Jack & Jill Politics

isn’t that curious…

Well, curious only to those who never believed any of the BS Zimmerman’s been shoveling from the beginning.

From The Orlando Sentinel:

Among the new evidence is a series of DNA reports from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. They reveal that DNA tests on Zimmerman’s gun and holster found evidence of multiple handlers, but none that matched Trayvon Martin, the unarmed 17-year-old Zimmerman fatally shot in Sanford Feb. 26.[....]

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For best results, press play on this video, and then start reading the post below…

This past weekend, I went to one of the most innovative performances I’ve ever seen. Denae Hannah, a performance artist and educator, debuted her newest show, Five Star Chick. Inspired by the Yo Gotti song, Denae decided to explore and challenge the imagery and expectations of black womanhood. The result is hella hilarious, impressive and sexy. 

The show features pieces like the “Miss New Booty Pageant,” “I-Dating,” and “Blue Magic” (a special planet with  climatic, barometric, and atmospheric parameters that are perfect for black hair). 

My favorite piece is probably “Ballerotica” which is a sensual and silly presentation of the obsession with “getting a baller.” The literal interpretation is priceless.

By far the most powerful piece is “Hold Me,” which dramatizes the experience of many black women’s relationships (or attempts at them) with black men. 

Denae uses video, slides, monologues, and dance to investigate what it means to be black, a woman, educated, a dancer, and a person in today’s America. She also devoted the second act to a conversation with the audience about their impressions and her intentions. I loved all of that, but her use of humor in the piece is what stood out most to me. I don’t think I’ve ever seen comedy expressed through dance in the way Denae pulled it off. 

It made the story more accessible and allowed for an entry point into some challenging topics. I am so excited about this next generation of young black comedic storytellers, from W. Kamau Bell to Issa Rae to Elon James White to Eric Andre, and beyond, the world is getting exposed to a beautiful range of blackness and identity. It’s largely what I strove to celebrate in How To Be Black. Well done, Denae. 

For most of October and November, Denae will be continuing to workshop the show at Stanford University. Meanwhile, follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and the normal Internet. Stay tuned, world.

“I got a question.”

I didn’t see him—or the other kid with him—approaching. In their teens, I’d guess. My back was turned to them. I was interviewing a lady selling stuff in a tent. This was late last century, in Savannah, when I worked for the daily newspaper. Savannah has a lot of festivals. I don’t recall what this one was—Greek, German, something.
.
The teens looked middle-class, clean cut. They were carrying cups, drinking. A lot of drinking goes on during these festivals. The kid with the question was closer to me. I smelled liquor. If only belatedly, I wasn’t surprised something smart-ass would come with his smirk.

“What about these welfare people?”

Laughing, he and his boy walked off.

The way the lady in the tent looked both sheepishly and angrily down told me what I thought had happened, happened.

I love it that Mitt Romney’s comments about the lazy 47 percent have become public.

They don’t pay federal taxes, Romney earlier this year reminded his wealthy donors at a meeting he apparently didn’t know was filmed, or if he did, didn’t know the film would find its way to Mother Jones magazine. No need to even court these natural Obama-ites, Romney added, those who “believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, you name it.”

He didn’t mention that most of those people pay federal payroll taxes or that they are elderly, disabled, or working their butts off but still making too little money to pay federal taxes.

He didn’t mention that most of the moochers are white.

As David Brooks wrote in the New York Times column yesterday, “They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees.”

Romney didn’t have to say that wasn’t who he was talking about.  Not in that room. Everybody in that room knew who he was talking about: the apparently innately un-ambitious, Ray-gun’s welfare queens—and kings.

Black people.

This is the rightwing narrative. This is pretty much all they talk about.

Blacks are blamed for just about every terrible domestic thing. The housing crisis had nothing to do with banks’ risky casino-like trading of derivatives. Six black people didn’t pay their mortgages, mortgages they got only because banks feared being called racist had they not loaned them the money, and the economy collapsed. Yeah, I know. What about Georgia, my neck of the woods, where so many small banks collapsed? Not many blacks are known for getting loans from the good-ol’-boy banks. What happened there?

There are out and out racists who actually get paid huge sums of money to broadcast these lies—to millions. For some reason, so many in a single race just don’t wanna work. I guess they’re refusing the myriad lucrative job offers of going on radio and lying for three hours a day. They’d rather sit on their butts and get $300 a month in welfare. All that lying—-and you know them— is just too much work.

