Organizing for Narrative Power

Bridgit

I grew up on military bases around the world as a military brat, very small, pretty closed communities. What artists did for me is fill my imagination with what the broader world looked like. So that kind of modeling and just stretching our imaginations and giving us the courage to be able to live differently and do differently is I think the really, really powerful role that artists uniquely play.

Host

This is Bridgit Antoinette Evans, cultural change leader and CEO of the Pop Culture Collaborative, which provides resources to artists and funders as they change the narrative landscape in our nation through entertainment and mass communication.

Bridgit

We talk a lot about narrative oceans at the Pop Culture Collaborative. We believe that all of us, all around the world are actually swimming in a kind of ocean except instead of water all around us, there are narratives and stories and ideas and behavioral norms and cultural norms and all of this information and experience that is whether we like it or not, shaping how we think about ourselves, think about other people, think about our role in the world and the possibilities of our world.

Host

And so where have we seen these narrative oceans as a force for good?

Bridgit

So I think for instance, about the narrative ocean that Tarana Burke gave rise to through the Me Too movement, this incredible swell of stories and personal testimony or the narrative ocean that Ryan Coogler created when he put out the first Black Panther film. That's on a good day, that's what narrative oceans are doing for us. On most days, the narrative oceans that we are swimming in are incredibly toxic and they are making it hard to breathe, hard to stay rooted in who we are, making it hard for us to live our best selves and make the best decisions.

Host

And right now we're swimming in some pretty choppy oceans. It's no wonder why so many of us are trying to keep our heads above water, struggling to pay attention, let alone take action.

Bridgit

We are actually living the effects right now of strategies to oversimplify and even revise and erase really important truths about our history, about who we are, who we have been as a nation, who we want to become. A natural human instinct for many people is to actually retreat, really not interrogating the complexity and really doubling down on the most oversimplified concepts of right and wrong, unjust and just.

Host

Sound familiar folks? These stories are being driven from the top down and they're not just stirring arguments. They're reshaping our reality in ways that are hard to ignore.

Bridgit

And these narratives and the policies that they validate that are churned up by these narrative oceans are doing horrible things in the world. They are separating children from their parents at the border, they are preventing people from accessing critical healthcare, they are preventing children from learning about their histories in schools, they are creating doubt around climate science.

Host

This rhetoric isn't just some random talking points floating around. They're driven by those with deep pockets, using their resources to flood the airways and our feeds with narratives that simplify, divide and distract all to protect their own power.

Bridgit

What a narrative ocean does, when we have the power to create immersive narrative oceans, it creates the context for possibility, the possibility that we could in fact change the rules, the systems, the laws, the policies, the norms that are governing and really influencing how people are making decisions and making meaning every day. That's narrative power.

Host

What we're talking about is more than just surface level arguments at the dinner table. It's eroding our approach to critical thinking and media literacy, reshaping how we interpret the world.

Bridgit

Those kinds of learning and skill building and instincts are actually not just important for children. They are the basis for how we actually grow up and engage in the world and begin to build a greater and greater instinct around distinguishing between rhetoric and information that is not true, disinformation, which can really cloud our sense of reality and information that's really rooted in honesty and fact and accuracy.

Host

And with artificial intelligence shaping so much of our digital space, especially during election season, distinguishing truth from manipulation is getting harder by the hour.

Bridgit

So there's actually a very strong relationship between this kind of this phenomenon of just overwhelming disinformation that is just flowing into all of our digital culture and other kind of cultural spaces and this effort to really, for lack of a better term, dumb down the American populace by removing access to culture and history and the ability to think really critically about information.

Host

It's alarming how these forces intertwine and erode our capacity for critical thought. But there are initiatives pushing back. For instance, Pop Culture Collaborative's Becoming America Fund brings together entertainment leaders, artists and organizers to build public yearning for a pluralist nation.

Bridgit

These movement leaders are actually funded to create stories, strategies, campaigns, podcasts, videos, et cetera, but to do so in deep community and collaboration. They're figuring out what it takes to actually seed and expand and reshape narrative oceans at the scale of millions of people.

Host

It's powerful work, but the reality? These artists and movement leaders are up against forces with far deeper pockets.

Bridgit

The amount of resources that are being spent to churn the toxic narrative oceans in our country and around the world is far more than the resources that are being invested currently and transforming those narrative oceans and creating healthy, just pluralist narrative oceans in which people can actually live safely and actually contribute to more justice in the world.

Host

And it's no accident that these toxic narratives make lasting policy change so hard to achieve. When resources flow towards division rather than justice, even the best policy solutions start to lose ground.

Bridgit

That's why we see policy solutions which languish, that don't get funded, that actually they don't have resilience, they can be overturned. We think about that a lot for instance, around climate, around immigration, around racial justice that we get to this place where somebody is willing to say, "This matters. This is what justice looks like. There is a policy for this."

Host

And without that cultural foundation, even the most vital policies can crumble leaving us with a painful reminder of how fragile the road to liberation can be.

Bridgit

Think about Roe v. Wade, how incredibly painful this moment is because the policy solution was not contending with the deeply emotional ways in which people have come to understand the issue of abortion access and bodily autonomy and choice.

Host

It's clear that without a strong cultural foundation, real change can't hold. And that's where artists come in, to help us build the resilience to face these complex issues from a place of understanding and shared values.

Bridgit

What we need, and this is again where artists are absolutely critical, is to be building the muscle for people to be able to see and contend with the complexities of our lives, of our society, of the choices that we are all faced with, and to be able to do so in a way that keeps us really rooted in some foundational value system and identity framework.

Host

That's a huge task and it takes support. Art funders have a unique role here, helping bring these courageous complex stories to life, stories that push us to confront our own imperfections and imagine a world where healing is possible.

Bridgit

I think in arts funders, funders broadly, have a significant role to play in investing in the stories and the strategies that help more people to see complexity and to head into it with courage. And that looks like all the stories that we tell where the characters are not perfect, where we dare to imagine the world in which some of this pain has been actually reconciled within each of us at a societal level.

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