Why Intersectional Stories Are Key to Helping the Communities We Serve

(Photo by iStock/agsandrew)

Storytelling is the best tool we have for effectively communicating about big, systemic issues like racism, classism, and transphobia. People think in stories. When we don’t have a narrative that tells us how to think about an issue or when the narrative is inaccurate, partial, or too abstract, we fill in the gaps, and the stories we build in our own minds can be flawed and full of biases and assumptions. 

Great stories help us understand systemic issues because they transport us into the lives of the characters. We see the world through their eyes, and we are changed by their experiences because they feel like our own. Great stories can counter existing beliefs by rewriting someone's understanding. They can help communities radically imagine new ways of being and seeing.

Many people communicating for social change are exploring how to tell diverse and inclusive stories that do the important work of centering marginalized communities while building understanding about how inequality persists. Intersectionality—a theory with roots in Black feminist thought, including the work of Sojourner Truth, Anna Julia Cooper, Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw—can help. 

What Is Intersectionality?

In short, intersectionality is a prism for illuminating how racism, sexism, and classism (and many other “isms” that affect people based on their religion, disabilities, physical appearance, sexuality, and nationality) interact and shape experiences within social institutions like education, health care, criminal justice, government policy, and media. Intersectionality scholars analyze the widespread influence of these isms in every fiber of our society— the stories we celebrate, the policies we implement, and how we interact with each other. These isms never act alone. They are interlocking, and they affect individuals differently. When we don’t apply an intersectional lens to communications about systemic issues, we’re likely to get our communications wrong.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, law professor at UCLA, coined the term in 1989, and in a 2019 interview with Vox, she shared an example in discrimination law: “In particular, courts seem to think that race discrimination was what happened to all Black people across gender and sex discrimination was what happened to all women, and if that is your framework, of course, what happens to Black women and other women of color is going to be difficult to see.” In other words, our stories have to address the reality that if you are Black, Indigenous, or a person of color and female, you likely experience multiple layers of discrimination.

To help people see the complex ways communities experience systems of inequality (the multiple isms), we have to tell intersectional stories. Here are some guiding principles:

Show (Don’t Tell) Systems at Work

The “show, don’t tell” golden rule of crafting stories is particularly important here. For people who don’t think in systems, stories can illustrate what abstract concepts like racism, classism, sexism, freedom, justice, and equality look and feel like.

All stories have a beginning, middle, and end; conflict and resolution; and characters and settings. But intersectional stories also require that we make visible how isms affect characters’ experiences. We must show characters navigating systems of inequality like racism, patriarchy, and classism as part of the storyline, while ensuring that although characters interact with these systems in the story, they aren’t solely defined by their experience with them.

When storytellers get this right, we are transported. We feel the emotional weight of the characters navigating an unjust world, and we see how these systems work to privilege and oppress. The characters’ experiences make these often hard-to-grasp, complex problems—and potential solutions—visible, real, and urgent. 

A video from REFORM Alliance, an organization focused on changing probation and parole systems, illustrates this well. Technically Illegal* follows the emotional turmoil people on parole or probation experience as they engage in technically illegal acts like visiting a loved one on their deathbed, running late to a meeting with a parole officer, or being around other people drinking. We can see ourselves in each of the characters, we understand parole violations better, we become radicalized by the reality of these inhumane laws, and we are left with a call to action—to give mothers, sons, friends, and “life” back—by joining the organization. 

While stories should focus on individuals within a community to enhance emotional engagement, defining problems and their solutions on the individual level hides how systems of inequality operate. Storytellers should make it clear that the society in which characters live shapes their experiences, while also demonstrating their power and agency. Three critical race scholars—Lindsay Pérez Huber, Lorena Camargo Gonzalez, and Daniel G. Solórzano—studied children’s stories and developed a rubric for building inclusive stories that’s as helpful here as it is for children’s literature:

• Center race and racism, and their intersectionality, with other forms of oppression in stories that feature people of color. Characters’ experiences with inequality or privilege based on race, class, and gender should be a central part of the story.  
• Illustrate and critique how power and agency operate in this context. For example, those who use their power to hurt others should be the villains of the story and communities that engage in collective action should be the solution.
• Challenge pervasive, harmful ideology that reinforces social inequalities, such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and individualism. Identify the existing pervasive narratives about the issue and the people it affects. Take care to dismantle and challenge those narratives through the plot structures you choose, the character’s perspective you center, and the emotions you engage.
• Center the lived experience of people of color in culturally authentic ways. Main characters should be complex and multifaceted people, and their experiences should feel real and authentic to the community. Work with people in the community so that your stories get this right.
• Include historical, cultural, political, geographic, and economic context shaping the storyline. Include elements in your story that help the audience understand the context in which it’s taking place.
• Make the moral of the story a commitment to social justice. Whether or not you include a direct call to action, the audience should leave the story with a commitment to change the systems that are creating the conditions and experiences of the characters. The resolution of the story should be one that reinforces social justice and collective action.