For this to be so out there, so accepting, is nothing short of the continuation of the assault under which blacks have endured since their sojourn to these strange shores. This is the verbal equivalent of involuntary servitude, whether in its rawest form of capture and chains, or later, as was brazenly common in the South particularly up until the sixties, of the formality of imprisoning black men for subsequent free labor, or now, of the war on drugs as an excuse to imprison so many young black males. This is the verbal equivalence of the entertainment community’s negative portrayals of black life and the often subtle but constant put-downs of darkness and big-butts—unless it’s on a non-black.

“Definitionless in this strict atmosphere,” the late poet Gwen Brooks wrote. This is the kind of stuff that invades black personal space and is with them thick as a March wind on their way to work, shop, or party and always in their interactions with each other. This is the air that induces a black person to call into one of these shows to agree with the bigoted analysis as if that betrayal would make him different in the host’s eyes and in which a black president feels he can’t say the word black. This is the air in which blacks, against all odds, raise their children.

Yes, it’s painful. But it’s good the meme is out there, so publicly out there, leaving little room for hiding, feigned ignorance, or tacit or not so down-low trade-offs.

The reactionary forces changed a word here and there, but they never slept.

Sometimes you just have to smash stuff.

I just looked at the two teens stumbling away, sort of congratulating themselves at their dig at the black reporter. The element of surprise had frozen me, I guess. Not so my alter-ego, Santee B. Downside. “Ask,” he shouted at them, “your mama.”

Each syllable buckled their backs, adding a new swerve to their drunken sway.

The media are all over Romney about this, aren’t they? Sometimes you’re surprised at who’s waiting for you.

I figured Downside had accomplished what he’d intended when I looked at the lady in the tent and she smiled.

From Randy Newman:

I’M DREAMING

George Washington was a white man
Adams and Jefferson too
Abe Lincoln was a white man, probably
And William McKinley the whitest of them all
Was shot down by an immigrant in Buffalo
And a star fell out of heaven

I’m dreaming of a white President
Just like the ones we’ve always had
A real live white man
Who knows the score
How to handle money or start a war
Wouldn’t even have to tell me what we were fighting for
He’d be the right man
If he were a

I’m dreaming of a white President
Someone whom we can understand
Someone who knows where we’re coming from
And that the law of the jungle is not the law of this land

In deepest darkest Africa nineteen three
A little boy says, “Daddy, I just discovered relativity.
A big eclipse is coming
And I’ll prove it. Wait and see!”

“You better eclipse yourself outta here, son
And find yourself a tree
There’s a lion in the front yard
And he knows he won’t catch me.”

How many little Albert Einsteins
Cut down in their prime?
How many little Ronald Reagans
Gobbled up before their time?

I don’t believe in evolution
But it does occur to me,
What if little William Howard Taft had to face a lion
Or God forbid, climb a tree?
Where would this country be?

I’m dreaming of a white President
Buh buh buh buh
‘Cause things have never been this bad
So he won’t run the hundred in ten seconds flat
So he won’t have a pretty jump shot
Or be an Olympic acrobat
So he won’t know much about global warming
Is that really where you’re at?
He won’t be the brightest, perhaps
But he’ll be the whitest
And I’ll vote for that

Whiter than this?
Yes
Whiter than this?
Yes
Whiter than this?
Yes
Whiter than this?
Oh yeah

Good Morning.

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And always, have a peaceful day.

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There is much outrage in the blogosphere today with what has been deemed as a startling revelation from the Romney campaign.  The video heard ‘round the world is making its Olympic-worthy marathon run on all of the news networks, and many a pundit is suggesting that Romney has all but lost the election as a result.

All the while, I am sitting here wondering why the outrage? The holy grail of political mishaps in the form of a covertly recorded video is about as surprising to me as a poorly scripted, badly acted, highly entertaining action flick (see the high grossing sequel to The Expendables).

I for one am happy that Mitt Romney was at least truthful about his beliefs, even if he didn’t mean for the rest of us to find out (so explicitly).

Let’s take for instance the highly debunked welfare ad he was pushing.

As soon as we saw the ad we all knew that it was specifically designed to evoke the feelings of the “welfare queen” ads of the past, mainly that the President was blatantly moving to create or enforce a system where as conservatives have put it, the takers continue to take from the makers, though this too is dubious.

