Who do you center in your story?
We are about to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence while also fighting to reckon with concealed truths. (Listen to the First America podcast for the true story of how the United States came to be.) There are many ways to explore these contradictions and uplift antidotes in the name of equity and justice for all.
One small thing we’re examining is our use of the active and passive voice. The American Journal Experts defines the active voice as emphasizing “the person or agent who performs the action” and the passive voice as emphasizing “the recipient of the action.”
By looking at how we consider the sentence structure may sound like a grammar lesson, but what we’ve found is it helps to see who or what is centered, and thus in control.
We work with Brevity & Wit, a strategic design consultancy firm. Its founder, Minal Bopiah work with organizational leaders to get them to redefine their success stories to credit the system and not the individual. They reverse the active voice to illustrate how integral – and active – a role the system plays in our lives.
A CEO might originally write something like, “I was accepted into an Ivy League university because I got good grades and excelled at athletics.” The CEO is fully in control in this sentence. It is active, emphasizing the individual performing on the path to higher education.
When the system is in command, though, the story reads a little differently. That same CEO could write, “An Ivy League university accepted me because my high school had adequate funding to fully support my academic achievement and my parents had professions to afford us sporting equipment and practice time.” Here, the education and social systems are emphasized as the main drivers, leading the CEO to the Ivy League.
Adrienne Gibbs expands on how the passive voice can be more than misleading. It can be dangerous. Baratunde Thurston gave a TED Talk that breaks down active headlines about white people calling the police on Black people for everyday activities as an interactive “game” to explain systemic patterns and hypocritical standards.
This is not to say we should all be pushover conformists. This is not to discount personal accountability and responsibility. This is about considering the full context as part of the story, where the system is just as central as the characters and props.
For us, this demonstrates the context and complexity of living autonomous, personal existences in deep relationship and community. “No man is an island” as John Donne said. No award winner gets up and says “I’m good. I did this alone.” in lieu of an acceptance speech. Unless jokingly, like Allison Janney at the 2019 Oscars.
This isn’t new. In the Aesop fable, “The Lion and the Statue,” as a man and a lion walk together, they come across a statue of a man defeating a lion. The man proclaims this is evidence of which species is stronger. The lion reminds the man that the creator matters. If lions could carve, the statue would look different.
There are modern tools to help individuals and organizations understand the power of who is centered as the actor. Frameworks Institute offers resources, toolkits, and online classes to help organizations “investigate patterns in public thinking about social issues and how frames can be used to shift them.” Race Forward has toolkits to enact systemic change at the political and institutional levels. The Rising Narratives for Radical Futures guide explores ways to disrupt toxic systems through intentional storytelling.
As individuals, we can choose to notice who we center in our own stories and who society centers in the collective narratives we weave. We can push ourselves and others to call out the fundamental forces that shape us all, whether in a sentence in a blog or a headline in a newspaper with a global one.