We can see all of these elements in the Netflix TV miniseries When They See Us, which tells the story about the wrongful conviction of Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Yusef Salaam, Korey Wise, and Raymond Santana in the sexual assault of a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. Creator, co-writer, and director Ava Duvernay makes the unique experience of racism that Black and Latino males experience within the criminal justice system central to the story. Racism is the air the characters breath, the context they have to navigate. The series transports us into the world of these boys, and eventually men, and their families by showing authentic depictions of their lives in New York—their personalities, friendships, and family life. We witness how race, class, and gender affect how the police treat them. We feel their anxiety, fear, and outrage as they desperately search for justice in a system that has labeled them criminals before they even have a chance to share their stories. We see the police department and white female lawyer build the case against them based on an assumption of guilt rather than innocence and evidence.

Rather than telling us the criminal justice system is racist, Duvernay shows us by following this unjust criminal trial within a particular social, political, and historical moment. Through their stories, we see how the criminal justice system oppresses men of color, and we are left with the desire to change it.

Provide Historical Context 

We can’t understand movements or the issues they are working to change without knowing the context in which they emerged. Research suggests that without context, people may look at a fact or piece of data and insert their assumptions as to what the data mean. Trace the arc of history to the present. Show the historical roots of racist, classist, and sexist policies, and how those policies persist within systems today.

Journalist and scholar Nikole Hannah Jones and her colleagues model this type of storytelling in The New York Times’ 1619 Project. Via long-form journalism, the project shows us how slavery shaped society as we know it and reframes 1619 as the birth year for the United States—when the first enslaved people were brought to the country.

In one piece, Jones and journalist Jeneen Interlandi illustrate how racial health disparities today are a result of a history of racist policies with roots in slavery. They tell stories about individuals navigating systems designed by people with racist beliefs, and how, as a result, Black communities had little to no access to quality health care and were more likely to die as a result. The journalists map this reality from emancipation to the present day by artfully weaving together stories of people navigating health-care systems with clear explanations of how those systems were designed to fail them.

Uplift the Voices of Marginalized People

In The New Yorker, writer Keeyanga-Yamahtta Taylor quotes the Black feminist Combahee River Collective as saying, “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”

This logic can extend to how we build strategy and communicate for justice and systems-level change. People who experience multiple forms of inequality need representation in decision-making and power over their stories. When we lack diverse representation on our planning committees and among our storytellers, we are more likely to get wrong the reality of the challenge and potentially distribute limiting narratives.

For example, while conducting​ field research on the immigrant rights movement,​ sociologist Emily Cabaniss found that national-level advocacy organizations told stories that depicted immigrants as a singular social community with shared goals and the same political identity. In 2009, frustrated with the leadership of these organizations, which did not include their perspectives, teens and college-aged activists organized and created a youth-led organization. Their priority was to pass the ​Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act—a bill to protect undocumented young people raised in the United States. They became known as the DREAMers. The leading narrative at the time on immigrant rights emphasized broadly a broken immigration system and centered the voices of adult citizen advocates. In contrast, the youth activists constructed and shared a new narrative that recognized the unique needs of undocumented youth.

 As a result of these efforts, the activists successfully joined the national conversation on immigration reform, specifically the DREAM Act, and gained support from national advocacy organizations. They did this by sharing “coming out” stories, where they disclosed their status as undocumented people and framed their perspectives as essential in the fight for immigrant rights. Ella, an undocumented movement leader, shared the following during a conference call with US Senator Richard Durbin’s office and undocumented youth around the United States: “One of the most powerful tools we have is being able to tell our stories, being able to be open about our status. And I think that coming out as undocumented is one of the most powerful and empowering things that undocumented youth have done—that we have done.”

When working with communities to share their stories, include them in the strategy process so that they have control over how and when their stories are used.  When we don’t do this, we risk tokenizing people for a particular identity they have or retraumatizing them by asking them to recount a hard experience. When you ask someone to share their story, give them the opportunity to share their whole self—how they define who they are, outside of the organization’s agenda.

For the report, “American Dreaming: The Road Map to Resilience for Undocumented Storytellers,” Define American, an organization aiming to change prevailing narratives about undocumented people in the United States, surveyed 40 undocumented or formerly undocumented activists who shared their stories with national and regional news media for advocacy efforts between 2010-2016. It found that while sharing stories for some created a sense of power and belonging, many saw certain stories shared for good public relations. Writing in a composite “we” voice to illustrate research findings, the authors write:

We are energized by our differences. And yet, the pressure to provide good public relations strategies and great political plans has often caused us to reduce our movement to the “best” stories. We gave power to others to determine which stories we raised up and which ones we left out. We limited our movement when, at our core, we stand for liberation for us all.