The pertinent portion of Ezra Klein’s analysis is this:

“For what it’s worth, this division of ‘makers’ and ‘takers’ isn’t true. Among the Americans who paid no federal income taxes in 2011, 61 percent paid payroll taxes — which means they have jobs and, when you account for both sides of the payroll tax, they paid 15.3 percent of their income in taxes, which is higher than the 13.9 percent that Romney paid. Another 22 percent were elderly.

“So 83 percent of those not paying federal income taxes are either working and paying payroll taxes or they’re elderly and Romney is promising to protect their benefits because they’ve earned them. The remainder, by and large, aren’t paying federal income or payroll taxes because they’re unemployed. But that’s a small fraction of the country.

“Behind this argument, however, is a very clever policy two-step that’s less about who pays taxes now and more about who is going to pay to reduce the deficit in the coming years.”

But policy and statistics aside, I am still not convinced we should be surprised or outraged.

When Romney makes comments about personal responsibility and comments about dependency, he using the same types of code words that have always been part of the Southern Strategy which is to convince poor white folks to vote against their own economic interests (which should be a tough sell for someone who admits he was “born with a silver spoon.”)

When he jokes that it would probably be easier for him to be elected if he was Latino, he is attempting to act as if he is not popular with Latin Americans not because of he is nonsensical policies but rather because those nonsensical policies are coming from a white guy.

He believes that it is the messenger not the message, despite the fact that his message consistently comes from a party that plays on jingoism and fake notions of a universal view of Americana, which is used to continue to cast President Obama as an individual who just doesn’t love America the way Romney does, and who doesn’t believe in American Exceptionalism.

I won’t go as far as to say that people shouldn’t be disturbed or fired-up about Romney’s comments, but they shouldn’t be outraged.

And if they are outraged, that outrage shouldn’t be a new found outrage, but rather one that has been simmering from the moment the hopeful Republican candidates began circulating their talking points.

If you are not rich, did not attend an elite institution or dare to have visions of an America that actually has equal opportunity and one that actually attempts to help [the] tired, poor, [and] huddled masses yearning to breathe free, then Mitt Romney doesn’t not like you.

And no photo op, kissing of babies, or turning water into wine (issuing talking points saying that you can or will do these things, until fact-checkers tell report that you are lying) will change that.

Talking Points Memo reports:

Supreme Court of PA vacates Voter ID law and remands the case back to the trial court. The next hearing is Oct. 2 2012. The Court asks the lower court to pay attention to whether or not the state is capable of implementing voter ID in a fashion that does not disenfranchise. When I get a copy of the ruling I’ll post it.

UPDATE 2:08

Here is the dissent

http://www.pacourts.us/OpPosting/Supreme/out/J-114-2012ds2.pdf

Second dissent

http://www.pacourts.us/OpPosting/Supreme/out/J-114-2012ds1.pdf

Majority Opinion

http://media.philly.com/documents/Voter+ID+deision.pdf

@jcwpolitics

Mother Jones has obtained footage obtained surreptitiously from inside a Romney fundraiser, catching the candidate saying “shocking things” about 47 percent of the electorate. Chris Matthews talks to Mother Jones’ David Corn about the video, and also to Salon.com’s Joan Walsh and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, about what this might mean for Romney campaign.

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Tweety in his closing statement.

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Ed Schultz with former Ohio Governor Strickland on Willard’s comments.

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Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

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The poet and academic, Ed Carvallo once said to me of Britney Spears during the height of her self-mutilation and meltdown, that what we were witnessing was a slow public suicide. I’ve used the phrase before, and I’ll use it again when someone in public life slowly devolves. What we have here is more complex and more dramatic than that.

For Mitt Romney, these videos act as a confirmation, an affirmation, and a resounding public recommitment to the worst stereotypes of the uber wealthy conservative class. Think Donald Trump with his racist birther nonsense, think the Billionaires Boy Club who is secretly funding Mitt Romney’s campaign, think Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz’s constant untrue attacks on President Obama that, over time, seem much less about policy – how do you argue with success – and more about identity. Mitt Romney has in a demonstrable way proved himself unfit to be President, unfit to be Commander-in-Chief, unfit to be Steward of our economy, and unfit to hold public office. His contempt for common average Americans is so remarkable as to be unremarkable.

