Shifting the Narrative – Protecting our Futures, with Malkia Devich-Cyril

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain minor errors.

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights.

[00:00:07] Malkia Devich-Cyril: So it all capitalism wants to reify itself and it has. So the digital technologies that were meant to open up doors for us to become our own producers of content have reorganized themselves to, usurp that content. So here we are on social media platforms are now gathering up.

[00:00:25] All our data, sucking it all up, sucking up our stories, and these are data mining companies. They’re not companies where we connect with friends. They’re companies to connect the ruling class to our data. This is the environment in which we’re trying to tell a story about democracy.

[00:00:59] Scot Nakagawa: Welcome to the Anti Authoritarian Podcast, a project of the 22nd Century Initiative. I’m Scott Nakagawa, one of your hosts. 

[00:01:07] Sue Hyde: Hello friends, I’m co host Sue Hyde. Scott and I first joined forces about 30 years ago to help defeat anti LGBTQ ballot measures proposed by Christian authoritarian groups. 

[00:01:20] Scot Nakagawa: It was as true then as it is now that those of us who believe in democracy make up a supermajority of people in this country.

[00:01:27] The challenge is, how do we go from being the majority to acting like the majority? 

[00:01:32] Sue Hyde: We dig into strategy questions like these and prescriptions for change. We talk with expert guests and commentators whose scholarship, political activism, and organizing Define the cutting edge of anti authoritarian resistance.

[00:01:48] Thank you for joining us.

[00:01:54] Scot Nakagawa: The stories we tell and how and to whom we tell them can be the difference between winning and losing in political struggle Case in point, the culture wars being waged from the right. Authoritarian forces are advancing a story of white erasure. What’s causing it? Immigration, civil rights expansion, the advancement of laws to protect women’s bodily autonomy, and the libs, or alternatively communism, and promoting anti Christian exclusion and persecution, and even anti Semitic conspiracy theories.

[00:02:26] By winning on the narrative front, authoritarians have built a popular base for autocratic government that serves to legitimate dismantling our liberal institutions and advancing authoritarian state capture, or, in other words, the takeover of governments in the U. S., including our federal government. To that popular base for authoritarianism, the radical changes to the ways in which Americans work and live, changes that are being driven by the consolidation of unprecedented wealth among the very rich, globalization, the rise of global oligarchy, the effects of climate change, changing family structures, the collapse of the base of our industrial economy and artificial intelligence, among a myriad of other things, can be blamed on drag queens, transgender children, feminists.

[00:03:10] The Black Liberation Movement, immigrants, Muslims, socialists, and the poor. Big story. To counteract the effects of all of this, we need to tell a very different story. One with the power to reframe the very real challenges of our time in ways that compel us toward real solutions to our shared problems rather than toxic.

[00:03:29] Dead end debates caught up in us versus them conflicts that end up causing the focal point of debate to be more on our differences in our reactions to these common experiences than whatever it is that’s causing us to have these experiences in the first place. This is a dangerous game that authoritarians are playing as the differences in our reactions to common challenges is often dictated by our diverse positions within existing anti democratic social hierarchies.

[00:03:57] And that opens the door to demonization, othering, and eventually to conflicts that are corrosive to democracy and that may even lead to political violence. 

[00:04:08] Sue Hyde: We are joined. By Malkia Devich Cyril, who will help us make sense of how to make sense in challenging times. Malkia, or Mack, is an activist, writer, and public speaker on issues of digital rights, narrative power, and digital rights.

[00:04:26] Black liberation and collective grief. Mac is also the founding and former executive director of media justice, a national hub, boldly advancing racial justice rights and dignity in a digital age. After over 10 years of organizational leadership, Mac now serves as a senior fellow. At media justice and is a contributing writer to various publications for over 20 years, Mac has championed the media and technology rights of communities of color and other unrepresented groups to demand and win equity in the digital age Mac remains a veteran leader in the movement for digital rights and freedom.

[00:05:11] And in the movement for black lives. Welcome to the anti authoritarian podcast, Mac. 

[00:05:18] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Thank you for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. 

[00:05:22] Scot Nakagawa: I want to first say, though, for our audience, listen carefully, because I feel like every time I talk to Mac, I’m at school. I learn something new every time. Here’s the first question.

[00:05:31] In the world of social justice activism, people often talk about communication strategies and narrative strategies as being related, but different. Most of us know communication strategy, but narrative strategy is a newer idea, or at least it is a newer idea under that title, narrative strategy. Yeah.

[00:05:49] So let’s get into this question of narrative versus communication strategy so that we are all on the same page. What’s the difference and why does it matter to those fighting authoritarianism? 

