In this episode, host Rafa Kidvai is joined by Shanelle Matthews, founder of the Radical Communicators Network and a distinguished lecturer at City College at the City University of New York. Shanelle discusses the critical role of narrative power in social movements, the importance of centering marginalized communities, and how storytelling can challenge dominant societal norms.
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Rafa Kidvai: This is No Body Criminalized: How the State Controls Our Bodies, Families, and Communities. I'm Rafa Kidvai, Director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. On our podcast, we talk with experts, activists, and advocates whose daily work intersects with reproductive justice and the state's targeting of marginalized communities. The founding mothers of reproductive justice in the United States define the term as the human rights to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. You will hear us restate the shared commitment throughout our interviews because regardless of the issues guests focus on, that is ultimately the world we all intend to create.
Our guest today is Shanelle Matthews. Shanelle is the founder of the Radical Communicators Network and a full-time Distinguished Lecturer at City College at the City University of New York. We began our conversation by discussing Shanelle's personal journey, growing up in Los Angeles, and how it shaped her approach to storytelling and activism.
Shanelle K. Mat...: When I was young, my mom was on welfare. I mean, honestly, she was like a lot of other moms on our South Los Angeles block. She was single, and working multiple jobs, and really doing her best to keep her head above water. I have a twin sister and a younger brother, and we knew that she cared a lot for us and loved us deeply because there's a stigma that is tethered to receiving state benefits, and to make sure that we had enough to eat, a place to sleep, my mom braved that stigma, and in many ways, braving it is exactly what poor people have to do. Despite that, she was punished for being poor. Our family was and many families living below the poverty line. There was a lot of shaming from policymakers, from other poor people. It was really everywhere.
At the time, I was so young. There wasn't really anything that I could do about it, but there was something for me as I learned to start making meaning of that experience that I realized was much more sinister which was this permeating assumption that the poor women, mainly in my community, were "gaming" the system, that they were collecting cash assistance, or food stamps, or housing vouchers, and not working or not contributing. If that was true, I never met them. Not one person.
Everybody who was poor like us, they worked. They worked from home if they didn't work a nine-to-five. They cooked all day. They sold plates to other families who were in our community. They did hair in the kitchen or watched another family's kids. A lot of them picked up recycling, trudged it to the recycling center for pennies. So they worked. In many ways, receiving that aid helped my mom stay afloat. This was the early '90s, and the reality is that by then, the stigma, and shame, and dignity foisted upon poor people had a long and storied history in the United States. So it wasn't unique to us, but it was new to me.
The traumatic part about that wasn't just about the shaming and the embarrassment that was imposed on us by other people, but it was about how the people who governed us treated us. I think for me, understanding the way in which the welfare system was actually broken because for decades, Black women and families were refused aid despite being the neediest, but the enduring narratives and tropes about Black women and Black families were used to justify punishing poor families. Ultimately, those justifications and those laws determined everything from the quality of our education to how justice is administered on our behalf in the court. So all that to say is stories and storytelling are the backbone of an inclusive society, and how they're told shapes narratives, what shaped policies, and those policies shape the material conditions of our lives even when those stories are lies that are used to win and will political power.
Rafa Kidvai: Thank you for sharing that story. I'm thinking about social movements based on what you said in terms of impact of narrative, and I'm wondering what the significance of narrative power and social movements is. If you could talk a little bit about how storytelling can really shape perceptions of whose lives are fundamentally valued in society.
Shanelle K. Mat...: Well, let me just start really quickly by defining narrative power and also, narrative and stories so that we're all on the same page. Narrative power, it refers to the ability to shape and control the stories told within our society, and this includes who tells the stories, what stories are told, and how they're interpreted. In short, it's really about the capacity to influence perceptions, beliefs, and behaviors through storytelling. Although story and narrative are often used interchangeably, they are different.
Stories are linear. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They often have a protagonist. The protagonist faces a problem that they go on a journey and have a path. Typically, we'll have some payoff. You've seen this in all of your favorite movies or documentaries, or listen to your podcast. Well, narratives are not linear, they're collections of stories that are refined over time that represent a central idea or belief, and narratives are really felt on a gut level. I learned this from my friend Jen Soriano, that they can be changed. It does take more work, but the gist of it is that stories accumulate into narratives.
