Telling American Stories

These twin values of liberty and justice are intimately connected, and not just by virtue of their recitation at the end of the Pledge of Allegiance. Liberty, of course, refers to the set of rights and responsibilities a free people grant to, and require of, themselves and Justice, the essential requirement for fairness in a nation that is committed to the rule of law and to protect that hard-won liberty. Both liberty and justice contain within their meaning the understanding that they must apply equally to every American if they are to have any meaning at all.Read more>>

For better and for worse, America is a deeply capitalist society, and as such, it values entrepreneurship highly. Whether it’s Bill Gates on the cover of another business magazine, or Oprah Winfrey on the cover of her own magazine (she is, each and every month), Americans can become famous for their business acumen and sheer wealth, and many have. Americans also value generosity, both because it appeals to their sense of fairness and because it implies success and financial well-being. Using language that emphasizes the entrepreneurial nature of our work—empowering individuals and communities to succeed, grow, and prosper— can help place that work in a context that many Americans easily understand and naturally tend to support. Highlighting the generosity of members of our community encourages respect for them and encourages those with even greater resources to support our work.

Community, whether it conjures up images of a neighborhood block party or a small town gymnasium filled to the rafters for a high school basketball game, is highly valued—and often a source of great pride—for all kinds of Americans.

To understand the role of community in our history, the example of San Francisco’s Chinatown is instructive. Already a thriving neighborhood at the time of the 1906 earthquake, Chinatown was completely destroyed along with the rest of the city. As planning for re-building commenced, the mayor decided that Chinatown should be relocated from its position at the center of the city to its outskirts. The people of Chinatown rejected the proposal, and got to work, constructing new buildings that they did not own, rebuilding homes and businesses because of the immense importance they placed on rebuilding their community.

The value of community, of pulling together to make a better life for its members, has long been understood by organizers as important for rallying support among an organization’s base. Self-reliance, for many conservatives, would doubtless call to mind images of the rugged individual. By connecting the two values—showing how empowering a community helps to empower individuals—we can connect with two deeply held American values that resonate throughout our history and across our politics.

Americans’ respect for discipline is deeply connected with ideas about honor and self-restraint, and also with respect for practice, hard work, and the excellence we believe those traits to engender.

When Jackie Robinson became the first African American to play major league baseball, he faced an entire season’s worth of the most terrible racism and ignorant hatred imaginable, from people in the stands, from his opponents, and even from his own teammates. Yet Robinson never once fought back, never lost control of himself, because he realized that to do so would be to lose sight of his ultimate goal: seeing the majors completely integrated. At the same time, if Jackie Robinson had been merely an average third baseman, or a so-so hitter, the trail he was blazing would have been immeasurably more difficult. Just as much as his discipline, his greatness helped him win over the public and achieve his goals—if there’s one thing America likes more than a hardworking underdog, it’s a hardworking underdog who wins.

Telling stories that focus on the discipline shown by hard-working immigrant mothers and father can help engender respect for their struggles. While there is a real danger of reinforcing stereotypes about “deserving” and “undeserving” members of the society we care about, highlighting the core American values animating our stories can be of immense value in convincing our fellow Americans of the justness of our cause.

The value Americans place on hard work is central to our identity and deeply ingrained in our collective conscious. The connection with fairness (“work hard, get ahead,” or “an honest day’s wages”) is a major part of many economic justice messages. These concepts are embodied in the life story of a woman such as Dolores Huerta, who has spent her entire life fighting for decent working conditions for migrant farm-workers and at the age of seventy five still puts in a full work week at her foundation. It’s important to remember that it is not only fairness that we strive for when we organize to win better wages or working conditions—hard work itself is valued in this country because it speaks to the moral uprightness of those who do it. Understanding how work imparts dignity to the worker and reminding people of that fact can be extremely helpful in forging the personal connections through our communications efforts that will help to change minds and win allies.

Americans value toughness, particularly when it’s mixed with a measure of stoicism, grace under pressure, and good humor. Cool, of course, is in the eye of the beholder, but people know it when they see it. In America, the birthplace of cool, it most often takes the form of a knowing toughness, laced with sarcasm and dry wit—always easy and graceful, without a care in the world. While our understanding of precisely who is cool changes with the times, from Humphrey Bogart in the 1940s to James Dean and Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s, Bruce Lee in the 1970s and Eddie Murphy in the 1980s to Andre 3000 and Big Boi today, cool itself is eternal. If you have someone on your side who has it, by all means—use it! Likewise, if your opponents are attempting to don the mantle of cool, and you know they’re anything but, call them on it. There’s nothing worse than trying to look cool when you’re not.

The freedom to worship or not, “according to the dictates of our own conscience,” in Thomas Jefferson’s phrase, is a cornerstone of our American democracy. Still, there can be no denying the powerful role that faith has played in our history, from the references to the Creator in the Declaration of Independence to the soaring imagery of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech. Acknowledging how traditional religious values related to social justice, inclusion, and care for those less fortunate than ourselves connect the values that animate the work of our own organizations can be a powerful way to connect with people whose religious beliefs are based in the same tradition. Those values reveal the hope for a better world that is embodied by that work, providing a corollary to the value Americans place on optimism.Read more>>

Americans have a deep respect for individuals whose actions are motivated by concern for others, and even more so when their actions involve great risk to themselves. Such individuals embody the kind of moral courage that we aspire to for ourselves.

The story of Harriet Tubman and her work on the Underground Railroad, leading escaped slaves to freedom in the North, is a good example. Time and again, she risked her own freedom to secure that of others. When asked how it was she could place herself at such risk so many times, she replied, “ I can’t die but once.”

Highlighting the sacrifices made by immigrant parents for the sake of their children, for example, or the commitment shown by a community fighting a polluting corporation, can help to connect the causes progressives are fighting for with broadly held values.

Optimism is the cardinal American value. How could it not be in a country that was founded on Enlightenment ideas about human dignity, the right of self-government and the perfectibility of humanity? Without optimism, a revolutionary war that pitted a group of poorly armed provincials against the most feared army in the world could never have been started. Optimism is intimately connected with the value of courage—not physical courage, though that is also highly valued in America— the kind of moral courage that makes a person believe they have the duty to fight for the better world they believe is possible. Read more>>

The first question to ask yourself when you start to think about how to tell your own American stories is: “Does it have American values in it?” The list of values that follows is admittedly subjective and nowhere near exhaustive, but it is based on a lifelong interest in American history, literature and popular culture. It makes connections between the listed values to show what they mean to Americans, both separately and as a system of values. Ideas like courage or hope are, of course, prized by cultures around the world—to speak of them as American values is to try to explain how they play out in our culture, and how they make up part of a coherent whole.

What Makes an American?
America, more than most countries, defines itself and the members of its society by reference to a set of shared values. In many ways, they define what it means to be American. While many other nations define their members on the basis of birthplace and blood relations, Americanness is based on a social contract involving an understanding and acceptance of its unique set of democratic values. As sociologist Carl Friedrich once said, “To be a Frenchman is a fact, while to be an American is an ideal.” By embracing that ideal, organizations fighting for justice and equality, whether they are working for immigration reform or against felony disenfranchisement, can stake their claim to the American story in a way that will make it difficult for their opponents to attack.

Reaffirming our commitment to our shared values can be a powerful tool to promote inclusion of all the individuals and communities that make up the American nation. This isn’t to say that using values-laden language will somehow magically erase the barriers between us and win acceptance of marginalized communities, but rather that it will be extremely difficult to win that acceptance without reference to the values that underlie the social contract that binds us together as a nation.