[00:06:01] Malkia Devich-Cyril: for asking the question. I think there’s a number of different ways that we can think about narrative.

[00:06:07] A couple of ways that I think about it, are first in Marxist theory, I think about The two kind of core organizing concepts of Marxist theory being like structure or the base and how modes and ownership of production is organized and superstructure which refers to the organization of social relations and ideas, including culture and state.

[00:06:30] We all know this, right? But, then, the two folks that I follow, Antonio Gramsci and Mao Tse Tung, further refined this relationship between this structure and superstructure. And they described it as this set of distinct class and social forces in political and civil society that form ideas, right?

[00:06:51] Ideology, culture the things we can’t exactly touch, we can’t exactly see, but we know they’re there the way we think about the world. And now in that kind of like new left Marxist theory, narrative, I think, can best be described as this historical process of becoming, right? This dialectical relationship between systems, structures, and self.

[00:07:13] We’re talking about more than individual stories. We’re talking about a collection of stories, a way of thinking about the world that shapes how we think about ourselves. So that to me is how I think about narrative. Since the 20th century, right, narrative theory has also been developed alongside of and part of organizing a social movement theory.

[00:07:36] And inside of that, these core concepts of frames, framing, collective action, framing with Charlotte Ryan, and Makani Temba helped us better understand these mental maps for how, that, that help us interpret how the world works, that help communicate a common worldview or meaning.

[00:07:54] And then narratives, which are different than the broad idea that you’re talking about, narrative strategy, but narratives, this collection and accumulation of stories that help communicate those broad frames. And then the stories themselves, the plots, the characters that organize a particular series of events, right?

[00:08:13] Joined in a common problem. We were talking about our victors, our victims, our villains, right? Bound together in a particular setting and context. And that leads to specific results and resolutions. All of this is how we think about narrative strategy today. But that’s different than strategic communications, right?

[00:08:32] Narrative strategy is really about a long term process to achieve fairly significant ends, right? Shifts in values, shifts in social relations, shifts in relations of power. Strategic communications is a very practical, logistical approach to policy change. Yeah. To short term specific changes, strategic communications built out of public relations, a capitalist model, a desire to sell an idea, to sell a product, to make a profit specifically for the ruling class.

[00:09:07] So these concepts are similar, but their purposes are distinct. Narrative changes about longterm shifts, about elevating values and ideas. Strategic communications is about organizing ideas and infrastructure. to impact short term policy or commercial outcomes. Both are actually useful to our movements.

[00:09:27] Both are required for us to be in, in this relationship around cultural power, but they’re different, they require different approaches and different resources. 

[00:09:38] Scot Nakagawa: Okay that was an incredibly good explanation. I feel like I learned something new right there. Who’s who’s doing good narrative work?

[00:09:45] What’s a good example? 

[00:09:47] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I think part of the challenge that we face is that we think that none of it, that the left is just, doing bad. We always talk about how the left is just doing bad. We down bad, baby. But I think there are examples everywhere. First of all, in terms of the who, let’s just say that my folks at Reframe are doing amazing work with some of their research.

[00:10:07] The folks at the Narrative Initiative are doing amazing work. And then, to help us understand these ideas, but then in terms of the actual, narrative work, the folks at, who are doing big things around care, folks at the National NDWA, National Domestic Workers Association, And other places who are introducing new ways of thinking about care as a big as a big framework, the student protests for Palestine right now are evoking powerful sentiment, right?

[00:10:37] Messaging frames, and they’re doing an amazing job of framing victims. Villains and victors, they’re sharing messaging across geography, across campuses, their demands are shared, but not just their demands, the way they’re presenting, the way that they’re showing up, all of this is shared. This is what makes narrative powerful.

[00:10:58] When you see this shared effort to embed an approach and organizing a movement strategy to embody, that approach and core civil and cultural infrastructure like. schools, like universities and that these approaches and strategies are evocative. They create and instill empathy and emotion, right?

[00:11:18] That by tapping into these powerful core and shared values and beliefs, rather than bullying or betraying central values and beliefs. This is what makes narrative powerful. And I see this happening all, all throughout the movement for justice in terms of Palestine, all throughout the movement for workers and reframing the movement.

[00:11:40] Some of those labor core labor concepts as concepts of care and rebuilding relationship. We’ll talk about this later, but a place where I think we could do better is how we think about and talk about democracy. 

[00:11:53] Sue Hyde: And to that point, Mac, you’ve tracked the shifting narrative strategies for a couple of decades, at least, and you mentioned ways and spaces and places where we might do things differently and better.

