Story: A recounting of a particular series of events that occur in a particular place and time and often contain structural archetypes such as a protagonist, a problem, a path, and a payoff. (Credit: Pop Culture Collaborative)

Narrative: A collection of stories we tell each other, rooted in shared values and common themes that uphold a particular frame or worldview.

Racial Narratives: The collection of stories we tell each other that uphold our understanding of race and racism.

Narratology: A humanities discipline dedicated to the theory and the study of narratives' logic, principles, and practices.

Racial Narratology: The study of the logic, principles, and practices of racialized narratives and narrative structures.

Narrative Power: The ability to change the most popular stories that define cultural norms.

Black Narrative Power: The ability of Black people to change the most popular stories about Blackness.

Narrative Change: An intentional approach to shifting the stories that guide our values and shape how people understand information and experiences.

Racial Narrative Change: An intentional approach to shifting the stories that guide our understanding of race and racial groups.

Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, sociologist, and structuralist literary critic, coined the term “Narratology,” which he described as a science of narrative.

Todorov wanted to analyze the structural properties of narratives and develop a general theory that could be applied to all stories.

My work seeks to understand and analyze the properties of the narratives surrounding race and racial groups. What scholars call Critical Race Narratology.

Our perception of Blackness and Black people is based on racist cognitive structures. These cognitive structures were supplanted into the origin story of the United States and have since been used to justify both the violence and economic exploitation of Black people.

Racial narrative change rests on the idea that we must change how we organize and interpret our understanding of race and, in my estimation, Blackness. Only through the disruption, dissemination, weaving, and defending of the gigantic sea of racial narratives will we see the creation of policies enacted to create a racially just world.

My work is dedicated to understanding how we can build Black narrative power and use it to change how society discusses, understands, and tells new stories about Blackness.