Full Dissidence by Howard Bryant

Author:Howard Bryant
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press

* Thomas always could have elected to refuse his Supreme Court nomination if he truly believed his pathway was illegitimate. He chose not to take such a drastic, morally consistent step.

WHY TONYA?

How do stories get told? Who tells them, who decides which ones reach the public, and how are they framed are all questions as important as the stories themselves. The ideas and concepts that do not emerge from this winnowing process suffer a fate worse than being forgotten: to the public, they never existed. The choosing of a protagonist tells an audience where their focus will be and what values, by proximity to the protagonist, will be linked to virtue. It tells in whose success the public should make an emotional investment. Conversely, the choice of protagonist will also tell the audience in whom not to invest, for whoever is not granted these important traits and is distanced from virtue is positioned as the opposite, an antagonist, and will be seen as suspicious, shadowy, disposable.

Inside of these questions, naturally, is power, and whoever has it, with the pen, the camera, the contracts and the dollars, has a form of omnipotence. They set the landscape, the rules, and the tensions. They tell us who should receive our sympathy and who should not. They, in a way, become the creators of truth. With the country’s brutal and living history looming on every page of every screenplay or manuscript, the tension in these choices is the reinterpretation of America. Who is the freedom fighter and who is the terrorist? Now that the historically voiceless can finally speak, have had the temerity to run for president (and win), and believe they, too, own a leading role in shaping the American narrative, inclusion is a primary weapon of the storytelling battlefield.

No longer can it be accepted as fact that cowboys and Indians present clear moral opposites, or that homesteading can exist without genocide, or that police are heroes and troops are liberators. Or that every leading character of every story will be white. With storytelling in different hands, these frameworks now receive direct challenge, and with power shifting hands, yesterday’s heroes just might be tomorrow’s murderers.

“Inclusion” may sound like a feel-good word, but it is deceivingly sharp. It is an indictment softening harder themes such as erasure, discrimination, whitewashing. The Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter David Maraniss once said of journalism that “history writes people out of the story and it’s our job to write them back in.” Inclusion is another word for this retrofitting, meaning reviving the forgotten stories, telling the Rashomon-style angles of the existing ones, challenging the story we’ve been told with more stories. When the camera is passed around, the story changes. Inclusion also is a kind way of detonating the American roadside explosive that is race. At some point during these conversations that turn into debates, that reveal the deep creases in the American experience, white people will invite cliché. “Well,” they often conclude, “history is written by the winners.” It

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