[00:12:12] You mentioned the pro democracy movement. I wonder if you could just expand on that a little bit and maybe also include your thoughts about how we should be talking about the authoritarian movement, which is, of course, the other the other aspect or an important aspect of the pro democracy movement.

[00:12:34] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I’m going to answer a few questions here in this response. We know that conflict sells. Yeah. Crisis sells. We see it on social media. We understand that we’ve always understood that to be true in terms of the media’s over hyper focus on violence and whether that’s in the news or that’s an entertainment.

[00:12:56] We, we understand that as the case. So that is a reality. When you couple that with the structural problem that we have inside of media, six companies right now control 90 percent of US media, right? We got AT& T, CBS, Comcast, Disney, News Corp and Viacom. Yeah. And these are some of the wealthiest companies, in the country, certainly and in the world these companies have an amazing lobby, in the white house and in terms of Congress, they are second only to the oil industry in terms of the dollars they spend on.

[00:13:32] Political lobbying. We have eight media giants that control 818 broadcast stations. Local news all sounds and looks the same, right? 83 percent of newsroom staff are white, right? This is the con these are the conditions that we have. We have a media infrastructure that is controlled, run, and on behalf of a ruling class.

[00:13:57] That is our reality right now. Only 13 percent of newspaper leadership is not white. You know? This is where we are. This is how stories, official stories, are being shaped. So we have a structural problem as we attempt to tell a new story. Part of what that means is that folks try to bypass Right?

[00:14:18] Mainstream media. Then we try to find other means to tell our stories. We go to social media, right? We’ve experienced over the last decade or two a huge digital transition that was supposed to open up storytelling for all of us. Supposed to decentralize. And in fact, decentralization inside of capitalism is very short lived in general.

[00:14:38] So it all, capitalism wants to reify itself and it has. So the digital technologies that were meant to open up doors for us to become our own producers of content, have reorganized themselves to, usurp that content. So here we are on social media platforms are now gathering up all our data, sucking it all up, sucking up our stories, and these are data mining companies.

[00:15:01] They’re not companies where we connect with friends. They’re companies to connect the ruling class to our data. This is the environment in which we’re trying to tell a story about democracy. And so right now, we have a situation in which Western democracies are engaged in this ideological competition with autocracy.

[00:15:23] Where does that leave us, though? You know what I mean? Where does that leave us, the organizers, or the everyday person who is trying to live in some measure of long term peace, long term justice, long term power? We know that narratives are this potent asymmetric instrument of power. We have to be able to reframe democracy in a new way that propagates a new worldview.

[00:15:48] Okay. How do we do that? This is the question that you’re asking me. It’s a complex question, and I don’t think I have a single right answer. I can say that I think authoritarian narratives tend to emphasize democracy as the threat. Yes? Suggesting that democracy interferes with individual rights and sovereignty, right?

[00:16:09] I can say that authoritarian narratives try to exploit grievances, our grievances, right? Grievances in the global South, grievances amongst oppressed people in the United States and in Western democracy. And they focus it on the failure of these Western democracies to deliver, right? And they compare that.

[00:16:29] To the effectiveness of authoritarian government governance and assert as a result, the need for a new world order. This is their frame. This is their frame. So the question is what’s ours? What’s our framework? And I don’t think that we have effectively answered that question. We are facing racialized disinformation, right?

[00:16:49] Information that’s deliberately false or misleading. Specifically intended to exploit these wedge issues that are related to race or even related to our communities. And so inside of this structural problem we have of media, this condition of racialized disinformation and this powerful authoritarian set of frames, how do we move an asymmetrical narrative that reframes democracy as something outside of Western neoliberalism, outside of the long history of racial capitalism, and inside of this new vision.

[00:17:27] This narrative strategy for our fourth world war. You know what I mean? Like, how do we move that? I’m not going to sit up here and act like I have the answer. I don’t. I think that’s part of this, where the left is at. We’re trying to answer that question. One part of the answer is to build up.

[00:17:44] our own media infrastructure. A second part of the answer is to I talked about embedded, embodied, and evocative. Yeah. We have to embed narrative strategy more deeply into larger social movement strategy and theory. Everything we do is narrative strategy. These aren’t separate and distinct. Efforts, from organizing.

[00:18:07] Narrative is a part of power building, plain and simple, and we need more. We need so much more infrastructure to be able to build up that strategy. We need to be able to embed our frames, messages, and narratives inside core civil and political infrastructure. So this thing where we’re constantly trying to battle in the media, that is not the only landscape for narrative terrain, for narrative battle.

[00:18:32] The landscapes that look at what they’re doing in Texas with curriculum, right? The book banning, all of that is the rights narrative strategy. I challenge, our comrade, our folks, our friends, what is the less narrative strategy at that scale? That’s what we need. We need a strategy that is at scale to be able to reframe and assert a new vision for what democracy can look like.

