Vote like your freedom of speech depends on it (because it does).

Today Arts In Action celebrates brilliant practitioners of the written word, artists in action who daily inspire us to our better angels and inspire us to do good.

Clockwise from top left: Isabel Wilkerson, Resmaa Menakem, Amanda Ripley and Heather Cox Richardson

The past week has seen some abdications of responsible journalism alongside some of the ugliest, meanest, and least true stories ever disseminated in our country's history. 
 
But good and true stories are also being told. They may not be fiction, but it doesn't have to be fiction to be a work of art. 
 
Freedom of expression is an essential right. Honest and accurate storytelling manifests that right. And that makes the art of storytelling essential.
 
There are those vying for power in the upcoming elections who, if they win, will attempt to wield their power by trying to stop truth-seeking storytellers from sharing their stories. Some will want those storytellers locked up, or worse. That’s not my opinion; it’s their stated intent.
 
Believe me when I say that freedom of speech is most definitely on the ballot, and we must vote to protect it. (Click hereto find your nearest polling place and get access to all relevant information about voting in this election.)
 
In that spirit, Arts in Action today celebrates artists who pursue and convey the truth through the art of narrative storytelling. 
 
I’ve chosen to spotlight Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Resmaa Menakem’s My Grandmother’s Hands, Heather Cox Richardson’s Democracy Awakening, and Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict. These visionary authors profoundly shaped my worldview over these last four years, and these books are as compelling to me as some of my favorite novels and short stories. 
 

Scroll down to read about minds-at-work that have shaped our world for the better.  Their words crackle. Their electrifying stories are game-changers. They are Artists in Action.

Isabel Wilkerson, about to receive the National Arts & Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama.

Let’s begin with Isabel Wilkerson.

I first heard her name when her critically acclaimed, chart-topping work of narrative non-fiction, The Warmth of Other Suns, came out in 2010. An account of The Great Migration told through the eyes of three of the millions who partook, it is powerful storytelling that introduced the story of millions of Black Americans to the many more millions of people who’d never heard of it, much less been taught about it. It’s a staggering achievement, and any author would give eternal thanks for a critical and popular success like that.

Ten years later, she gave us Caste, an even more stunning exploration of the pathogenic ways societies around the world and across time have ranked the quality of groups of people’s lives to keep them very much in the lanes they prescribe, no matter how damaging or deadly the consequences. We Americans assume that often comes down to race, but Wilkerson boldly suggests that we’re not looking deep enough.  

“As we go about our daily lives,” she writes, “caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.” 

I wish I could write like that.

By exploring the Caste system with the same storytelling genius that infuses The Warmth of Other Sun, Wilkerson makes this a global story, lifting the veils to allow readers to see how the powerful around the world have imposed caste systems for as long as there have been vulnerable people to subjugate. That helps us better understand what’s happened in our own country. “Race is the skin,” she writes, “but caste is the bones.”   What an artist Wilkerson is!

A related side note: When I read this extraordinary book, not once did my documentary-inclined mind ever think it would be possible to translate its tremendous scope and scale to film. I’m grateful that I share the planet with Ava DuVernay, who had the vision and talent to turn Caste into what I think was the best film of 2023, Origin.

This is saying something, considering that 2023 was also the year of Oppenheimer and Barbie. Those two films deserved all the acclaim they got, but you won’t find a better screenplay or more accomplished direction than those that DuVernay displays in this extraordinary film. Nor will you find a more exquisite performance than the one crafted by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, portraying Wilkerson as a mind at work, journeying through every kind of loss imaginable on her way to profound discoveries.

Barbie and Oppenheimer were also inadvertently part of a larger cultural debate. Ryan Gosling was nominated for an Oscar for Barbie, while neither adapter/director Greta Gerwig nor star Margot Robbie were for Best Director and Best Actress. And in the end, the more male-oriented and dominated Oppenheimer won Best Picture. Didn’t these turns of events prove Barbie’s point about male dominance and preferential treatment?

 Sure, but when Origin – a film that was based on a landmark book by a Black woman, adapted and directed by a Black woman, starred a Queer Black woman, and unquestionably deserved the accolades bestowed on two films made by predominantly white artists – got zero nominations and disappeared from movie screens and public discourse painfully quickly, then that proves Origin’s point even more powerfully.