The study also found that the activists experienced stress and re-traumatization from telling their stories. Define American offers an important set of questions that advocacy organizations working with communities to tell their stories should adopt. They suggest asking the following questions:

• Is now a good time to share your story? How have you been since we last connected? 
• What do you feel comfortable sharing now? 
• Have you shared your/this story before?

Define American also has standards for itself when sharing other peoples’ stories, which we think all advocacy organizations should adopt:

Tell Whole Stories

Narratives are made up of lots of stories that collectively tell us how to see an issue, its causes, and its solutions. Changing a narrative requires that we support communities in telling lots of whole stories that can build a new way of understanding. However, in creating new narratives, we must be sure not to inadvertently share new, harmful pervasive narratives that lead to limited understanding of issues.

Sociologist Bess Rothenberg studied the narrative strategy of the Battered Women’s Movement that emerged in the 1970s to shift the narrative on violence against women. Prior to the movement, few considered domestic violence a political issue. The movement shared story after story of cisgender heterosexual women facing violence from cisgender heterosexual men. Every story about a woman emphasized how she was severely abused, trapped, and isolated. Stories also described violence against well-off women to show that it happened to all women, regardless of their socioeconomic status. 

While this strategy built support for local resources for women and changed policy on the local, state, and federal levels, it also created a single cultural narrative that shaped understanding of domestic violence, its victims, and its perpetrators. While the movement constructed stories to connect violence to sexism, it erased violence committed by women and perpetrated on men, as well as the unique experiences of LGBTQA+ people, undocumented people, and people of color. Women didn’t have agency in the stories, and there were no stories of collective action. They also featured the most brutal violence, making some question whether less severe forms were considered abuse.

To avoid creating limiting and partial narratives, support communities in telling their own stories. When we do this, we ultimately share the full humanity of people—people who live multifaceted and unique lives—and avoid creating narratives that define people and issues by a single experience or identity.

Pose, an FX TV show about the 1980s New York ballroom scene does this well. The show features the storylines of Black and Brown, queer and trans people in the community, and the network staffed the show with writers, producers, consultants, costume designers, and set designers who had experience in the 1980s ballroom scene to ensure accuracy and authenticity. Rather than define characters by any tropes or stereotypes, the show tells the stories of people with hopes, dreams, and interests, who are simultaneously navigating racism, homophobia, and classism with their chosen family and friends. In an article for Variety, activist and Pose executive producer and writer Janet Mock shares: “When girls like us flitted onto my screen, we were seen through the narrowest lens—either as points of trauma, treated as freaks, or mere punchlines. Rarely were we given a chance to be the center of the story, to be the protagonists, the antagonists and the damn villains.” Later in the interview, she says:

Our characters are the center of their own stories rather than plot devices, serving as martyrs who teach non-trans protagonists a lesson about authenticity and self-assuredness. No, in the world I am writing, these women are the heroines I have always been waiting for. They are tethered to one another. They support and challenge one another. They love on and dance and laugh and yes, shade one another. This is what sisterhood, family and resilience looks like, especially in an era where black and Latina trans women are being hunted down for merely existing.

Stories That Help Us Imagine a Different World

Intersectional stories are also transformational stories about how the world will be or can be different when we succeed. Scholars Alex Khasnabish and Max Haiven believe movements must work from a place of radical imagination. They write: 

Radical imagination is the ability to imagine the world, life, and social institutions not as they are but as they might otherwise be. It is the courage and the intelligence to recognize that the world can and should be changed. The radical imagination is not just about dreaming of different futures. It’s about bringing those possibilities back from the future to work on the present, to inspire action and new forms of solidarity today.

Rather than telling stories to counter how a system defines a person, stories should help people radically imagine a future where justice and equality are status quo. 

The Movement for Black Lives modeled this exceptionally well with its Black Futures Month campaign, which ran during Black History Month in February 2021. The campaign “centers Black, queer, and trans feminist perspectives,” noting that “Black queer and trans people have long been at the forefront of dreaming, visioning, and expanding what is possible for our movements. It is our duty to affirm, celebrate, and defend all Black lives.” The campaign calls people to join the movement and to watch its video, “An Ode to Summer Freedom,” which shows us what it looks like to be in a world where Black people are truly free.

Advocacy organizations and storytellers must be intentional with the stories they share. By telling whole stories with care that include systems and history, and that center the voices of marginalized communities, we can help people understand systemic issues and inspire them to act.

Read more stories by Annie Neimand, Natalie Asorey, Ann Christiano & Zakyree Wallace.