[00:18:56] Sue Hyde: Mac, I’m gonna ask you a follow up question. 

[00:18:59] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Okay. 

[00:19:00] Sue Hyde: What would strategy at scale look like? Feel like? How do we build. That 

[00:19:09] Malkia Devich-Cyril: you’re not trying to ask me no easy questions, huh? What would that look like I feel like I think number one I tend to pay very close attention to the rights approach to narrative because they’ve been quite deliberate about that as a counter to the civil rights movement and a counter to both the civil rights movement of the sixties and the civil and human rights movements of the of more recent years.

[00:19:33] And the escalation, that we’ve seen in terms of the attack on schools. So just for example the curriculum battles that have been going on, we call it, the culture wars that we describe them as. These curriculum battles, the the attacks on transgender youth, The bathroom bans, the book bans, all of these are essentially attempts to change how people think about rights.

[00:20:03] Change how people think about rights. The issues as they are fighting them aren’t the issues. They don’t even care about those issues. They don’t really care about gays. Gay stuff. You know what I mean? They don’t care about transgender kids. What they care about is transforming how people think about and who controls schools.

[00:20:20] Yeah. And how people think about and who controls the retelling of history and how people think about rights. And one of the things that I think is important and distinct about how the left has approached issues is that I find us to be reactive to attack. As opposed to moving a long term agenda that is strategic, that asserts a long term narrative.

[00:20:46] So that’s number one that our, that the long view of our strategy has to change. Our strategy needs to be longer. We need to be concerned with what are the core values. And issues that we are trying to move and then finding opportunities to move them as opposed to reacting to the constant attack.

[00:21:10] Now the challenge with that is what that means when you do that is sometimes that means you’re not going to be able to respond when attack happens. And I understand that to be a very difficult balance. But I do think that taking a long view is going to benefit us better in the long term. So that’s one of the ways we think about scale is the length of the view.

[00:21:30] I think the second way that we think about scale is again, the right has attacked various institutions. We tend to be responsive to individuals in an interesting way. I’m very curious about what our strategy is around schools. In general, not just responding to the militarization or responding to the guns in schools or responding to crisis, but what is it that we’re trying to reshape about how educate what education is, what its function is in society, because this is a core.

[00:22:04] element or core landscape for narrative terrain, for narrative battle is as both, our public education system and our university system. The so basically becoming more institutional about our approach, I think is another way we achieve scale. The last way I think we achieve skill is the level of shared strategy, right?

[00:22:27] So that we are, we move from issue to to vision. Yeah we move from fighting of specific distinct and strata, stratified issues. To being less sectoral, being less organizational, and being more visionary and we’re, we’re trying to achieve a reconstruction, how do we achieve that reconstruction? We need a whole new social contract. So what are the values and what are the fights that would achieve that social contract? That moves beyond organization, that moves beyond issue. So those are the three ways that I think we can achieve. a level of scale that we have not yet seen in our narrative strategy.

[00:23:08] Sue Hyde: That’s beautiful. Thank you.

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[00:24:04] Thanks for listening.

[00:24:11] Scot Nakagawa: Malkia, when you said, when you talked about what the right is doing, it brought to mind something from the early 90s. All right, this kind of jujitsu that they pull on us with their communication strategies and narrative work, where there was a video called Gay Rights Special Rights circulated by, basically far right wing organizations to attack the LGBTQ community.

[00:24:34] And in it, they make the argument That LGBTQ people were hijacking the freedom train and taking it from Selma to Sodom and basically said that gay people, in particular, which was their target at the time, were disqualified from civil rights because they did not meet a kind of litmus test that black people instead met historically of multi generational poverty, oppression, et cetera, et cetera, right?

[00:25:00] And it really forced the LGBTQ movement on its heels, having to respond to this argument that we’re somehow immoral, which became the debate, that we’re immoral and all white, right? And We lost what they were really doing, I think, which was re educating people about civil rights. That the only group that don’t have them are white males.

[00:25:20] That in order to be under the protection of the Constitution, you have, in this way, you have to have had multi generational poverty and political exclusion. That all of these things were the case, and that not everyone had civil rights to begin with. And I see that getting repeated over and over again.

[00:25:36] How do we avoid getting caught in that argument? 

[00:25:40] Malkia Devich-Cyril: First of all, let’s be clear, That strategy is age old, this fragmentation, this approach to fragmentation, this approach to to trying to distinguish between types and forms of oppression, to create this hierarchy. This is all an attempt, obviously, we know this, to reduce our ability to build power.

