#brietbart

The Trump Team and their ilk have explicitly stated they will keep lists of crimes committed by the groups they are trying to scapegoat and demonize. Breitbart has been doing this for a while. Stormfront even longer.

The point of these lists, these itemized lists that list each crime individually as opposed to using statistics, is to create a narrative. A narrative that, in highlighting each story individually, ignores numbers, other crime, and other people from the group.

It’s very effective.

So I’m wondering if any counter-narrative projects have been set up. Either in the positive or the negative. For example:

A collection of stories about muslims/muslim non-citizens from banned countries/black people/undocumented immigrants doing exceptionally positive things. Heartwarming stories, stories of service, stories about taking part in local fire departments or offering aid during disasters. The more personal, the better. Where it’s safe to provide details, the more details the better.

Boosting these individual stories is good, but without the onslaught style of the opposing narrative, it allows bigots to rest easy in their “well, not all of them are bad but--” mentality. 

A great place to start with this is the number of undocumented immigrants who are serving in the military. Trump and team would be loathed to look weak on military, and in fact have already proven that in such cases, their love of military outweighs their hatred of immigrants. [x] Even the obstructionist GOP of Obama’s term couldn’t bring itself to reject the idea of allowing these undocumented immigrants to serve. [x] Whatever your personal views on the military or its targeting of these people and their dire situations for personnel, this is a huge push back on the narrative of Trump and his people are trying to push - that these undocumented immigrants are unpatriotic, non-contributing members of the country.

The less positive approach would be a similar list to their list covering white crime. Police reports only style. As close in style as possible to whatever list they put out officially. Obviously we couldn’t keep up with all of the white crime, but a project that for every crime posted on one of these public lists, lists 3 or more comparable white criminal cases could go a long way to creating a counter narrative. (I felt myself falling back on statistics in writing this post, hence the 3 or more, but I don’t know how relevant that would really be, especially if the crimes are comparable or more horrific). 

It would be crucial to frame the latter project as entirely reactive, and as cold and clinical as possible. These folks will be quick to yell about attacks on white people, but if the project is, down to the formatting, the same as their projects against these other groups, it’ll at least give their shouting a strong stench of hypocrisy. Won’t stop it, but it’ll help.

Sarah Kendzior Highlight from News Xchange on Vimeo.