, and why the policy responses also elicit such disparate responses.
I remember, in the fall of 2014, when protests and rebellions paralyzed the city of Ferguson, Missouri, after the grand jury refused to indict the police officer who shot and killed Michael Brown. The responses broke down along racial lines, especially on cable news where Fox News with its largely white on-air presence and audience focused solely on the no-bill, framing it as an exoneration, and using it to undercut the protesters’ refrain of “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot.” Brown, the grand jury and later a federal civil rights investigation found, was not shot in the back and likely did not have his hands raised, as was originally reported. The no-bill, according to the prosecutor and Fox, meant that the shooting of Brown was justified. (That’s a distortion, of course; what the grand jury found that there was not enough evidence to indict.) Fox, its audience, Republican lawmakers, and even many liberals and Democrats, took this to mean it was over. They turned their gaze elsewhere. Nothing to see.
The response in the black community, however, was quite different. What Black America saw was another in a long line of police executions of black men. They saw a situation drenched in biased assumptions, poisoned by white supremacy, and that viewed their lives as less valuable.
The no-bill was announced on a Monday. The next night it was the only thing my composition class cared to discuss. The students were mostly black and brown, working class, and nearly all worked full time and as they returned to school at night. They were angry. We had been discussing poems by Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay. Angry poems about the black experience in the United States in the early 20th Century. We had read the short story, “Spanish Roulette,” by Ed Vega, in which the protagonist considers whether to avenge his sister’s rape partly because he knew the police would be unlikely to respond to a call for help from his poor, Latino neighborhood. They wanted the chance to talk, to vent, to argue. Many of the students reported having dicey encounters with police, feeling scared when being pulled over, knowing they had to be careful not to make even the slightest unexpected move. This was their reality. The stories they told were born of the lives they lived as second-class citizens in an America that continues to use race as a line of demarcation. This reality — these stories — literally colored their perception of police and what happened in Ferguson.
The broader majority tended to see it differently, thanks to an almost blind trust in the police that just does not exist within minority communities. The default position for most was to assume that if one was interacting with police, the police must be in the right — especially if the “perp” was black or Hispanic. The language of crime and order introduced to politics by Richard Nixon and George Wallace and then maintained by Reagan, both Bushes, Bill Clinton, and others like Joe Biden and Donald Trump, helped foster the militarization that continues to bedevil the profession. The police procedural, which is a staple of television, only underscored what the politicians were selling, dividing the populace into good guys and bad guys — with the police always being in the right, even when they are not. In many communities (not all — there are thousands of good cops out there), we have moved from “protect and serve” to an occupational mindset for what essentially are minority bantustans throughout the country.
The coverage of the shooting followed predictable lines. Stories appeared painting Michael Brown in the worst possible light. The New York Times on Aug. 24, 2014, just days after Brown was killed, ran two stories, one picturing Brown as a troubled, but overgrown teen, and the other describing Darren Wilson, the officer who shot him, as quiet and unassuming. The contrasting stories allowed many to view the shooting through a familiar lens, and it made it far easier than it should have been to accept Wilson’s version of what happened.
After all, as the Times wrote, Brown was “no angel.” He lived a life of “both problems and promise.”
Shortly before his encounter with Officer Wilson, the police say he was caught on a security camera stealing a box of cigars, pushing the clerk of a convenience store into a display case. He lived in a community that had rough patches, and he dabbled in drugs and alcohol. He had taken to rapping in recent months, producing lyrics that were by turns contemplative and vulgar. He got into at least one scuffle with a neighbor.
The Times makes it clear that Brown had a broad and endearing smile, that he graduated on time, that he had dreams. But these details are lost in the larger narrative, buried beneath the cliches and longstanding caricatures of the African American brute.
Wilson, in contrast, was described by a former coach as “a good kid but also a nondescript kid.” Former neighbors in Texas “recalled Officer Wilson grilling outside from time to time and never causing trouble,” while neighbors in Missouri “said they rarely made much conversation” with Wilson.
These stories ran side by side on the same day in the most prestigious newspaper in the country. They are meticulously reported. And, given the pedigree, they help set the narrative: Troubled black teen from a troubled area v. unassuming white officer who reacted out of fear for his life. And these stories ran well before the empaneling of the grand jury, well before Wilson was given the chance to describe Brown in golem-like language as rising from himself as a sort-of mythical monster. The narrative was set.