[00:26:02] So how do we respond to that? So number one I think these moments create opportunities. for identity based movements for struggle to, first of all, be, become a little bit more reflective, right? This, in the case of queer identity, racism has been a wedge. Yeah, It’s a, and for us as queer folk, queer and trans folk, being able to deal with that wedge inside of our movement is incredibly important.

[00:26:33] Similarly, inside of Black movements, inside of race based movements being able to deal, for example, with patriarchy, is similarly a wedge issue inside of our ability, our movements for civil and human rights. In both of these instances the attempt to wedge, for example, inside of black black movements, black civil rights and black power movements, women and men, or to wedge, there’s a whole black straight pride movement now, to, to wedge black queer people away from straight folk, black straight folk.

[00:27:08] How we respond to this? is by recognizing patriarchy and white supremacy as the way as the tool that’s creating the wedge. So if we can, for example do the work inside of our own movements, inside of our various sectors, inside of our various issues and communities to attack those as the fight patriarchy and white supremacy, not to respond to the wedge itself.

[00:27:35] Wedge issues are not to be responded to directly ever. They’re intended to distract, they’re intended to weaken. And so our best response is, I think, first of all, not to ignore them, but to refocus on whatever the tool being used to do the wedging, and then to use that as an opportunity to strengthen our own relations internally.

[00:27:58] The counterintelligence program, the FBI’s counterintelligence program in the 60s very effectively used patriarchy as a wedge to destroy the Black Panther Party. My mom was a leader in the Black Panther Party in New York, one of the founding members of the New York chapter ran the breakfast program in New York.

[00:28:15] And she always talked about this particular effort, that the to turn. Wedge between women and men, in, in the Black Panther Party, to use intimate relationships as a way to create and forge and sow distrust, and so we have to understand this is a tactic.

[00:28:33] And so our best bet is to strengthen our own movement to attack patriarchy and white supremacy as it is seeded inside of our work. That is the way we respond most effectively to wedge issues at all times, not by responding directly to the issue itself. 

[00:28:50] Scot Nakagawa: That’s really good advice, because as you said, we have been facing this for a long time, and we’re facing it now.

[00:28:55] They’re doing it to us around immigration, calling immigrants rapists and criminals, and forcing us to have to refute those arguments. And then we lose the thread on mass migration, what’s driving it, how does it all affect us, and what is our self interest, right? 

[00:29:09] Malkia Devich-Cyril: And that’s right. And not only that, but it sows a, it seeds, rather a, an affinity, an affiliation with the state.

[00:29:18] It sows and seeds an affiliation with white power and puts you on the side of white power. It makes you identify with the state. with America and make sure I identify with American nationalism in a way that is not, it’s deadly to whatever fight you actually are fighting. That move, that push towards American nationalism is deadly toward whatever movement you’re already in.

[00:29:41] So it’s not just about distraction, nor is it just about the weakening of power. It also seeds an affiliation To dominance that is deadly and destructive. 

[00:29:52] Scot Nakagawa: Before I turn it over to Sue, I just wanna say that we’ll include in the show notes some contemporary guidance on how to deal with agents’ provocateur that have been published by people who’ve been working internationally against anti-democratic movement.

[00:30:04] Excellent. Wonderful. 

[00:30:06] Sue Hyde: Mac we, we do have some narrative and we have plenty of powerful stories. What’s your assessment of. movement media at this point. And by movement, racial justice media, pro democracy media. What do you see out there and what do we need? 

[00:30:29] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I’m really pleased with the fact that we have magazines now like Forge and Convergence.

[00:30:35] We need places to debate. We need ways to articulate and assert new ideas, to push lines, to debate concepts. We haven’t had that, in a long time. The infrastructure that we need to forge new ways of thinking about things has been unfunded, defunded. Our conferences are, I’m not going to say they’re non existent, but I’ll say that we don’t have as many as we used to, and they don’t, they’re not as strategic as I think sometimes they could be.

[00:31:09] And so it’s not, when I think of movement media, I want to be clear. It’s not just our podcasts. It’s not just our radio shows, not just our magazines, but also our conferences are part of the narrative infrastructure. The ways that we forge strategy is very important. So I’d say that the state of movement media is complex.

[00:31:31] On the one hand, we have some new infrastructure. We podcasts. Okay. Everybody and their mama got a podcast. The question to me is, do you have an audience, right? And so being able to, being able to build audience in new ways is very important. The digital landscape has really transformed our relationship between a content producer and audience.

[00:31:55] And we need to rebuild that relationship. It’s the same as organizing, we have to rebuild the base. Whether we’re thinking about the base in terms of an audience for our ideology and an engagement with ideas, or we’re thinking about the base and other ways of building power, our relationship to the base must change.

