Naming the break
“We’re not a broken people. We have broken stories.”
The creed of the AYA StoryologistIn your first course you found the cultural technologies your family used to heal: kinship, song, prayer, humor, mutual aid, and standing together. Keep listening for them.
Now you add a new skill. Movies, textbooks, the news, and sometimes our own families tell stories that make our people seem small, helpless, or in need of rescue. You will learn to name five kinds of broken stories, in stories you already know and in your family’s lore.
Assata Shakur’s life is a lesson in this. The FBI told her story one way. Many in our communities tell it another. A Djeli-in-Training always asks: whose telling is this, and what does it want me to believe about us?
How-To Study: The five broken stories
Open the video in GHL
Broken stories are stories, or story fragments, that act as agents of oppression. They center Europeans and carry the dominant culture’s messages to weaken or control Afrika and Afrikan people.
You can often feel a broken story before you can name it. It is a story that:
- Encourages us to discount ourselves, our people, or our culture
- Moves our people to defer to, or praise, those who oppress us
- Makes life’s challenges seem too much, so we see ourselves or our people as “less than”
- Invites us to surrender instead of retreat, regroup, and return
- Asks us to accept the oppressor’s views, criticism, and opinions of us, our people, and our culture
Here are five types to guard against, especially when we tell our own stories. Open each one. Several use the story of Araminta, from your first course.
MSOMorality in Service of Oppression
Direct action against oppressors or oppression is treated as immoral, or less moral. Our well-known Afrikan values of loving and forgiving humanity are used to hold back direct action, including self-defense and holding oppressors accountable. Our people win the moral victory, but the power between oppressor and oppressed does not change. The story turns the other cheek to our oppressors while taking a moral hard line against our own.
Example
At the end of legal apartheid, South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission offered amnesty to those who confessed their political crimes. Compare the Nuremberg trials, where Nazi leaders were prosecuted and punished. Today, white South Africans still hold a disproportionate share of the country’s land and wealth.
Healing question: Who holds power at the end of the story? Did anything change for our people, or only a moral victory?
UBOThe Universal Black Orphan
This broken story has a positive face: there is a real Afrikan hero or shero. The problem is that they are cut off from the Black family, culture, comrades, and the historical mission of our ancestors to be free of European domination. It borrows from Hollywood and the hero’s journey. It promotes individualism and the illusion that a lone hero is the answer, a feel-good story that slips in Eurocentric poison. Without family and community mission, the character ends up serving the missions of others.
In Araminta’s story: Harriet Tubman is often shown working alone. Her story is seldom linked to the militant Black abolitionists of her time who were her comrades, like William Still of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee, who recorded the people she brought through.
Another example
Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek. Unlike the other stars, she never speaks of her background, and it is never explored.
Healing question: Where are this hero’s family, community, comrades, and mission?
GWSThe Great White Savior
The efforts of white people are amplified or made the center. Afrikans made an effort, but in the end it is the white person, or white culture, that saves the day.
In Araminta’s story: Tellings that center the white abolitionists who helped her, making them the heart of the Underground Railroad, while Tubman and the Black people who planned, sheltered, guided, and freed themselves move to the edges.
Healing question: What did Black people do for ourselves in this story? Who has been moved to the edges?
SWPShame White People
Shaming white people for their racist actions is presented as the most powerful, or best, way to persuade them to stop oppressing us, while our own direct action is minimized.
Example
When talking about police brutality, it is often said the officer shot him “just because he was Black.” This is an error, and it makes the victim’s Blackness the problem. Instead: the officer shot him because of the officer’s racism toward Black people.
Healing question: Where does the story put the problem, in our Blackness or in their racism? What direct action did our people take?
SHTThe Super Hero Trap
Another broken story with a positive face. The shero or hero has a super power, like bullets bouncing off them, x-ray vision, or superhuman strength, that lets them defeat evil. Everyone cheers and identifies with them. It feels good, but it’s shallow. The victory can’t be repeated, because it rests on a power ordinary people can’t have. It becomes a fantasy victory. What we need are ordinary people, or groups of people, who do extraordinary things.
In Araminta’s story: Tellings that make her a one-of-a-kind legend no one could follow. The healed story shows how she did it: planning, disguises, songs and signals, a network of safe houses, and in 1863, helping lead the Combahee River Raid with Black scouts and soldiers that freed more than 700 people.
Healing question: Could an ordinary person or group do this? What did they plan, learn, and organize?
Where are the empowering stories?
Naming what’s broken is only half the work. Keep searching your family lore for stories that:
- Make us a family, with heroes, sheros, villains, rogues, martyrs, and rebels who teach us values
- Teach us to love ourselves, to appreciate and defend being Black, and deepen our Black cultural and spiritual awakening and growing Afrikan identity
- Shield the family from adversity
- Inspire us, and make us get up when we’re down
- Remind us that our actions, thoughts, and emotions are significant, and that our family’s and our people’s actions were and are significant
- Remind us that while our actions may need correction, we don’t need correction: we are objects of praise from birth to death and beyond
And ask: who will fix the broken stories that tell you otherwise?
Practice: Name the break
Read each fragment and choose the broken story it shows. Your graded quiz is in GHL.
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Family Research: The story hunt
Hunt for two broken stories in the world around you, and one in your family’s lore. Answer each with an empowering family story.
- Find two broken stories in stories you already know: a movie, TV show, textbook, song, video, or news report about Black people.
- Find one broken story or fragment in your family’s lore, from your interviews in Challenges III and IV. It might be a saying, a warning, or the way a family story usually gets told.
- Ask a family member: “Is there a movie or story about Black people that always bothered you? Why?”
- Log them below, with the empowering family story you would use to answer each one.
Handle family broken stories with care. A broken story in your family usually came from somewhere: fear, survival, or what someone was taught. Name the story, not the person. In Journey 3 you will learn to retell broken stories using the Story Structures for Liberation field guide.
Personal Reflection
Demonstration: Broken story, family answer
First, respond to two tellings
Answer before you call. Respond to two tellings from classmates or from the Ancestor Shelf, using the four moves:
- Name itGive the story a temporary name.
- Take itSay one thing it taught you.
- Ask itAsk the teller one question.
- Link itConnect it to your own family or adopted line.
Then, post your telling
Record 2 to 3 minutes, or write about 300 words. Name one broken story you found and its type, show where it breaks, and answer it with an empowering story from your family.
This week, listeners add a fifth move: say whether they agree with the type you named. Some stories carry more than one break. Post an answer back to close the circle.
Bring to your weekend session
Bring your story hunt. The circle will diagnose a short film clip together and practice turning broken sentences into healed ones out loud.
For the family
This week your Djeli-in-Training is learning to recognize broken stories: stories in movies, books, the news, and sometimes our own sayings, that make our people seem small, helpless, or in need of rescue.
“Is there a movie or story about Black people that always bothered you? Why? And what story from our family would you tell to answer it?”
Watch a movie or show together this week and ask: whose story is this, really?
Challenge V checklist
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