Of course, Mitt Romney has no compassion or empathy for the working class, the middle class, and the working poor. Listen to his wife Ann talk about her life and her experiences and you’ll realize she has no compassion either.
Michelle Obama famously said that if Barack and she lost in 2008, Obama wouldn’t run again. That he was as close to an ordinary American running for President as you could get, but that after this process he wasn’t any more. That no matter what happened the process had changed him and that what he brought uniquely to the table would be missing from a subsequent run. That is a paraphrase. However, what I took away from her remarks four years ago was that she understood how unique the moment in history was. The she got how outside the realm of possibility Obama’s journey truly was — and not simply because of race, but also because of class, because of economic trajectory etc.

Anne and Mitt Romney are the poster children for entitlement, which makes their denunciation of it hypocritical in the extreme. In politics, the worst thing you can do is confirm the stereotype. Hillary Clinton famously saying that she landed in Kosovo under sniper fire, Al Gore saying he invented the Internet, John Kerry saying that he voted for a bill before voting against it. Three easily explained comments if you had the time and the message.

Kerry could have said, when the bill came out of committee, it was strong. When the GOP got their crack at it, they changed all the elements that made the bill work and a success for working class Americans. So I voted against the GOP version of the bill.

Hillary could have said that where we landed in Kosovo was one of the worst sniper territories in the war, and knowing that I was coming, the military worked tirelessly to clear the space of snipers and of rogue elements. It is a testament to my confidence in our military, in their bravery and their heroism that I went and landed there, and that I brought my daughter with me. That is how much I believe in the US Military.

Al Gore could have said, when DARPA came to my committee with a proposal for the internet, no one got it. No one understood that what they were talking about was a game changer. However, I did. I intuited what our possibilities were with this technology and I got the funding for their project by hand walking the bill through congress.

Neither candidate said what I suggest here; instead they reconfirmed the stereotype of who they were — the caricature of their identity. For Mitt Romney, this moment and the Libya comments, and the lies at the convention and the welfare attack, all act as cement to the identity of Mitt. His inability to get a message together for the first three months of the campaign after he won the nomination allowed the President’s team to define him, and Mitt has simply confirmed this version of himself. It has been a meltdown of Britney Spears proportion.

But the GOP itself is the slow public suicide. The party is dying. They aren’t an elephant they are a Wooly Mammoth, slouching towards extinction. They don’t believe in science, they don’t believe in education, they don’t believe in alt energy, they don’t believe in communities and helping your neighbors, they don’t believe in anything other than greed, anything other than division, anything other than what benefits them, individually. The President’s comment that they framed their entire convention on was “you didn’t build that.” The convention was preposterous because each and every person they brought out to declare, “I built that!” did so with government help – including Mitt Romney and Bain.

Their ideology is so concentrated on self, so disengaged from the communal and the society in which they reside, that they have become anachronistic. They are at the end of their collapse. Romney’s nomination hastens it, and highlights it. Mitt Romney believes what he is saying, he believes that half the country is lazy shiftless welfare queens. He believes in this political dystopic view of the nation and because of that, he is unfit to lead it, unfit to hold any position of governance within it. This is the end of the GOP.

Join Jack and Jill Politics tonight at 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. ET for a livestream of #Ignite2012, a project of the League of Young Voters Education Fund in partnership with AllHipHop.com. Kicking off the first leg of the national tour in Milwaukee, the civic engagement organization will explore the political climate while using hip hop culture as a vehicle to re-ignite the youth vote.

Tour Dates:
September 18, 2012 – Milwaukee, WI
September 22, 2012 – Pittsburgh, PA
September 25, 2012 – Cincinnati, OH
October 6, 2012 – Philadelphia, PA

Video streaming by Ustream

Rachel Maddow did a few good segments on Friday. The first is about how Governor Ultrasound McDonnell could cost Willard the state of Virginia, because of his anti-abortion antics.

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A discussion with Eugene Robinson about Willard’s Libya antics.

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Next about what happened in Iowa with regards to Voter Suppression.

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Good Morning.

As you go through your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And always, have a peaceful day.

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Mitt Romney has been running a campaign that makes no sense. Check out the piece in Politico from this weekend where the circular firing squad of, blame the consultant, began about seven weeks early. The goal of the campaign, the messaging of the campaign, the pick of Paul Ryan, the entire operation of the campaign has made little or no sense. Until now. Listen to the video and I’ll update the piece this evening.
Peace,
J
@JCWPolitics

UPDATE

CHICAGO – “It’s shocking that a candidate for President of the United States would go behind closed doors and declare to a group of wealthy donors that half the American people  view themselves as ‘victims,’ entitled to handouts, and are unwilling to take ‘personal responsibility’ for their lives.  It’s hard to serve as president for all Americans when you’ve disdainfully written off half the nation.” – Jim Messina, Obama for America Campaign Manager

Good Afternoon.