[00:32:12] So the state of movement media is one where we have a lot of content, but we don’t necessarily have the audience to engage. So that’s one thing. I think we are also in our organizing, constantly inserting new ideas into the mainstream and moving, pushing, some of the ideas about democracy to the left.

[00:32:34] I think the movement for ceasefire and to end the occupation of Palestine is one place where we have been extraordinarily powerful in asserting new ideas about democracy, and not just ideas about democracy as it relates to Palestine, but this internationalism, this rebirth of internationalism, re reigniting of internationalism, has been a powerful contribution in this time.

[00:33:00] In this time of global fascism, this is an absolute necessity. So in that way beautiful approach. Some of our some of the work, like I said earlier around this reframing of care, in terms of labor, in terms of the labor movement, an amazing assertion of new ideas and new ways of thinking that is about re.

[00:33:23] Revitalizing the social contract re I should say revitalizing, I should say reformatting, our social contract, rethinking democracy without neoliberalism, rethinking democracy outside of capitalism. This is the attempt that, that this care narrative is doing right. So we’re really lucky that we live in a time where care as a core concept is being asserted.

[00:33:49] But our infrastructure is weak. Our infrastructure, even the public broadcasting that we used to have, we no longer have in any significant way. They, our ability to tell our stories we, we rely heavily on an internet that is corporate controlled and that is actually It’s a breathing ground for disinformation, for racialized disinformation.

[00:34:15] So even though we have more opportunities for content development, we also have more institutional barriers. The personalized news, right? The hyper local, hyper niche content. The citizen journalism that blurs the lines between audience and journalist. and also blurs the line between fact and fiction, right?

[00:34:33] We don’t know what’s true anymore, right? The increasingly mobile media and journalism consumption, right? The artificial intelligence that’s replacing journalists. The news bubbles, the on demand, all of this, right? Helps spread messages faster than ever, but that also means it spreads lies faster than ever.

[00:34:54] And it’s a brother, Khalil Muhammad who said disorganized truth is easily overcome by a well organized lie. When the infrastructure supports the organization of lies, then the movement has to create its own infrastructure. And that requires extraordinary resources that have not been provided. So I’d say that the state of movement media now, especially now that we’ve lost major conferences like the allied media conference and others.

[00:35:25] We are lacking in the kind of infrastructure that we need to build the strategies that we deserve. 

[00:35:33] Sue Hyde: Yeah, I think the loss of the Allied Media Project Biennial Conference is a big loss because it was a place where The multiracial pro democracy movement would gather to share narrative and communication strategies and build skills, and it’s gone.

[00:35:51] I like to think that the 22nd Century Initiative Conference, which will happen in 2025 in Atlanta, it can be a space for that. It is not a dedicated space for that kind of work. We will certainly have it. We’ll have skills building and educational stuff on that topic of narrative strategies and communication strategies.

[00:36:16] But wow, the loss of the Allied Media Project Conference, I think is really big. Huge. Huge. 

[00:36:24] Scot Nakagawa: Yeah. I have a question for you about Trump, I don’t like talking about him that much, but Trump or whoever may be advising him seems to play a longer game than most of his opponents. He prepares his space for both win and loss scenarios that.

[00:36:43] And in ways that make him stronger and builds capacities, he will need in either scenario, right? Like this, that’s well, for real, like the steel campaign claiming that election was stolen before it was ever even. Executed, before the election day ever came, prepares people to react in the event of a loss, for instance, that’s a very simple way in which he does it.

[00:37:03] So how can the multiracial pro democracy movement counter authoritarian disinformation and misinformations of this kind while serving the longer game of winning an equitable, pluralistic, multiracial, and feminist democracy? Dang. 

[00:37:20] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I don’t know that. I think the answer, the answers lie in our ability to strengthen the infrastructure that we have to build power.

[00:37:32] So from a narrative perspective, our need to reframe democracy, and I’ll just say it again and again, outside of the context of neoliberal capitalism is extraordinarily urgent. Our ability to to talk about a new ways of thinking about democracy, what democracy is, who it’s for who how it serves we need it.

[00:37:56] We need a new way of framing that. At the same time as we need these new ideas and we need these new frames and we need these stories that communicate these frames, we also need the power to then communicate whatever it is we come up with, which means we need new narrative infrastructure.

[00:38:12] We need places to debate and articulate strategy. And we need more and new narrative leadership. This idea that having three or four firms, or a couple of narrative institutions that serve power building organizations, that’s sufficient. That’s malarkey.

