I love to tell the story of my Scottish grandfather, Daniel. At the age of seven, Daniel became an indentured servant. It was a common arrangement in the 1800’s among European families like Daniel’s: dirt poor, unable to feed four growing children. In exchange for room and board, Daniel would have to work for a master for ten years.
The master’s side of the deal was to prepare Daniel for a skilled trade, and at the end of ten years, give him his freedom and a ticket to America. That, too, was customary.
Daniel’s master happened to be a piano tuner. And whether Daniel’s family knew it at the time or not, Daniel had musical talent. In those ten years, he not only learned his trade, he became an accomplished pianist. His master gave him his ticket and a beautiful set of piano tuning tools and sent him on his way.
Daniel boarded his ship to America and headed straight to the Julliard School of Music. To earn money for tuition, he tuned the pianos displayed in Macy’s Fifth Avenue window, playing for customers upon request.
Part of loving to tell this story is the richness of historic details it contains: Scottish heritage, indentured servants, becoming an immigrant, Julliard and Macy’s. Even when people know me well in the present age, it often comes as a great surprise to hear how much history is wrapped up in one grandfather’s story. A good story like that can open minds to the possibility that immense courage, talent and endurance may be hidden inside every ordinary life we encounter.
Through StoryCorps and The National Story Project, NPR has been collecting, broadcasting and preserving stories about the lives of ordinary Americans since 2003. They have encouraged sons and daughters from coast to coast to record stories they have heard from their parents and grandparents, before those stories are lost forever.
The hugely popular NPR radio program, “The Moth,” takes it a step further and invites people of all ages to tell commonplace, hilarious, heart-wrenching, true-life episodes in 10-minute segments. I went to one of the Moth Grand Slam theater productions recently and heard, among others, a story about a doctor’s night on the emergency ward, a young girl’s school years told through images of her lunch box and a family’s dilemma over an inherited shrunken head.
During the few minutes of each story’s telling, the most wonderful ambiance was created in the theater. The audience was “at one with” the teller – in harmony, in empathy, in a state of belonging together.
Humans of New York began in 2010 with an unemployed photography buff who wanted to take pictures of everyone on the streets of New York. It didn’t take Brandon Stanton long, though, to realize that the success of his project was going to come from telling the stories of the people he was photographing, more than from the photographs themselves. He now has over 15 million followers of his HNY blog, which gives us narrative glimpses into the lives of New Yorkers, along with their faces.
Telling our stories has become a hugely successful means of waking people up to our common humanity, even changing minds that were prejudiced. Way back in 1988, the Gay-Straight Alliance was formed out of young people’s intense interest in stories that had started to emerge about the lives of numerous gay teenagers who had committed suicide. Clubs and chapters of Alliance groups formed in high schools and colleges all across the country, lending importance to the stories of gay teens, as well as providing a means for visible and all-important peer support.
A current school-aged story that is calling people to action is the number of girls who miss school every time they have their periods, because they cannot afford sanitary supplies. Some others go to school and tough it out using rags and newspapers.
While this has been an issue for hundreds of years, only recently have people begun to listen to the stories of young girls and discuss the issue openly. Once the stories began to be heard, efforts got underway to ensure that schools – in our own country and around the globe – are supplied with tampons and sanitary pads.
Women’s rights, poverty, public health, education and achievement all intersect in that issue. Stories like this demonstrate what intersectionality is, and why we need to look at social issues through the lens of intersectionality, rather than, say, school supply budgets, or girls’ health, or racial and cultural differences, or educational attendance and achievement. Stories about girl’s being unable to afford sanitary products weave all those threads together.
Recently the city of Boston unveiled a series of murals on city structures that depict immigrants both past and present. Some are well-known Boston sports figures or neighborhood business owners. One mural is devoted to humble grandmothers who came to the city over the past century. It was designed using photographs of actual immigrant grandmothers from Boston’s many ethnic neighborhoods (see image at the head of this article). Seen all together, it depicts the richness of our individual stories, as well as the augmentation of riches our entire culture enjoys as a result of our diversity.
These murals are part of a national project entitled, “To Immigrants, With Love,” an intentional effort to let immigrants know that they are welcome everywhere in this country. It is the brain child of an organization called Define America (http://www.defineamerica.com), which creates films and shares facts and presents stories in the media about real people, in an effort to break down false stereotypes about immigrants and people of diverse religions and cultures.
We find great value in hearing one another’s stories, as well as deep affirmation that we are all equals. Until we know one another’s stories, we have no grounds for categorizing, judging, coming to conclusions about or ranking people. At the same time, once we come to understand that every individual is the bearer of important stories of fear and courage, loss and gain, triumph and tragedy, then we know in our bones that we are all equals.
Activity for understanding intersectionality: Listen to someone’s story – funny, sad, startling, heart-breaking. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if you are listening to a neighbor or listening to a Moth story. Afterward, write down a list of the different issues that intersect in that story.