As you go through the rest of your day, don’t forget JJP.

Drop those links. Engage in debate. Give us trivia and gossip too.

And continue to have a peaceful day.

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Like many others, I’ve worked for years to get Americans to think expansively and compassionately about immigration. In a decade dominated by the push for what’s been dubbed “comprehensive immigration reform,” I’ve argued that immigrants drive economic growth, pay taxes, add value to the culture, and don’t take jobs from native-born people.  Although I wasn’t thrilled with the enforcement elements of the policy–that fence, beefing up the Border Patrol, growing detention and deportation–it seemed amazing that Congress was even considering changing the status of as many as 12 million undocumented people. Most of the immigrant rights movement focused on winning that policy, and for a time, it really seemed possible.

That was then. In the spring of 2007, the last decent bill authored by John McCain and Ted Kennedy died in Congress. There have been other bills since, each with more enforcement and less legalization. President Obama’s election seemed a hopeful sign, but he refused to move forward without Republicans and then deported record numbers. The moderate Republican on this issue has become scarce; by 2011, even McCain was claiming that border crossers had started wildfires in the Arizona desert. Democrats too have moved to the right, adopting harsher language and stressing enforcement. The immigrant rights movement, for all its vibrancy and depth, has been losing the policy fight. That’s because the movement has also been losing the profoundly racialized cultural fight over the nation’s identity, limiting our ability to frame the debate.

I watch lots of TV, where Hollywood tells the same story again and again: beleaguered Americans and their law enforcers confront hordes of “criminal aliens” rushing our borders. As a cultural event, September 11 became a gift to xenophobes, giving the show “24″ its reason for being, and helping to make South Asians, Arabs and Muslims subjects of suspicion wherever they went. Battles over the building of mosques have been carried out with epic heat in Murfreesboro, Ky., and New York City, during the same period that a Florida preacher threatened to burn a Quran. These “swarthy” communities have endured a relentless barrage of attacks, long predating the August massacre at a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisc.

Reality TV has been inspired by immigration enforcement. Sherriff Joe Arpaio, who at age 80 doesn’t seem done winning elections in Maricopa County, Ariz., had a three-episode pilot on the Fox Reality Channel. “Border Wars,” “Law on the Border,” “Homeland Security USA,” and “Border Battles,” all aired on channels like National Geographic and Animal Planet. It was exciting to see a meaningful storyline about an undocumented father on “Ugly Betty,” but that was hardly enough to compete with the volume of material glorifying the other perspective.

The image of the unwanted, unscrupulous, immoral immigrant permeates television, talk radio, and movie screens, yet pro-immigrant organizations have largely neglected even to pick a cultural fight, until recently. That fact has started to change since 2007, as the movement took up a cultural strategy to tell the modern immigrant’s story in as many ways as we can find.

DREAMers–the youth who have advocated for and come to embody legislation that would provide a pathway to citizenship for some people brought to the U.S. as children–are making art and creating new words. Organizers are adding programs designed simply to put native-born and immigrant Americans in contact. Documentary and fiction films about undocumented people are finding audiences. And thousands of people are raising questions about the language of “illegality” in immigration talk. These are the activities that reframe the debate by establishing immigrants as full human beings–not just workers–who are exercising the core human urge to seek brighter conditions.

If the death of hope on a comprehensive reform policy has a positive spin, we can find it in the space that has opened up for cultural work on the issue. Only the thoughtful integration of these tactics with traditional policy pushes can get us out of a period dominated by bad news for immigrants.

The Roots of Failure

In 2005, the Minute Man Civil Defense Corps Project set up to do what the federal government supposedly wouldn’t. Frank Sharry, then director of the National Immigration Forum, sees this event as a key volley in the culture war, noting the massive press attention on Project founder Chris Simcox.

“Prior to this,” Sharry said, “racism in the anti-immigration movement was latent but not activated. The Minute Man Civil Defense Corps Project was a grassroots white nationalist movement. Not that everyone who showed up was a white nationalist, but the idea was to keep those brown people out.” Even Jim Gilchrist, the founder of a financial investigation outfit The Minute Man Project, which targets employers of undocumented workers, has spoken out against the racist tone of vigilantes. He told the Atlantic that they were “nothing but a bunch of skinheads.”