[00:38:30] That’s crazy. That’s ridiculous. Like we need dozens. We need hundreds of institutions like this. And so we need some shift. We need a new, a renewed push at the foundation level. We need new ways of thinking about resourcing these, this type of work because we need new infrastructure strategy and leadership.

[00:38:51] And then I think another way that we need to Be thinking about how to counter authoritarian disinformation and misinformation campaigns is first of all, we need to really understand, racialized disinformation in a way that we don’t currently we need new. We need more support on that.

[00:39:09] I will say that being able to introduce new frames that are anti elitist. But that but that also are, but are not anti government, right? We need to, we have work to do inside of that that framing competition around elitism and government, right? Around thinking about power and how we talk about collective power versus dominating power.

[00:39:33] We need to be able to. Counter ideas about anti democracy while not asserting frames around anti leadership that are anti leadership. These are the places where we have some sticking points around our framing. We need to be able to think about and talk about in new ways.

[00:39:51] Dehumanization and extraction. We need to be able to talk about in terms of the economy. We need to assert a new way of talking about deserve, who deserves and who does not. So deservingness as a core, core value. We need to rethink how we talk about disparities. Sometimes asserting data around disparities actually reinforces messaging that we don’t wanna reinforce.

[00:40:17] We need to be able to engage in new ways with faith and religion as a terrain for narrative struggle. These are all areas where would, if we stepped into them wholeheartedly and with greater vigor. we might actually have a chance at serving a longer game in terms of our narrative strategy. And there are so many more points like that.

[00:40:44] So many more intersections where we need to step in. We need to think, for example, about, we need to have conversations about violence. We need to have conversations about armed struggle as a movement, because violence is going to come, is going to meet us. There are all these places where the right is thinking about and asserting ideas and we are responding.

[00:41:06] We have to move from that level of reactivity to, to something new. And I believe we are. Moving. We are doing that. Our platforms, Forge and Convergence, are places where we’re doing that. This podcast is an attempt to do that. So we are doing it, but we need more. 

[00:41:24] Scot Nakagawa: Malkia, I love that you started out by talking about democracy, who it serves, etc.

[00:41:28] Definitional kind of imperatives, right? Because I feel like often in this fight that, you described as an ideological fight with autocracy, that, It’s a fight between liberalism and autocracy, and not between democracy and autocracy, because we still haven’t come to a common definition and understanding of democracy, not just as a concept but as a set of institutions, of processes, of rules, etc.,

[00:41:52] and that concept in a way that’s, something people can grab onto. So thank you so much for that.

[00:42:00] This podcast is presented by the 22nd Century Initiative, a hub for strategy and action for frontline activists, national leaders, and people like you. 

[00:42:10] Sue Hyde: At 22ci. org, you can sign up for our newsletter. You can learn from our anti authoritarian playbook, which includes resources. on how to block rising authoritarianism, bridge across the multiracial majority, and build an inclusive pro democracy movement in your community.

[00:42:35] Mac I want to turn to a question about crisis communications. You mentioned violence and political violence is very much on our minds, happening and probably will continue to happen. When communities face threats and acts of political violence, what would you bring forward as the keys to crisis communication that can maybe maximize the backfire against perpetrators, but also help?

[00:43:08] Community groups, local groups on the ground build power. 

[00:43:14] Malkia Devich-Cyril: There are three things that I think are necessary. One, we need more of our communications entities, firms, organizations. to have strong crisis communications strategy and infrastructure. We don’t have that right now. Very few strategic communications firms, PR firms, and other kinds of narrative entities actually support at the level that we need crisis communication.

[00:43:41] So that’s number one. We need the infrastructure. Two In terms of the content piece we often respond to acts of political violence by attempting to reframe them as domestic terrorism, but we have to be very careful when we try to reframe terrorism. It’s a very powerful frame that’s being used against us.

[00:44:02] oppressed communities in the United States for centuries. And our attempts to reframe the ruling class, to reframe white men, to reframe white supremacist attacks as terrorism can often backfire on us. And so we have to be very careful about that. We can shift the terms of debate by being really clear about who the victims are, who the victors are, and who the villains are.

[00:44:25] We have to have that clarity of message and that clarity of frame at all times. I think in the face of crisis, sometimes we lose that clarity and we lose that consistency. But the most important thing we can do is scenario plan in advance. The most important thing we can do, I’ll just say it again, scenario, plan, and advance.

[00:44:46] We are living in an era of political violence. We are living in an era of extraordinary death, loss. We are living in a time of of crisis and instability in what Gramsci talked about as the interregnum, this time between stable governments, right? And which fascism thrives. This is the place where fascism thrives in chaos.