So I wanted to just give that framing, and I really like this rhetorical device by the Narrative Initiative, "What tiles are to mosaics, stories art narratives," which helps us understand how one story is a tile in a larger picture, but stories are really about how we make sense of the world. Facts, and data, and history. They contribute to the meaning-making that we do every day, especially regarding people, places, and our experiences. But stories are the glue that connects our individual lives to those of our families, communities, and societies.
There's so many different functions of storytelling. Cultural preservation, teaching different morals and lessons to convey culture and norms across societies. They can be very therapeutic, help us make sense of the world, help us form different identities, help us get connected to other people in our community, help to influence people. So all these things, as you can see, are incredibly important. But in and of itself, storytelling is not an oppressive tool. Still, it can be used as a weapon of the rich and powerful to maintain their control and power which is really about this powerful people controlling and maintaining their power is we would call cultural hegemony.
What's really important about understanding the relationship between narrative and story inside of social movements is that those of us who are working for revolutionary, transformative change have to be aware of how the powerful and wealthy figures in our societies manipulate institutions like commercial media, and social media, and organized religion. All of which carry inherent biases to propagate and reinforce a society's subtle, yet dominant norms, beliefs, and values. This manipulation upholds a social order where white people and Western ideas are prioritized, placing whiteness above Blackness, emphasizing capitalism as essential, and treating the land as subordinate to humans.
These norms and beliefs are values that are embedded into our society through legislation, through structural development of our structures and institutions, and also, maintained through policing and stigma. So stories are often political, and the reality is, is that you are in an ideological contest for the future. I believe that if we struggle to radically shape the norms and rules that influence our lives across different domains of power, then we can remain worthy competitors of the trust of future generations.
Rafa Kidvai: What brought you into this kind of work? I really appreciate you framing what narrative power is in the first place, and I'm intrigued about what about storytelling makes you so passionate in the first place.
Shanelle K. Mat...: Today, I teach anthropology in the Department of Anthropology and Interdisciplinary Studies at the City College at the City University of New York, and that my journey towards getting there was actually really circuitous. Aside from a few uncles who are members of the Black guerrilla family, I don't come from a movement or activist family. My parents are semi-political. They're working class Black Americans. They have dueling beliefs in respectability and Black pride. Mostly, I was taught to be proud of who I was, but to also mind the rules.
My family's story is classically Black American. We joined the Great Migration from Northeast Louisiana where Grant's Canal meets the Mississippi River to Inglewood, California searching for freedom and jobs. Some of us survived the wars on poverty and drugs, and welfare reform, HIV and AIDS, and also, the viciousness of the Los Angeles militarized police force. But other people in my family did not, and it would be many years before I understood how the policies and practices of those who governed me and my family shaped that experience.
So I don't know if I'm as passionate about storytelling on its own. Where I think I thrive is at the intersection of narrative power of which storytelling is a function, and left and radical social movements. The movement tradition that I belong to is the Black radical tradition which George Lipschitz defines as the culture of opposition that has emerged and thrived within everyday life, evolving through expressive culture and underground activism. Within this tradition, the discipline of narrative-power-building plays a pivotal role, and I just want to give you an example of how my family's story and the Black radical tradition merges in ways that shape my passion for existing radical and left social movement narrative-power-building work.
The significance of communication of narrative-building in advancing Black liberation in the United States has a very long history. During chattel slavery, there is a network of enslaved Africans known as Borderland Maroons, and they established communication channels between plantations which helped runaways in their escape. They navigated this gray area between slavery and freedom, really striving for a way out. The Underground Railroad itself is a metaphor which a lot of people don't know, and it served as a critical means of communication among runaways and the enslaved providing life-saving information.