That same year, conservative communications guru Frank Luntz wrote a strategy memo for  restrictionists, stressing the law-and-order frame. He instructed the movement to use “illegal immigrant” always, but never “illegals” because the noun was too dehumanizing and would drive away Latinos. The Associated Press blessed that phrasing with its style book, calling the adjective a neutral term while warning people never to use the noun. All this parsing out of nouns and adjectives indicates a great faith in the average American’s knowledge of grammar, a faith that hasn’t been borne out by a reality in which everyday people, pundits and politicians regularly refer to immigrants as “illegals.”

Leaders of D.C.-based immigrant rights organizations are now self critical about their slow response to a changing climate. Deepak Bhargava, director of the Center for Community Change, which maintains a national network of state and local immigrant organizations, said, “Prior to ’07, and I don’t consider myself innocent in this regard, there was a squeamishness, an uncertainty, a tentativeness that people projected about framing immigration in terms of the racial debate.”

Those people woke up after the fall of the McCain-Kennedy bill. Republicans were clearly conflicted, with longtime supporters like Sam Brownback turning tail, while Trent Lott, of all people, berated his party for voting against reform because of racism. “We were naïve enough to think we were in a public policy fight,” said Sharry, acknowledging that he was directly criticized for years by colleagues who warned him this was the inevitable outcome of a limited strategy. “When even a right-leaning, back-room reform was defeated, it showed the right was not interested in policy debate.”

The question is, how does a society grapple with choices that touch on our deepest racial divides?

In one intervention, the pro-immigrant movement exposed the ties between restrictionist organizations and white supremacists. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, documented the role of eugenicist John Tanton in founding FAIR, Numbers USA and Center for Immigration Studies–all crucial groups in the restrictionist movement. Those connections have been well covered now in the mainstream and independent press, yet it has had little effect on the credibility of these organizations. There are two reasons for that fact: Who sits on what board of directors is of little concern to most people, and the accusation of white supremacy is a blunt instrument in a nuanced racial situation. As Bhargava put it, “You can’t just call all the people who resist reform white supremacists and be done with it.”

By 2010, mainstream communications advice for immigrant rights leaned toward giving Americans what they seemed to want: tougher enforcement with a little compassion. The cognitive psychologist Drew Westen released research in partnership with America’s Voice, Sharry’s organization, and the Center for American Progress that supported using “illegal immigrant” to signal a tough stance on immigration. Westen said the phrase opened up people who were ambivalent about immigration to the idea of legalization. “When [voters] hear ‘undocumented worker,’ they hear a liberal euphemism, it sounds to them like a liberal code,” Westen told Politico in 2010.  In a later study for the Center for Social Inclusion, Westen confirmed that saying “illegal immigrant” was key to convincing white people to support immigrant inclusion in health care reform and other policies. Democrats largely adopted this advice, but advocates have refused to do so, including Bhargava and Sharry, who is effectively ignoring the research he commissioned.

Yet, Westen is not wrong. People do use “illegal” automatically–precisely because it is so ubiquitous, having been made so by Frank Luntz’s strategy. To win in the short term, one has to find a way to get into what’s called the audience’s circle of concern–or, that group of people that viewers, readers, listeners and voters are willing to protect. The circle of concern is entirely shaped by our subjective and mostly unconscious thoughts about who belongs and who doesn’t, which are in turn triggered by the constant repetition of frames like law-and-order.  Getting in the circle is less likely if you signal that you’re talking about outsiders from the start. This is why Westen tells immigration reform advocates that they can avoid “illegal” if they want, but they should be prepared to deal with less support. Entirely correct, in the short term.

Winning in the long term, though, requires getting people to think of the “other” as being inside their circles. That is entirely possible to do, as the abolition, civil rights, feminist, sexual liberation and many other movements have proven. But it takes a complement of cultural interventions alongside the political ones, advanced over five, 10, even 30 years. The cultural project has to establish the stories, images, and archetypes that prime a person to expand rather than shrink the circle of concern. That project requires us to deal with how race is lived in America, not just how it is legislated.

A Different Kind of Organizing

Storytelling is central to a cultural strategy. Ever since linguist George Lakoff gave the Democrats hell for losing the 2004 presidential election by talking technicalities instead of values, politicos apply the word “narrative” to everything from policy platforms to budget proposals. But real narratives are dynamic, with characters, settings and actions that move things along. Storytelling has its own structural demands–a protagonist that isn’t an organization, an antagonist that will turn out to be wrong in the end, a conflict that creates obstacles the protagonist must overcome. Most political messages, even if they describe a problem in some detail, don’t reach storytelling standards because they lack these other elements.

