Q&A with Race Forward's Jeff Chang

Race Forward catalyzes movement building for racial justice in the US. In partnership with communities, organizations, and sectors, we build strategies to advance racial justice in our policies, institutions, and culture. The Butterfly Lab for Immigrant Narrative Strategy at Race Forward was founded in 2020 to build power for effective narratives that honor the humanity of migrants, refugees, and immigrants, and advance freedom and justice for all.

It’s hardly news that the far right has used immigrants to intensify a broad culture war aimed at raising white fears of emergent communities of color. Immigration remains the “third rail” of progressive politics. But we found that nearly everyone believes that immigrants deserve to belong and thrive in the U.S. The trouble is that many find it difficult to imagine a nation in which that may be true. We face a narrative problem that precedes our myriad policy problems: we need to bring a majority of Americans to adopt a compelling vision of a future that includes us all.

As one example, sometimes when we message about the brokenness of the immigration system, we move away from describing immigrants as human beings, and unwittingly reinforce detached, dehumanizing notions about them. But we also cannot simply message our way out of this situation. We also must advance narratives that activate and engage deeply shared values–such as interdependence, dignity, belonging, and the freedom to thrive.  

For this reason, we think it’s important for our justice movements to build narrative power. Narrative is as important as policy. Indeed, narrative drives policy. This is why we must be as strategic and rigorous in building narrative power as we are in building all other forms of power. Narrative is the space in which energies are activated to preserve a destructive system or build a better world for us all. We found that narrative deserves as much focus on strategy and infrastructure as work on policy does. 

To that end, we developed, stress-tested, and refined narrative strategy and design frameworks and tools to level up our movement. We created a narrative praxis that allows individuals and organizations to align to advance pro-immigrant narratives while acting with a diversity of methods, timelines, and issues. This praxis is infinitely adaptable from the individual and organizational level to the cross-movement level. 

In particular, we created three tools: a narrative pyramid tool that aids in analysis and diagnosis; a narrative design star that helps advocates and artists to think methodically about project design; and a narrative system tool that allows multiple actors to align diverse work. These tools, in turn, catalyze new ways of thinking about how we can form a narrative ecosystem that can build and sustain this work. 

Even in these discouraging times, we believe it is possible to win if we:

1. Work together from a shared set of values and long-term vision.
2. Win over multiple diverse audiences through diverse approaches, forms, and messengers, working on diverse issues and timelines all at once.
3. Connect and expand our narrative ecosystems. 
4. Invest in narrative and cultural experimentation. 
5. Build a bridge to an irresistible future.

In the coming year, we expect that right-wingers will continue to use immigration to scapegoat immigrants and win power. Our work will also sunset this year. But our minds are focused on the long game. Our goal is to leave our movement with greater capacity in narrative design and strategy, better informed by focused narrative research, and more aligned around shared narrative goals.

Immediately we will be focusing on: 1) building a community of practice so that we may teach and advance our foundational narrative pedagogy across the movement, 2) testing four selected immigrant-majority building narrative projects at scale, 3) conducting innovative narrative research at the movement level, and 4) building a narrative table of key actors in the movement to develop sustainable strategy for the movement. Our goal is to share our learnings in real time with our partners, the field of narrative strategy practitioners, and of course, immigrant movement actors as well as those in other justice movements. 

• Download, read and distribute our report and toolkit: https://bit.ly/BLabReport 
• If you’re interested primarily in our pedagogy and toolkit, click here: https://bit.ly/BLabToolkit
• For grantees, individuals, and organizations who may be interested in participating in our free narrative design and strategy webinars, they may sign up at: https://bit.ly/BLabInterest