Would that all those who read Caste would see Origin, because we’ve largely ignored a profound work of art that could not possibly be more relevant right now. We owe it to ourselves and each other to watch.

The first time I heard the phrase “generational trauma” it was uttered by Minneapolis-based trauma therapist Resmaa Menakem in an interview for NPR’s On Being. Throughout the conversation with host Krista Tippet, Menakem invoked not with generalized abstractions but rather with specific and striking imagery. When explaining how trauma could be passed from body to body, he asks us to consider the terrible things that have happened to Black bodies with their backs turned.

That was the first of many things he said in that interview that stopped me in my tracks. The interview led me to immediately order a copy of Menakem’s groundbreaking book My Grandmother’s Hands. Throughout this thoughtful work, his brilliance as a story-based facilitator and healer helps readers explore with him the ways that generational trauma, particularly that spurred by racism, impacts our communities, our lives, and indeed our bodies. It also gently but firmly cautions us that simply having opinions and good intentions doesn’t make us experts, nor do they set us up for any kind of success to “heal the world,” as progressive do-gooders like myself are wont to attempt. We have much to learn and much work to do before we’re anywhere near ready to be of service to the world.

Menakem is as adept with the spoken word as he is with the written one. He’s as brilliantly challenging in his second appearance on On Being (in a conversation that includes White Fragility author Robin D’Angelo) as he was in his first.

In this conversation for Sounds True, Menakem uses the terrific metaphor of running a marathon to help those rushing into political, social, and cultural battles before we are remotely ready.

And his striking 2024 Commencement Address to the graduating class of the California Institute of Integral Studies is a thing of discomforting beauty, his compelling words innovatively enhanced by the sounds literally gurgling underneath them. (As I first did, you might think something’s off with the audio. It’s not, and it’s beautiful.)

Heavy as the topics that Resmaa Menakem addresses are, his skills as a storyteller, teacher, and therapist leave me feeling lighter. His words and ideas leave me feeling sobered and accountable in a way that persuades me to be more thoughtful and humble. He leaves room for me to be inspired to take genuinely helpful action, rather than believe that it’s enough that my heart’s in the right place.

The vision, wit, and insight of Resmaa Menakem don’t call people out so much as they call us in. It’s therapy, it’s social commentary, and it’s art.

“I just can’t vote for a Democrat,” someone told me in the ramp-up to the 2020 election, “because I’m terrified of America becoming a socialist country.”

Wait, what? America has never been remotely close to being a socialist country (except for the stuff we all seem to want, like Medicare, Social Security, and so on).

Yet somehow, that label gets thrown as an attack, and an anti-American one at that, toward at any politician interested in making life better for everyone, not just a few.

So where did this profoundly inaccurate and lethally fearful “socialism” talking point come from? Thank goodness the brilliant historian, professor, and author Heather Cox Richardson knows and is willing to share it. (More on that in a second.)

During the Trump impeachment drama, and I imagine frustrated by the number of people with platforms telling tales of American history that reflected the weakest of grasps on it, Richardson began daily Facebook posts she called “Letters From An American.” The enormous response suggested that a lot of people out there hungered for Richardson’s capacity to convey history and current events within the framework of social conscience and biocultural psychology, and the post quickly evolved into the Letters From An American Substack column that now has more than two million followers.

These posts led to her terrific book Democracy Awakening, a beautifully conceived, richly textured call to action about the precarious state of American democracy. It reads like a thriller, which makes the fact that it’s non-fiction all the more impressive (and scary).

Even in Richardson’s daily column, which you can both read and listen to as a daily podcast, you never get knee-jerk reactions. When she read what she’s written in response to something noteworthy that may have happened only hours before, you can almost imagine her closing her eyes and taking a deep breath before drawing on her considerable intelligence and experience to adroitly connect the dots between the present moment and the people, places, and events that got us here.  What she writes makes sense because she’s a great historian; the reason it sticks with you is because she’s a great writer.

So when someone hits you with something as absurd as “Democrats are leading us down the road to socialism,” you can rely on Heather Cox Richardson to help you set them straight.