As Lakoff writes, the human brain holds competing worldviews, known as frames, that are shaped by thousands of years of repetition. A person’s dominant frame might be “bootstraps” because that’s what she heard the most growing up. But “love thy neighbor” is in there somewhere, too. Numbers and facts can’t trigger “love thy neighbor,” but stories can.

In his book “The Storytelling Animal,” Jonathan Gottschall notes that our brains engaged in story take us through the protagonist’s reactions. We flinch when the serial killer jumps out and cry when the heroine’s father dies. Gotschall writes that, “when we experience a story–whether it is in a book, a film, or a song–we allow ourselves to be invaded by the teller.” If this is true, then it’s hard to imagine any political movement succeeding without the strongest possible ability to tell stories. Tell the story first, and you get to frame the issue.

This might be the central difference between the DREAMers’ strategy and that of the traditional immigrant rights movement. Young, savvy with social media, and artistically inclined, DREAMers have compensated for their lack of political power by telling their stories in many forms and venues. The Trail of Dreams, the route from Florida to D.C. that four DREAMers walked in 2010, had characters and plot built in. They took on a heroic quest, encountered the Ku Klux Klan along the way and their completion of the journey reinforced what might be considered old-fashioned American perseverance.

Favianna Rodriguez is a printmaker and visual artist, a mentor of young undocumented artists and a founder of Culture Strike, which brings together musicians, writers and artists to support immigrants. Rodriguez says that organizers initially saw artists as amplifiers of the message, but the messaging itself was often uninspiring (i.e., “states don’t have the right to set immigration policy”) or inconsistent. Artists knew that had to change. “Whatever work was produced, we had to think of it not as a communications track but on the track of changing people’s hearts,” said Rodriguez.

She was inspired by the DREAMers moving on from comprehensive immigration reform with the slogan Undocumented and Unafraid, and she has since hosted Undocunation and numerous other visual galleries featuring the work of young immigrants. Julio Salgado, a 29-year-old artist whose family came to the States from Mexico because his sister needed a kidney transplant and stayed because she would have died without ongoing treatment, produced one of my favorite prints. It features a young immigrant saying, “My parents are responsible and loving and that’s why I’m here,” a much-needed counter to the bad parent, innocent child characterization that undergirds so many DREAM Act messages.

These artists, like Rodriguez, have fans who are in it for the art, taking the politics on the side. “People come and say I never knew DREAMers went through this, “said Rodriguez. “Not because they’re bigoted, just because of lack of information. They came for the way we were delivering the stories.”

In 2006, while Leo Morales was door-knocking a community on immigration reform in Canyon County, Idaho, he quickly discovered that people were either against it or afraid to engage in a public discussion. The Idaho Community Action Network had a 15-year history of bringing together white, Native and Latino working people to fight for policy changes of all sorts, but on this issue, they couldn’t get enough traction to do anything.

So they backed up a step. Through the Main Street Alliance, which provides small business owners an alternative to the Chamber of Commerce, ICAN members asked local businesses to put up a simple sign in their windows. “Immigration is an American tradition. Acceptance is an American value,” the sign read, under a picture of the Statue of Liberty. A year later, ICAN started Welcoming Idaho and bought ads on bus benches and billboards. That’s unusual for a group whose go-to tactic is a raucous demonstration, but Morales said, “We had to do something different to lower the heat level and get people talking.”

Morales’ group is the Idaho chapter of Welcoming America, which started in Tennessee and went national in 2004. Their approach hinges on getting native-born and foreign-born Americans in direct contact with each other. The model is straightforward: local leaders declare themselves a welcoming committee, and host programs in which people can ask any kind of question without fear of judgment. Eventually, they may get local authorities to adopt a resolution declaring themselves a welcoming community. The groups use videos that spark conversation, as well as “Welcome to Shelbyville,” a documentary about Somalis and other immigrants in a small town near Nashville that aired on PBS.