In the early 20th century, there were courageous abolitionists, like Ida B. Wells, who harnessed the power of the printing press to expose the horrors of lynching, challenging the basic legitimacy of white supremacy. By the '60s, the civil rights organizers used something called Wide-area telephone services to bypass telephone companies that were collaborating with the police to surveil them. Then, today in the 21st century, the Contemporary Black Liberation Movement used tools such as #BlackLivesMatter or #SayHerName as vehicles for contemporary counter narratives which provide communities who are typically excluded or victimized by mainstream and elite media institutions a platform to speak our truth and our words. So throughout history, Black individuals seeking freedom of which my family comes have employed various technologies and symbolic resources, words, signs, images, networks, music, and even put our bodies on the line to communicate the path to liberation. These traditions persist today even if it's under vastly different and rapidly changing circumstances.
Rafa Kidvai: You've talked about this a little bit already, but why do you think it's particularly important to center the challenges and experiences of marginalized communities when you talk about narrative power?
Shanelle K. Mat...: I'm glad you asked this question because I often hear people say we need to center the most marginalized, and I think it could be easy to assume that we all agree on what that means, but it feels important to be explicit about that because what I believe, and I had mentioned this earlier, is that the stories of the marginalized really are the antidote to cultural hegemony. Again, hegemony is really about how the dominant beliefs of the most powerful people in our societies become normalized, how they become the main way that we understand our society.
The solutions to society's most pressing social problems exist already in the stories of the people who have experienced the worst outcomes of those problems, and here's why. One of the challenges we have is that in a male-dominated patriarchal society, there is a lot of paternalism where people with power, particularly men, but also women and other gender-expansive people who believe that they know better than the people who are experiencing the oppression. They put forth solutions that are highly ineffective because they're imprecise about contending with the actual problem because they don't know and have never experienced the problem that they're solving for. People who have experienced the worst outcomes of systemic oppression, they develop coping mechanisms and survival strategies that form practical and actionable solutions, and their lived experiences highlight what works and what doesn't work, providing a much more grounded basis for policy and intervention design.
I'll just say, I was talking about the Black radical tradition, that the stories that we're telling today are not dissimilar to stories that people were telling 400 years ago. When I think about, for example, the Contemporary Abolitionist Movement which has really materialized from centuries of abolitionist organizing, their commitment to investing in new approaches to public safety to abolishing prisons and using restorative justice approaches for repair and rehabilitation to abolishing family separation system or otherwise known as Child Protective Services, that that discourse that they're using very similar to and even borrowed from the discourse that former iterations of the Abolitionist Movement used.
In the 18th century, abolitionism began to really talk about legal emancipation and getting information out about how abolishing slavery would be beneficial to not just, obviously, Black people, but also to all of society, and that's how we talk about it now, that is that if Black people are free, then all people will be free. For centuries, movement workers have encouraged the oppressed to tell their stories because in our society, the dominant classes, the wealthy men, Christian people have a larger platform to be able to spread their ideas and to diminish the ideas of the oppressed, but it is precisely inside of the stories and experiences, the knowledge and insights of the oppressed people that exist the solution to our most pressing issues, and it is imperative that we'd be able to articulate that.
Rafa Kidvai: Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I am thinking a lot about after the overturning of Roe, how there was a wave of storytelling from people across generations about their abortion experiences. I know that you have a background working in the Repro Movement. How do you think stigma about abortion impacts people's ability to share their experiences, and/or does it flatten the experiences that people do share?
Shanelle K. Mat...: Yeah. I mean, I think it does both of those things. Stigma about abortion keeps people from talking about their abortions, although it's very normal to have an abortion. I think it's a good example to show just how powerful stigma and shame can be. We saw it after the 2022 Midterms that even people who have fairly conservative beliefs still support people's access to abortion. So it just goes to show you how loud the dominant voices in the room can be and how much power oppositional forces have to make people feel like they shouldn't be telling their story or make them feel ashamed of doing that.
The reality is that yes, the more diverse stories that we have, the more dynamic an issue becomes because you talked about flattening stories. If people can only talk about their abortions in the "worst case scenarios," rape or incest, then it really becomes very stigmatizing and threatening to share a story of a person who simply wants to have an abortion because they don't want to be pregnant anymore. The reality is what's also wild is that there are a lot of people who would vote against access to abortion, who would shame and stigmatize other people who have already had abortions.
