Writing Truth to Power: Affirmative Stances
Many of my clients are writing about race, class, gender, disability, sexuality, power, privilege, and/or colonialism. One of the hardest things for them to do is figure out how they will negotiate their relationship to power. For some, this is the power of a tenure or promotion committee. For others, this is the power of a publisher. Since I edit with equity in mind, my task over the next few newsletters is to give some inkling about how you might write truth to power.
To be fair, this phrase – “truth to power” – embeds itself in my psyche from my days as an undergraduate, when my campus was transfixed by the professors working in Black Studies who consistently spoke truth to power or used the phrase to describe what they were doing. Currently, the phrase functions as an ethos of how to write and why, to whom and for whom.
When we research, we are exploring. We search for information in every crevice, going down roads that lead nowhere, spelunking into rabbit holes that turn out to be warrens. When we write, we must be experienced tour guides, taking someone into places we’ve already seen a million times over. These are two different ways of thinking about information, two different approaches to writing.
The problem is that we can write as though we are still exploring. This often results in describing the negative space of an idea. It is not this. It is not quite this. There exists this lacuna, these lacunae. As an explorer, this is quite useful because it recounts where we’ve been and why. It also helps someone understand, eventually, where we’re going. However, the tour guide does not bother with where we’re not going. Instead, in their experienced hands, one travels directly to the point, stopping at marvelous and interesting, and relevant places along the way.
Let me introduce you to the affirmative stance. The affirmative stance allows you to clarify exactly what you’re doing and why. I see its utility most clearly in the literature review sections of critical work, also in grant applications. The affirmative stance takes you away from outlining everyone else’s work toward clarifying how we’re moving toward your point.
In Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, they had the option of explaining how and why everyone had thus far messed up in tracing Black and Native Studies. Instead, the introduction is a patient, steady rendering of the intwined fields’ stories that lead us to The Black Shoals. The major metaphor – the shoal – allows King to ask “what do my readers need to know to engage with my work?” The result is a story of how the field connives to bring us to the point of asking the questions King asks, seeking the answers they provide us.
The humble summary is also an affirmative stance. When we analyze complicated works, we often hop into the analysis without explicating the story itself. I recently took two paragraphs to describe Victor LaValle’s The Devil in Silver. While those paragraphs felt luxurious, they were indeed necessary. They allowed me to refer back to the summary I’ve provided as a way to guiding someone through the argument.
As always, tour guides know where they’re going. They tell you where they’re going. While they’re taking you there, if they’re good, you feel like you’re in expert hands. Save a reader. Be a tour guide.