“When someone sees a community changing with lots of new people in it, they can feel like ‘this isn’t my place anymore,’ ” says David Lubell, Welcoming Tennessee’s executive director. “You have to give people a chance to see the racial dynamic for themselves without beating them over the head with it. So they can see hey, we don’t have this kind of reaction to Russian immigrants.” Stories are key to that process, Lubell says, because if native-born people can hear an immigrant tell her story in a way that resonates with their own experience, then there’s an opening. In 2009, Nashville voters rejected an English-only ordinance; Welcoming America ran the cultural campaign to accompany the policy campaign led by others in that instance. Welcoming America now has 21 affiliates, including many in the South and West.

Drop the I-Word, Save the Kids

At the Applied Research Center, our recent interventions in the immigration discourse have been generated by stories and centralized stories in their strategy. The first is the Drop the I-word campaign, which urges residents, politicians and journalists to stop using the language of illegality in immigration. Second, our Shattered Families investigation exposed the permanent severing of family ties between parents who have been deported and children who are in the child welfare system.

In 2008, I traveled around promoting The Accidental American, my book about the founding of the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York. At Powell’s Books in Portland, OR, I kept seeing a young man walk back and forth behind the audience. When all the people had left, the young man made contact.  He’d been browsing the architecture books and overheard our discussion. He’d graduated high school and wanted to be an architect but couldn’t afford college and couldn’t get a job. Should he turn himself in and ask for mercy? I still remember the way he whispered, “I’m illegal.”

We launched Drop the I-word in September 2010 with a video and pledge drive. Many immigrant rights activists ignored us, and we were certainly on the opposite end of Drew Westen’s approach. But when our microsite was shared 20,000 times on Facebook within 48 hours, an unprecedented response to an ARC release, we knew we were onto something. This was a story people wanted to tell and hear. We started with a series called “I Am…”–people without papers and their allies talking about how they define themselves and how they live with that word hanging over them. We’ve heard from students, activists, army wives, white fourth graders from Idaho, Native Americans, and numerous journalists who had decided to drop the i-word.

Last year, the Society of Professional Journalists adopted a resolution denouncing “illegal alien” and urging reporters to rethink “illegal immigrant,” too. When José Antonio Vargas came out as undocumented in the New York Times Magazine last year, his became the outlet’s most emailed story that week and “undocumented” trended on Twitter for a day. DREAMers have taken “undocumented,” a word Gloria Steinem told me would be a problem because it had no poetry,  and used it to create  UndocuNation and UndocuBus memes. New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz apologized for using “illegal” as the answer to the clue “One Caught by Border Patrol.” Shortz wrote, “At the time I wrote this clue … I had no idea that use of the word ‘illegal’ in this sense (as a noun) was controversial…It’s in widespread use by ordinary people and publications. Still, language changes, and I understand how the use of ‘illegal’ as a noun has taken on an offensive connotation.”

Also last year, we released the first-ever report on the interaction of child welfare, immigration and criminal justice systems, illuminating how the shaming device of “illegal” plays out.  When these systems converge, it is astonishingly easy for parents to lose their parental rights because they cannot do the things required to get their kids back. We estimated, very conservatively, that some 5,000 children across the country are in danger of never seeing their detained or deported parents again. We hoped the report would fuel policy and practice changes, but we also wanted to disrupt the “they deserve what they get” message that dominates so much of the immigration debate. We framed the problem as a matter of what happens when we allow bias to replace all we know about what is best for children. The clearest evidence that the frame worked was the utter lack of pushback from conservative immigration organizations.

In the course of the projects, we broke the story of Felipe Montes and his family. Montes, father of three boys, was deported from Allegheny County, NC in 2010. He’d been the primary caretaker, financially and otherwise, so when his wife was unable to maintain the family without him, the kids were taken into the child welfare system. Child welfare soon stopped efforts to reunify the boys with their mother and moved to terminate Montes’s parental rights as well. Just before his family court hearing, which he couldn’t come back to to the U.S. to attend, Presente.org built a petition asking officials to reunify the family; 20,000 people signed it. The Mexican Consulate got involved; ICE granted Montes a rare parole to return for 90 days, and he’s been having substantial visits with his boys. The hearing is set for next week, and numerous press outlets are waiting to report on the outcome.

From DREAMers creating prints to journalists picking the right words, our storytelling skill is key to framing and reframing immigration issues. People who want real immigration reform can regain control of the debate by  recasting the immigrant as agent rather than victim, and as human being rather than a robotic worker. We need to tell that person’s story everywhere and as often as possible. That’s our only chance–our best chance– at creating the public will required to make the vast policy changes immigrant communities need.