PART TWO: THE SPECULATIVE CONTEXT
There Are Maps Within Our Joy & Exceptionalism is Gaslighting
Lisa Yancey
The day I sat down to think about this article, a child was shot in the head in Kansas City, Missouri. He arrived at the wrong address to pick up his younger siblings, and a man shot him through the door. I don’t have any children, but I am an aunt, and something inside of me dislodged when I learned what happened to Ralph Yarl. I heard my mom in my memory bank telling me, Go pick up your sister [or brothers] from so-and-so’s house. That was just a responsibility of being an older sibling. A directive that should have been inconsequential, annoying at best for Yarl, but certainly unworthy of the evening news. And yet, here we are.
When I agreed to this piece of writing, I had been asked to architect a point of view that elucidated narrative change strategies as effective interventions for transforming people’s beliefs and behaviors. Okay. That seemed doable enough. Think about it. Many of our early memories of rituals that shaped our beliefs and expanded our capacity to dream started with “Once upon a time . . .” Storytelling has long traditions of grafting into our imaginations what we believe and what we believe is possible. Who hasn’t held visual imagery for tooth fairies, wizards, Santa Claus, tortoises, hares, flying elephants, or hobbits? Parables structure most faith-based doctrines, which makes sense because great stories force us to grapple with plausibility and incredulity tensions. The push and pull of those tensions is the valley where beliefs and concepts of faith and miracles come of age. All this is to say, I didn’t think it would be too difficult to craft a compelling case for narratives that center on the well-being and thrivability of artists and creatives.
I figured that I would anchor around the harms of exceptionalism as a central trope of artists, through which, under the beguilement of being deemed “special,” these creativity engineers find themselves left outside conventional labor support systems. It sounds good to be “exceptional” until you realize that frame invisibilizes your multidimensional identity and connectivity to the commons. The one-dimensional exceptional artist trope is not only insultingly reductive, it is also extremely harmful to the economic stability and warranted worker protections for one of the most generative labor populations in our global society.
In We Are Bound: Recommendations, the companion book to We Are Bound: Excavating the Story of Artist Relief, I proffered that “Exceptionalism Is Gaslighting.” There, I say, “Exceptionalism frames have placed artists and creators outside the public’s basic understanding of [them] as essential innovators and workers within the labor force and as seminal economic contributors to the gross domestic product.” Exceptionalism also sustains a practice of looking for the “one” exceptional artist, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands of talented creators that keep this industry generative. It further allows the framer to diminish artists' immense compensatory, cultural, social, and global value as a distinct professional class.
That’s where I was headed. Then I heard about Ralph Yarl, and my heart cracked. Everything above felt like frames without a pulse—like I, too, had fallen into the trap of needing to craft a case when cases are quotidian. What we need to act (and keep acting) is right in front of us. Before this shooting, Yarl played multiple instruments in a youth orchestra and had earned a Missouri All-State Band recognition. He is an artist. A clarinetist. A distinguished student. A son. A brother. He represents the best of the next generation of leaders, thinkers, doers, and makers to whom we are endowing this world. Because of a narrative trope rooted in a systemic fear of Black male bodies, he is now in the biggest recovery fight of his life.
We need narratives that stop talking in general frames that don't allow people to see the human and feel compassion and a compulsion to reconstruct our system along fault lines of common decency and love. As much as my work dwells on strategy, this is about something larger than strategy. Strategy is in service of the better world we are here to build. We must be able to see the vision of the future we want and tell those stories with such vivid detail that they graft as memories of what is now and beliefs in what is possible. And we are not starting from scratch. Don’t believe that lie. There’s so much joy and beauty and laughter and stories with maps inside of them already tracking us toward the future we want. We just need to press on. Flood the imaginations of people of all ages with unforgettable stories and imagery. Let’s keep forcing a widespread grappling with plausibility and incredulity until the world we want is not only possible, it is.
With love and abundance,
Lisa Yancey
NOTES
Lisa Yancey, WE ARE BOUND: RECOMMENDATIONS, self-published, 2022, 70.
Ibid., 72.
Tariro Mzezewa, “What We Know about the Shooting of Ralph Yarl,” The Cut, April 21, 2023, https://www.thecut.com/2023/04/ralph-yarl-shooting-kansas-city.html#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20probable%2Dcause,before%20Lester%20fired%20his%20gun.
ABOUT THE COVER ART
Original artwork produced by Lynnette Kaid, A kaid’n kolor Production, in collaboration with author Lisa Yancey.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lisa Yancey is president and founder of Yancey Consulting.
She is a thinker and doer who cares about our current state and our future. She knows that her life has a purpose beyond her personal comforts. She has dreams yet realized and those that are fulfilled. The dancer and lawyer in her frame her dedication, rigor, creativity, and work practice. She wants her labor to matter long after she is gone.
Best qualities: active listener, strategist, activist, loyal friend, mentor, forever dancer, and entrepreneur.
