In the past year, political and cultural resistance movements in the form of protests, marches and movements emerged online.
We often hear that “telling our stories” is an important means of cultural nourishment and resistance, but we would like to argue that a specific method of storytelling — counterstory or “counter-discourse” — can be particularly valuable in the higher education of minority students in the 21st century and in boosting institutional advancement strategies at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs).
“Does racism still exist?” This question was asked by a student during the first college-level course that I, Aja Martinez, taught 12 years ago. It became the impetus for my work in critical race theory (CRT).
In our contemporary socio-political context, I rarely face this question, and I find myself forgetting that my young, predominantly White students who attend a private predominantly White institution still have much to learn about race relations in our institutional spaces. Considering this context and my own identity as Chicana — of Mexican-American and indigenous ancestry, born and raised in the U.S. Southwest — I find the most accessible point of entry to conversations about racial justice for my students is through story — counterstory, to be specific.
CRT made way for the emergence of counterstory, a method used in scholarly and popular publications as a necessary and legitimate mode of research for marginalized scholars, particularly those from cultures where the oral tradition is valued. Counterstory serves to expose, analyze and challenge stock stories of racial privilege and can help strengthen traditions of social, political and cultural survival and resistance.
Below is a meme that represents a stock story of allyship associated with a privileged perspective of “assistance” toward the listed marginalized identities. However, the second meme represents the counterstories that my students and I construct over the course of a semester as we discuss Whiteness, allyship and the responsibility of privilege to work beyond the parameters of the stock story and to change the story.
A stock-story meme: If you wear a hijab, I’ll sit with you on the train.
