Black History Month
Toni Morrison, Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman showed that freedom is never given but won. Although their actions speak for themselves, you can learn a lot about communication when looking at their achievements.
Blue eyed girls
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison would have turned 90 this week. The literary mistress grew up in Ohio and graphically depicted black life in fiction for over five decades. Stories about rape, incest and infanticide gave some institutions an excuse to ban her books - with little success. Each of her novels, from “The Bluest Eye” to “God Help the Child”, made it harder for Americans to close their eyes on the country’s dark past.
Social injustice and cultural identity dominate Morrison’s work stirring controversy amongst both white and black folk. That did not prevent her from winning the Pulitzer Prize as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature. When the first female African American laureate took center stage in Stockholm, she showed the power of language with a parable of a blind, old woman.
Analogies are only one of many techniques in the toolbox. When you devour her vivid vocabulary, you will spot uniquely smitheried sentences full of historic references. If you want to captivate your audience in a similar way, remember what she said at a Google Talk in 2013, “The point of writing is to take what is common and estrange it, and to take what is strange and familiarise it.”
Lesser-known and undervalued constructions of her repertoire are appositives. Appositives are nominal phrases that you put close to a noun to describe it better. For example, Morrison introduces the “renting black Cholly Breedlove” in “The Bluest Eye”, presents “Freddie the janitor” in the “Song of Solomon”, and writes in “Beloved” that “[t]he grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away.” You might deem appositives irrelevant for non-writers at first but they can boost a speaker’s ethos. The next time you refer to nameless functionaries or faceless colleagues humanise them by sharing some details. That way you show that you know as well as care about them, and prick up your audience’s ears.
Mr Civil Rights
No one who followed the 2020 US election campaigns could miss the dispute over one of the country’s most powerful institutions: the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS). Its members review laws and legal decisions, guard the constitution and decide on issues between citizens and the government. When a seat becomes vacant, Presidents usually nominate like-minded candidates to get to a conservative or liberal majority. There are only nine justices (since1869) serving for life, which makes it a singular opportunity for any American to shape society. Only two African Americans have ever been granted this privilege so far.
Thurgood Marshall was the first. The great-grandson of slaves was denied access to the University of Maryland’s law school because he was black. He nonetheless obtained a law degree from Lincoln University and fought segregationist policies with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). A few months after Martin Luther King gave his speech “Beyond Vietnam” in 1967, President Johnson offered Marshall a seat on the Supreme Court. The “civil rights crusader” won a record-braking 29 of his 32 cases furthering racial equality.
Lawyers and non-jurists can learn how to argue effectively with a simple structure from him. Numerous people fought racial segregation with little success. Courts, back then, upheld a “separate but equal” doctrine well-illustrated in the Plessy decision: “If one race be inferior to the other socially, the Constitution of the United States cannot put them upon the same plane”. Marshall accomplished a breakthrough with the case Brown vs. Board of Education because he argued that a discriminatory educational system deepens the divide and contradicts the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution from 1868, which gives US citizens equal civil and legal rights. You are more convincing when you do not just appeal to morality but rebut the main counterarguments and point to its social utility.
Being eloquent helped as well. The conclusion of a rare analysis identified Marshall’s oratorical prowess: his speeches are technical yet plain, an immediate response in line with future trends, and substantial as well as honest. A closer look reveals that he was also very concise and structured. Introduction and conclusion together only make up 15% of his speeches. How long does it take you to cut to the chase?
A women of note
The almighty dollar is in men’s hands. This is at least the impression one can get when you open your wallet staring at the faces of Benjamin Franklin and his six companions. Harriet Tubman could replace the 7th President Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill crushing through the green ceiling. What makes her noteworthy?
Tubman is neither an inventor nor a former president. She was born in slavery in the early 19th century, escaped and rescued fellows through the Underground Railroad, which got her the nickname “Moses”. The abolitionist with a disability represents the “essential story of American democracy”, according to Obama’s Secretary of Treasury Jack Lew. Even if her name does not ring a bell, you probably saw the mock-up Democrats used to visualise the diversity of the country.
African Amercians had a huge impact on US society but were not always welcome. Blacks were, willingly and unwillingly, sent back to Africa in the 19th and 20th century. The Boston abolitionist paper “The Liberator” reports that when Tubman faced similar calls, the illiterate countered with “a story of a man who sowed onions and garlic on his land to increase his dairy productions; but he soon found the butter was strong and would not sell, and so he concluded to sow clover instead. But he soon found the wind had blown the onions and garlic all over his field. Just so, she said, the white people had got the ‘nigger’ here to do their drudgery, and now they were trying to root ’em out and send ’em to Africa. ‘But,’ she said, ‘they can’t do it; we’re rooted here, and they can’t pull us up.’”
We have heard such tales from our parents or in school. The above-mentioned exchange shows that grown-ups can still use forceful fables to show the difference between what is right and what is wrong. Use them whenever you need to create compassion.
Three tips to present better
Show that you know and care about key people through appositives.
Be breviloquent by spending no more than 15% of your speech on your intro and conclusion.
Design mockups to visualise the change you want to see.
- written by Benjamin Wilhelm, benjamin[at]thedandeliongroup.eu
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