I think what it really comes down to, again, is how the people in our community, our family, our places of worship, what they're going to think about us. We are hardwired to consider how our reputation impacts our relationships and our lives. If we can't be honest about the fact that we had to make a decision for ourselves that was best for ourselves and continue to hold that inside and not share it, but also shame and stigmatize other people, we'll continue to have this broad level of secrecy among people who are accessing abortion and one-dimensional stories. But I'm hopeful because I do think that there is a lot of stigma and shame, but I also have seen firsthand as a member of the Reproductive Health Rights and Justice Movement the way in which storytelling has helped to bolster a new vision of society.
I'm thinking of people like Renee Bracey Sherman, and We Testify, and the storytelling infrastructure that she built in order to ensure that there was a place for people, especially people of marginalized backgrounds, to be able to say, "Look, I had an abortion, and I'm not ashamed about it, and I want to talk about it so that we can create safer conditions for everybody to tell their stories." That can also lead us to understanding how the systems that govern our lives are constructed and may perhaps need to be deconstructed. So there's, of course, risks and rewards to storytelling, and I believe that we are in this ideological contest for the future, and storytelling is such an important function to winning that contest.
Rafa Kidvai: So this is my last question, and it's a question that we ask everybody. I would love to hear from you, what does "No Body Criminalized," which is the name of our podcast, mean to you?
Shanelle K. Mat...: Yeah. I like this double entendre that you all fit into here. From a narrative-power-building perspective, "No Body Criminalized" is about reshaping the perceptions, beliefs, and worldviews of those who believe that criminalization is an effective mechanism for our society. In order for us to get to the point where nobody is criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes, for protesting in the streets, for crossing a border, we have to build narrative power for a much more inclusive vision of society. We have to help people interpret and make meaning of our world in ways that put people over profits, put the planet above capitalism, that emphasize the importance of the stories of people who are in closest proximity to oppression, recognizing that they have the solutions, and we have to illegitimize that cultural hegemony that I was talking about, recognizing that the beliefs of the dominant group don't often represent our needs, and it can be easy to internalize the shame that those groups impose upon us.
But for nobody to be criminalized, for self-determining, making decisions about their lives, for their families, for their communities, we have to reshape how society thinks about our collective liberation and ensure that every person, no matter what they look like or where they come from, can make the most self-determined decisions. Ultimately, that's not easy work to do, but I remain hopeful, especially given the revolutionary work that's happening across our movements from labor unions to the Working Families Party, to the abortion funds, to the Immigrant Rights Movement. We are well on our way to building a vision of society that works for everybody.
Rafa Kidvai: Shanelle, thank you so much for taking time to talk with us. I secretly call you my professor, and it was really lovely to be in class with you today and all the days.
Shanelle K. Mat...: Thank you, Rafa. I really appreciate that. Thanks for inviting me to be here.
Rafa Kidvai: Here are some takeaways from our conversation. Shanelle discussed the critical role of storytelling in shaping societal norms and policies. She explained how the state manipulates narratives to justify punitive policies and how reclaiming these narratives is essential for social justice. She pointed two examples of how social movements have successfully shifted narratives from disability justice advocates changing work norms during the COVID-19 pandemic to the MeToo movement highlighting grassroots activism. Shanelle also discussed the importance of community and solidarity in her work and highlighted the need for radical communicators to collaborate across movements to build a more inclusive and equitable society.
Shanelle Matthews is the founder of Radical Communicators Network and a full-time distinguished lecturer at City College at the City University of New York. You can learn more about her work at HelloShanelle.com. I'm Rafa Kidvai, the host of this podcast and Director of the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. The Repro Legal Defense Fund funds bail and strong defenses for people being punished for abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and other pregnancy outcomes. Learn more at ReproLegalDefenseFund.org. If you have questions about your legal rights, go to ReproLegalHelpline.org or call 844-868-2812. No Body Criminalized is produced by Phantom Center Media and Entertainment for the Repro Legal Defense Fund at If/When/How. Pamela Kirkland is the show's producer. Kojin Tashiro is lead producer and mixed this episode. Remember, keep your community safe, and don't talk to cops.