Brown’s murder was followed by Eric Garner’s murder, and Freddie Grays’, and the murders of so many more, most of which caused just a trickle of outrage outside of those communities or beyond the black community — until Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis and the dynamics shifted. Perhaps it was the tape — nearly nine minutes long, with Chauvin seeming nonchalant about it even as Floyd calls out for his life. No scuffle. Just depraved indifference to the life of a fellow human being.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000007159353/george-floyd-arrest-death-video.html
The video showed something so egregious, so elementally beyond the pale, that we were able to start telling a different story — which, again, varied depending on who was doing the telling. For many in the Fox News set, the president, many police officers, and conservatives, Chauvin was a rogue and not representative of the badge. This was a singular event that all of us could condemn. The same folks dismissed the deep and abiding anger in urban communities, dressed down the rioters, and used the violence that did occur to dismiss the protests as a whole. This is not about George Floyd, they said, and they were right. It never was just about George Floyd, but about a pattern of abuse that dates back to the formation of local police, that has always been used against black and brown people and against the poor, and about the use of state violence as the lone tool of redress when a crime is broken.
This is an issue of race and class, which are embedded in the stories we tell. The police are tools of power, of capitalism. It is the state and the corporate business community that are responsible for creating conditions in which American citizens feel like an oppressed and occupied population. History argues that this is the case, the history of slavery, Jim Crow in the South and a de facto Jim Crow in the North that played out in housing policy (as outlined in Ta Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations”), union membership and hiring, the deindustrialization of our cities, white flight, school funding fights, etc.; the war on drugs and the general use of war rhetoric in the public policy arena, especially as it relates to black youth; and the victim blaming we see regularly on cable television that pretends that the occasional success story (i.e., Barack Obama or Cory Booker) proves it isn’t public policy but personal character that determines all outcomes.
None of this factors into the stories we, as a broader culture, tell ourselves. America remains wed to the mythology of exceptionalism and individual freedom that frames so much of our discourse. Everyone, the story goes, can succeed with enough pluck and effort. It’s not about race, not about class. It’s only about work.
That’s the argument that props up the racism of this meme, which I found on Facebook. The image is designed to trigger memories in the minds of a very specific cohort — white men of a certain age, who have seen their power diminished, men who can remember their boyhoods in sepia tones, but whose lives are now lived against a backdrop of stagnation and recession. This, the image implies, is what a better time looks like. This is the image that the word “again,” in Trump’s MAGA mantra, is meant to elicit.
Text is superimposed on the image to add context and argument, which is two-fold: that Whites are successful because they work and Blacks, not included here whether in picture or text, are making excuses. The point here is to remind the reader/viewer of the guiding American mythology of White supremacy, which has been a part of the American rhetorical landscape since the first black men and women were kidnapped and enslaved on American soil. This mythology is perfectly encapsulated by Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, which uses a backward-glancing proclamation to diminish the gains made by African Americans and women, to call forth an Edenic before-time that exists only in the sepia-toned memories of his supporters.
As long as the mythology can disregard the systemic ways in which African Americans have been and continue to be excluded, the ways in which they have been put upon, beaten, and killed based on little more than their skin color, then the voices of African Americans can be ignored. Their claims on the nation can be disregarded, their concerns dismissed. We work, they don’t and the “whole truth,” as the meme says, is that this work is all that matters.
In a lot of ways, the protests — and violent uprisings — from Ferguson and Baltimore to Minneapolis and Louisville were inevitable. Michael Brown and now George Floyd were sparks; the long-term conditions and the stories we, in the white majority have and continue to tell, were the fuel. Violence often follows when subjugated people — or people who view themselves as subjugated — are ignored. The story of the Floyd protests being told in the Black community is different than the one being told by conservatives and even many white liberals, even if we are grasping for the same story telling tools. The use of The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as a cudgel — King would be aghast, the Fox cohort tells us, which is only part of the story, which ignores the measured way he responded to the violence that struck many American cities in the mid-‘60s.
Nonviolence was central to King’s belief system, a core tenet of his call for equality and justice. He called rioting an immoral act, said he would always stand against it, would always seek to offer a moral and more pragmatic alternative. But he also made clear that “riot is the language of the unheard” — a line he used a number of times, including a little remarked upon speech (“The Other America”) and this CBS interview. King was critical of violence on moral and tactical grounds, but he understood its genesis. The riots in Watts, in Newark, Philadelphia, Rochester, Harlem and so many other cities that began erupting in 1964 and the Black Power movement of the time was a response to the failures of white America to address not only segregation but economic inequality and the race-based, though seemingly race-neutral policies used to enforce the status quo.
I don’t know how King would have responded, were he alive, though I suspect he would not have taken to cable television to denounce what was happening, as did many White moderates, to borrow King’s phrase, and conservatives, and instead would have been on the street marching himself, putting his moral credibility on the line. King, however, is not hear to speak for himself — though we have his speeches and essays to guide us in our view of what he might think. These stand as the only way he can tell his story, the only way he can influence the stories being told today.
The reality is that what is happening on the streets is not King’s story to tell, not mine, not the story of the chattering classes. It is the story of the people who live in the neighborhoods being occupied, the young men and women being accosted by police, who live under a cloud of suspicion created by the stories we tell ourselves, the mythology we have created and that stands in for a real accounting of our historical crimes. We need to shed the lies, the distorted narratives, and replace them with honest ones not so beholden to the mythologies of white supremacist past.