By Nat
Kendall-Taylor and April Callen APRIL
29, 2020
In
moments of social and political upheaval, the best way to get attention and
action is to focus on common ground, highlight our interconnectedness, and
foster solidarity, communications research tells us. In the
wake of the Covid-19 crisis, that is exactly what we are seeing from grant
makers like the Ford Foundation’s Darren Walker and advocacy networks
like People’s
Action, which are stepping up and advancing messages that unite and
push us toward a better future.
These
messages spark hope that a more inclusive and equitable world might lie ahead,
that the new normal might be closer to the one we have been working for. But
alongside this optimism sits a stark and sharp reality. Covid is turning up the
heat on inequities that have simmered throughout the history of America.
The
pandemic is driving a wedge into the existing chasm between rich and poor,
black and white.
As
lawmakers call for demographic data to be collected, early information confirms what social-
and racial-justice advocates have long known: that decades of bad housing,
health care, and employment policies, as well as the daily stress of racism,
manifest as disparities in health outcomes — whether it’s higher rates of heart
disease or shorter life spans.
Covid
is bringing America’s systemic racism into clear view. But amid the chaos and
suffering, there is an opening to address our legacy of racist public policies
and systems. Our ability to move forward in this direction lies, at least in
part, in the way we talk about issues of race and racism right now.
Researchers
who study how we discuss certain topics — a process known as framing — are concerned with the effects of our communication choices on
people’s perceptions and behaviors. Research has shown that how we
say what we say shapes how people think, feel, and act.
At one
time, there was some debate about whether those seeking to address structural
racism should lead with it in their communications: Some research suggested
that going hard and headfirst on the stark reality of racism and the gravity of
its effects was not the best way to generate broad support for the policy
changes needed to promote change.
We are
in a different time. The issues have advanced, and so has the research.
We
simply cannot and should not avoid talking about race. Rather than whether, the
question now is how best to have conversations about race. How
can social-change communicators best promote conversations about race and
racism in ways that help people understand, and get them to act and support
solutions that advance equity?
Here
are four ideas that can help those communicating about race equity in the
Covid-19 context:
Find
shared values. To develop strategies that could open up productive
conversations about improving the justice system, we looked at how best to use
facts about racism in the justice system. In partnership with
Harvard’s Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice,
and with support from the Ford Foundation, we conducted an online experiment to
test messages that focused narrowly on data about the justice system’s unfair
treatment of black Americans. We also tested messages that called for making
change through collaborative problem-solving and a commonsense approach to
overhauling the justice system to advance our shared goal for it, public
safety. Finally, we tested a message with both the commonsense change
argument and the structural racism facts. In the end, the
most effective message was the one that contained facts about race and emphasized
problem-solving. This worked better than either of those appeals on their own.
Talking about racism as part of promoting social change is more effective if we
also draw people’s attention to larger shared values.
Don’t
just assert. Explain. We have also found that messages explaining
the roots of racism are more effective than those that only assert its
existence. In a project supported by the Knight Foundation,
we explored public understanding of neighborhood segregation to
find ways to drive support for integrative policies. We found that messages
that asserted the existence of racist housing policies were generally
ineffective, but when paired with a short explanation of how racist lending and
zoning practices have led to segregated neighborhoods, they spurred support for
a wide range of progressive community-development policies and practices.
For
advocates working on housing, community development, education, and health,
messages about patterns of racism work better if they help people understand
the roots of current inequities. Historical examples (like redlining) that
demonstrate how past policies led to the current reality facing
many communities of color are particularly promising ways of
explaining.
Show
solutions, not just problems. While it’s tempting to
start and end messages about racism with a firm and unwavering focus on the
scope and depth of the problem, research suggests that messages focused
only on the problem, without also touching on solutions, don’t move people
much. And in some cases, research suggests that messages mired in crisis may
actually make people fatalistic and lead to disengagement. We suffer
acutely from crisis inflation and emergency fatigue, traps that problem-based
messaging falls right into.
Counter
“separate fates” thinking with a collective aspirational vision for the future. We
are finding that messages with an affirmative, collective, and aspirational
vision of the future that puts race and racism at the center can create space
for supporting progressive policies. We know from many years of work that
Americans tend to assume that black and white Americans occupy different worlds
and have “separate fates.” This thinking saps support among white Americans for
policies that would redistribute resources to provide black Americans and other
people of color with the opportunities they have historically been denied.
To
counter this separate-fates thinking, we can offer messages that make it clear
that racism is an issue that affects all of us and that addressing it creates a
stronger society for us all. Such messages must also offer a positive vision of
the future. We must ask ourselves, “What would it actually look and be like to
live in a society characterized by racial equity?”
In working
to build support for policies that address racial inequities in access to affordable housing, we found that
emphasizing collective prosperity — the idea that tackling racial
inequities was key to the future of all Americans — increased people’s sense of
collective, rather than individual, responsibility for the issue and boosted
support for policies including progressive zoning, developer incentives and
set-asides, and housing assistance.
Racism
is at the core of many issues we wrestle with today — making sure every child
receives a quality education, ensuring that every community has a grocery store
stocked with healthy food options, creating a criminal-justice system that
honors human rights, and guaranteeing that everyone has access to vital health
services, including proper Covid-19 care and treatment.
We need
to be able to imagine a world that is more just and inclusive while learning from
our past — and present — mistakes and failures.
In her
essay, “The Pandemic Is a Portal,” the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy captures
this wisdom: "Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the
past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a
gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it,
dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks
and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk
through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready
to fight for it"
Acknowledging
the presence and effects of racism by appealing to shared values, explaining
its roots and offering solutions, and advancing an affirmative vision of a
collective future can help create the systemic and cultural change we need to
move into a safer, healthier, more equitable new world.
Nat
Kendall-Taylor is chief executive officer and April Callen is a senior
strategist at the FrameWorks Institute, which advises advocates on
communicating about social and scientific issues.
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