[00:45:12] In Game of Thrones, they talked about chaos as a ladder, yeah? A ladder for power, whoever can step in and build power at that time. So as we attempt To respond to political violence. We have to think of it not as individual attacks. But as elements, as morbid symptoms, yes, of a period of time, and we have to prepare for them in advance and respond to them with that preparation.

[00:45:41] That is what I think is most important. 

[00:45:45] Sue Hyde: Thank you. And I love the Game of Thrones reference. 

[00:45:50] Scot Nakagawa: Yes, as long as somebody doesn’t go flying around on the dragon killing everybody at the end. 

[00:45:55] Malkia Devich-Cyril: You don’t know what’s gonna happen. It could be dragons, we don’t know.

[00:46:03] Scot Nakagawa: Just Switching gears for just one minute, because I know you are working on a very important project to transform the public narrative on grief and equity in America. Can you just tell us a few words about this in order to get people’s interest piqued? 

[00:46:19] Malkia Devich-Cyril: I just mentioned that we’re living in a time of mass loss.

[00:46:22] We’re living in a time where Police shootings are more visible to us than ever because of the shift in our communication infrastructure, school shootings, mass shootings are happening at an unprecedented rate because of the availability of semi automatic weapons. And colonial war against colonized peoples, all over the world, civil war unprecedented global violence.

[00:46:47] And that global violence results in that is the result of rising authoritarianism, but also the kind of violence that is the result of escalating climate crisis land grabs resource extraction. All of this leads to mass loss. We just faced the crisis of a pandemic in which millions across the globe died in a very short period of time in an unprecedented way.

[00:47:15] This is our reality now. This is the world our children are growing up in, where their own losses are stacked up Against the losses of millions and millions of people, and they are witnessing that those losses on social media. We, as organizers, as people attempting to build power for transformation, if we don’t recognize three things.

[00:47:36] One, the impact that loss will have on potentially demobilizing our base. If we don’t understand that unprocessed and unmetabolized grief is a toxin to our movements, then we in trouble. Number two, if we don’t recognize that processed and metabolized grief is a medicine and an antidote to authoritarianism, we in trouble.

[00:48:05] And finally, for our own sanity, for our own longevity in the struggle, if we don’t understand that we have to care for our movement workers in a new way that helps deal with the vicarious loss and the direct losses, then we in trouble. There’s a quote from Subcomandante Galeano, who’s a Zapatista rebel.

[00:48:28] He talked about the 43 disappeared students. He said, your struggle is a crack in the wall of the system. Don’t allow it to close up. Your children breathe through that crack, but so do the thousands of others who have disappeared across the world. So that the crack does not close up, so that the crack can deepen and expand, you will have in us Zapatistas a common struggle.

[00:48:52] One that transforms pain into rage. Rage into rebellion and rebellion into tomorrow, and that is the work that I’m trying to do with a new project called Radical Loss, where I’m trying to devise new ways of thinking about mass loss that support mass movement building putting out an emergent framework to transform this era of mass loss into an era of collective grief that is that is about building a more resilient future.

[00:49:19] Building grief practitioners supporting bereaved change makers and enabling new infrastructure that helps us to think about a grief as a tool and a methodology and a framework by which we make change. So that is the work that I’m doing through a project called Radical Loss. It’s a Black led change lab transforming how movements face loss and catalyze grief into powerful leadership and action.

[00:49:44] So that’s what I’m trying to do. And I’ll just say that it was inspired by the death of my wife, Alana Devitch Cyril, the death of my mother. And I’ve lost about 22 very close. People since 2016 and and it became very clear to me that we need something more than what we have right now.

[00:50:04] Scot Nakagawa: I’m really sorry for all that you’ve lost, but I’m so grateful that you’re doing this work. Can’t wait to hear more. Yeah. Mac, thanks so much for doing this with us. I promised people they would learn something new and I learned like 10 new things. So I’m sure the audience will love this episode.

[00:50:20] They should love this episode. So please love this episode. Yeah, thanks again. 

[00:50:25] Malkia Devich-Cyril: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. It’s always a pleasure.

[00:50:43] Sue Hyde: authoritarian podcast on all of your favorite platforms, and also at 22ci. org and convergence mag. org. Direct links to these and other resources referenced in this episode. Are in the show notes.

[00:51:05] Sound on Tape: The Anti-Authoritarian Podcast is created by the 22nd Century Initiative and published by Conversions Magazine. Our theme music is After the Revolution by Cari Blanton, and is licensed under Creative Commons. The show was hosted by Scott Nawa and Su Hyde. Executive producers are James Mumm and Tony Esprich.

[00:51:23] Our producer is Josh Elstro, and Yong Chan Miller is our production assistant.