Authoring a Better Future, Together

This blog post was originally published as part of the Disinfo Defense League's "Narrative Takes." DDL is a distributed national network of organizers, researchers, scholars and strategists dedicated to disrupting online racialized disinformation infrastructure. Spitfire has supported the work of DDL since its inception in June 2020.

The "Narrative Takes" newsletter for DDL members features keen insights, errant thoughts and brief reflections on our ever-evolving socio-political landscape from narrative strategists and cultural thinkers who sit on the DDL Narrative Council. Below is a slightly edited version of my latest entry.

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The Standards of Villains Simply Will Not Do

The genocide in Gaza continues, every single day, as it has now for 54 straight weeks. The daily massacres, ceaseless slaughter, the attendant and tireless justification for Israeli military atrocities and war crimes by powerful politicians and pundits. Fifty-four straight weeks.

Nearly a year ago, in November 2023, when it already seemed as if the horrors we were witnessing and the US government’s brutal commitment to facilitating them were too much to bear, I had the honor of moderating both a Disinfo Defense League member session and Radical Communicators Network panel on narratives about Palestine, resistance and humanity. My opening remarks at both of those events included the following:

Whose lives, whose rights, whose voices, whose existence, and whose futures matter? In times of mass murder and war crimes, our politics and press make the answer painfully clear. This is another type of warfare, one waged by media and government over narrative, defining and dictating what and whose stories are allowed and encouraged, and whose are omitted, maligned, and marginalized.

The doubly shameless and shameful interview with renowned author Ta-Nehisi Coates last month by “CBS Mornings” co-host Tony Dokoupil provided a clear example of how this plays out in real life. “[W]ho we believe is human, who we don’t believe is human, what policies we believe should be in the world, which policies we don’t, are actually shaped largely by writing and the stories we tell,” Coates calmly noted before Dokoupil’s relentless font of patronizing and pathetic “hasbara” talking points.

Coates’ new book, The Message, which recounts the authors’ experiences and revelations during travels to Senegal, Palestine, and South Carolina, is as much a mediation on the power and purpose of writing, of storytelling, as it is an examination of human nature’s propensity to condition and tier the humanity of others. “[T]o imagine the enslaved, the colonized, the conquered as human beings has always been a political act,” writes Coates in the introduction to his book. The power of writing, especially from one’s own lived experiences, Coates adds, “of drawing out a common humanity, is indispensable to our future.”

The work of countering racialized disinformation, linked as it inherently is with organizing for narrative power, demands contesting for new and liberated lexicons, for acknowledged and accepted realities long denied, denigrated and deprecated. As Kwame Ture, born Stokely Carmichael, explained in 1967 to students of Morgan State College in Baltimore, “[T]he first need of a free people is to be able to define their own terms and have those terms recognized by their oppressors. It is also the first need that all oppressors must suspend… And the power to define is the most important power that we have.”

Ture’s words are echoed in Coates’ own description of what we need to oppose systems of oppression, which he deems “systems of cowardice” that “work best in the dark.”

“[T]he standards of enslavers, colonizers, and villains simply will not do,” Coates declares. “We require another standard—one that sees the sharpening of our writing as the sharpening of our quality of light. And with that light we are charged with examining the stories we have been told, and how they undergird the politics we have accepted, and then telling new stories ourselves.”

Albert Camus, in his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, spoke to what he defined as the writer’s duty — and, dare I suggest, the duty of anyone who opposes oppression, colonization, apartheid, genocide — to stand against the staus quo, to avoid the seduction of flattering the powerful and stay connected to our human community and common humanity.

The writer, as Camus said, “cannot put himself today in the service of those who make history; he is at the service of those who suffer it. Otherwise he will be alone…,” adding that the act of storytelling, of documenting an honest reality, must “always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows, and the resistance to oppression."

Carrying the torch of these traditions honored and articulated by both the author Camus and the organizer Ture, Coates describes the task of writers, of those who use communications to translate experience into meaning and meaning into power, to (in the words of Finley Peter Dunne) comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, as “nothing less than doing their part to save the world.”

In my own role as a writer, as a media critic, as a communicator and agitator — especially when things are at their bleakest — I often return to the words of Edward Said, who four decades ago wrote in his book, The Word, The Text, and the Critic, “In human history there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society, and this is obviously what makes change possible…”

We, together, are that something. We are all the authors of a better future.

To have any chance of saving this world, from Asheville to Deir al-Balah, we need to be writing new narratives into existence a whole lot faster.