That’s what happened when my acquaintance expressed their fear that socialism would keep her voting for Republicans. As Richardson has explained, that fear is nothing so highbrow as a sophisticated aversion to an economic system employed by foreign governments and everything to do with a cruel and calculated campaign against Black Americans whose acquisition of civil and voting rights crashed headlong into the racism that has haunted our country for hundreds of years and was recast as socialism to be resisted and fought.

Read Richardson’s account for yourself, written in the wake of the 2021 passage of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It’s jaw-dropping.

Heather Cox Richardson doesn’t simply challenge her readers with the realities of historical, social, and cultural truth. She writes from the top of her intelligence to the top of theirs.  She treats them like curious grown-ups who might be as thrilled by a promising discovery as she is.

Grand narratives operate from the top of the artist’s intelligence to the top of their audience’s. They leave their audiences changed, charged, and empowered.

Heather Cox Richardson does this, and it makes her work art.

This is how NPR’s On Being described Amanda Ripley when she appeared on the show following the publication of the book that changed my life the most this year:

“Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then, in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called “Complicating the Narratives,” which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, “can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters, and scenes. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we’ve reached our collective limitations … Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation.”

In between that terrific essay and the one she wrote this week about how to live with uncertainty until the election is decided, Ripley became fascinated with the concept of conflict.

We’re all in it, in one form or another. Not all conflicts are bad or by definition lead to alienation or destruction. Accomplishing great things usually requires going through some kind of conflict.

 And yet conflict is also at the heart of disruption and destruction. That kind of conflict feels entirely different and increasingly prevalent.

So what’s the difference between the two? How do we know what kind of conflict we’re in? And why does it matter?

Not everyone would see the story here – stories, actually – but then not everyone is Amanda Ripley, who did what any good journalist would do. She pursued the story with determination, empathy, and objectivity.

The result is High Conflict, a book of profound insight that reads as compellingly as a great short story collection. It came out in 2021, and while I only caught up with it this year (via its terrific audio edition on Audible), it’s more timely than ever.

Ripley posits that there are two kinds of conflict. There’s good conflict, in which people may butt heads and bruise feelings but, generally speaking, are united by a shared desire to give it up to the best idea in the room.  When they do, they stand a good chance to bring that idea to life.

Then there’s high conflict, in which it’s the fight itself that matters. When the fight is the thing from which we derive our sense of identity, morality, and even happiness, we’re in high conflict and on the road to disaster.

The stories we’ve been telling ourselves for millennia demonstrate that we’ve been wrestling with these concepts since we learned to tell stories. From ancient mythological and revered religious texts to Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Marvel, the struggle between good and high conflict—what we often call good vs. evil—has fascinated us and resonated with us (to the point that some of us are willing to fight over our interpretation of any or all of these narratives).

High Conflict is an essential book.  Ripley’s remarkable and accomplished narrative journalism deftly weaves carefully researched and curated stories that feature an array of individuals from around the world. These people felt extremely well-intentioned in their pursuits (or at least understandably motivated) and fell into high-conflict situations.

This is no abstract treatise on human conflict. This is Light Side vs Dark Side of the Force stuff with real-world stakes.  

From a Chicago gang leader to a British environmental activist, from the California divorce attorney who invented the concept of mediation in divorce law to a political consultant to authoritarian foreign leaders, from the ancient La Brea Tar Pits to the post-Trump American quagmire, High Conflict is chock full of riveting, devastating and empowering stories. It’s a profound journey.

I deeply appreciate that Ripley honors both the subject and the audience by refusing to play the end of the story at the beginning. High Conflict plays as much as a mystery thriller as a piece of narrative biocultural psychology. Every chapter is imbued with wonder as the pieces of this complex puzzle are assembled.

Sure, the book can be unsettling. It’s a scary topic. High conflict is the Dark Side of the Force. As Yoda says in The Empire Strikes Back, it’s “quicker, easier, more seductive.” It can lead to scary behaviors and consequences. Ripley is clear that none of us are immune to its pull and often don’t know we’re in it until the damage is done.

But High Conflict also offers great comfort because she provides ways to identify when we see it, when we’re in it, how we can escape it, and what we can learn to improve our chances of escaping its clutches next time. The takeaway is that with introspection, improvisation, and humility, we can claw our way back to good conflict. 

In the end, High Conflict offers the feeling that arguably we want the most out of the art of storytelling: the possiblity of a happy ending.