The one thing I know for sure, after years of teaching and lobbying legislatures, is that facts don’t move opinions. Stories do. It is the personal story that makes the biggest difference in people’s opinions. Your story starts a revolution.
It Makes a Difference in Laws
In 2014, I was asked to coordinate a panel of women to testify about aging for the State of California. One of the people I opted to bring in was my 83-year-old grandmother who had nursed my grandfather through six years of severe illness before his death. She testified about the difficulty of finding competent end of life care and options. She talked about how doctors kept lobbying to keep him alive regardless of their wishes and quality of life. She then testified about how difficult it was to look for other options while being a primary care giver. Her story moved the panel to applaud her (a very rare instance in legislative testimony). As a result of her story, California now requires physicians to provide information on at least three different ways to approach end of life care when they give a terminal diagnosis (e.g., hospice/palliative care, rigorous medical treatment to prolong life, at home care options).
Over and over, I saw how stories moved politicians to pass legislation. Most of the time in these hearings I would set the stage with statistics, facts, and information about current laws. This rarely moved the needle on where politicians would vote. It was the people I brought in with personal stories that changed minds. I saw this happen with women and aging, maternal health, homeless veterans, sexual assault victims, and more.
It Makes a Difference in Teaching
The same proved true when I was teaching in universities. At John Jay College in New York, I was assigned at least two “Introduction to Government” classes each semester. After a few semesters of using standard textbooks and lecturing about the Constitution, Bill of Rights, civil rights, and all the standard Gov101 materials, I began to incorporate fiction reading. For example, when I talked about the Jim Crow era, I didn’t give them a litany of legal challenges. Instead, I had the students read Langston Hughes’ short story “Home” from The Ways of White Folk. This story is about a talented Black violinist who is eventually lynched because of his interaction with a White woman. This short story encapsulates many of the realities for Black men living under Jim Crow in an engaging and visceral way which cannot be captured by dry text about Plessy vs. Ferguson or the roll of the Pullman Porters in fighting Jim Crow laws.
Your Story is a Revolution
Your story is a revolution. Being open and honest about your life and your experiences helps those around you humanize the rest of us in groups you are a part of. I spent a lot of time in the past year reading stories interviewing tRump supporters. Over and over again, they expressed the sentiment that the people being villainized (e.g., immigrants, trans folks, etc.) were not people they knew. When someone discovered that a proposed policy may affect someone near them, they couldn’t believe it. Consistently, they stated that they thought the person they knew was “one of the good ones,” and would not be deported, denied medical care, be harmed by a proposed policy.
Social Psychology Evidence
This belief that your personal in-group does not include the “bad people” being villainized is supported by social psychology research. Gordon Allport, in The Nature of Prejudice, proposes that we all have in-groups and out-groups. He represents this with a series of concentric circles of relationships (see image). Those closest to the inner circle are the ones we seek to protect.
Allport, Gordon. (1979). The Nature of Prejudice, 25th Anniversary edition. Addison Wellsley Publishing. Page 43.
This was built on by Dr. Gregory Herek. I had the privilege of working in Greg’s lab as an undergraduate at UC Davis. His study on the impact of HIV/AIDS on the LGBTQ+ community found that when someone knew three or more people with HIV, the bias they had significantly decreased. We can know one or two people of a group and think they are “different.” By the time we know three, it is much more difficult to compartmentalize our friends as “the good ones” and the rest as “bad.”
Your Story Changes People's Minds
Anyone who is the one Black/gay/trans/Muslim/etc.” friend knows that you become a representative for an entire group of people. When there are three or more of you in a group, the rest of the people there have a harder time seeing you as a monolithic stereotype.
Telling your story to the people close to you makes it harder for them to think that the proposed policies and changes to laws won’t impact someone they care about. If they know your story, if they see you, it will become harder to support the odious policy proposals of the incoming administration.
Being honest about who you are isn’t always easy. It can be difficult or terrifying to share something about you with people you care about and fear their rejection. I speak from experience. As a queer, gender nonconforming, disabled, poor individual I have to come out about a lot of stuff all the time. I have done this at the risk of losing jobs, loved ones, and more (and I have lost jobs, loved ones, and more when I came out about various stuff). But it is worth it. I see how knowing me and understanding how the various laws will impact me change people.
My father, who is long been supportive of me but still a bit of an old redneck, talked to me a lot about the last election. For the first time in his life, he voted a straight Democratic ticket in Arizona because he understood how dangerous Republican control of government would be for me.
Your story has the same power. This is not the time to shrink back or hide things about you. The incoming administration is hoping you will be ashamed of being poor, trans, undocumented, queer, female, and a myriad of other things that we won’t speak out. They are hoping that we will believe isolation and silence will protect us. It will not. Share your story. Speak up and let the folks around you know how changes will impact your life directly. This is how we protect our communities.
Want to hear some great personal stories?
Check out Bawdy Storytelling, Risk! The Podcast, and Hook-up Horror Stories
*Full disclosure, I've appeared on all three of these podcasts.