In Handbook for a Phase Transition, Robert LePage and Jody LePage write:
"A destructive master narrative, not ‘human nature’ or individual malice, lies at the core of our complicated tangle of world problems. Yet a narrative, even a master narrative, is only made of words. This understanding permits us to grasp and address our situation. It offers both a more effective solution and one without endless recrimination." ...
"History has led many of us to recognize that it is not only unintelligent but morally unacceptable to harbor pre-judgments of superiority/inferiority about whole groups of individuals. Few of us would embrace group hatreds consciously. Unconsciously, however, a powerful master narrative still imprisons us in group identities and hostilities. If we can come to understand what lies at the core of these problems — mental constructs made of words — we can deal with them more effectively and create a world that better matches our aspirations."
I’m neither a historian nor literary scholar, far from it, but my upbringing, ethnic background and family history made me partial to critiques of the "master narrative" long before post-modernist literary critics coined the term, before historians, sociologists and journalists found it useful in their own descriptions of the world.
The master narrative is the big story from which all the other stories emanate. The story of how the world works as viewed and validated by society. That is, how the world works as told by the dominant culture. The master narrative reinforces the "natural order" of the privileged position of the dominant by virtue of their class, race, gender, religion and nation. It maintains a pernicious classist, racist, sexist, nationalistic (and sometimes theistic) view that the non-dominant are inferior, a view quite often absorbed and internalized by the non-dominant themselves, whether they live in an inner city or a remote fourth world country.
If you were an anthropologist, you might view the master narrative operating as myths do. But I prefer to think of it as brainwashing, whether imparted around a campfire, in a grade-school history lesson, at a graduate-level seminar, by an endowed think-tank, on the evening news, or in the pages of an economic treatise. Stories derived from the master narrative resonate so profoundly in our psyches that we often don’t even recognize their power over us. For instance, Americans, especially white, male Americans of a certain generation, were taught by the master narrative to believe unquestioningly in our society as a meritocracy, so much so that they denied – and often still deny – their own privilege.
Canadian journalist Robert Fulford writes:
A master narrative that we find convincing and persuasive differs from other stories in an important way: it swallows us. It is not a play we can see performed, or a painting we can view, or a city we can visit. A master narrative is a dwelling place. We are intended to live in it.
To raise an issue familiar to all Kossacks – election campaigns – the brilliant New York University Journalism Professor Jay Rosen wrote four years ago:
A given work of journalism will have an author’s byline, but in some measure the author is always "journalism" itself and its peculiar habits of mind. You can’t interview that guy. In standard coverage of political campaigns, where one goal is always to appear nonpartisan and above the fray, the master narrative has for a long time been winning — who’s going to win, who seems to be winning, what the candidates are doing to win, how much money it takes to win, how the primary in South Carolina is critical to winning and so on. Reporters call this the horse race, one of the rare occasions on which they have aptly named their own master narrative and recognized it as a story machine — almost an appliance for cooking news.
The master narrative, whether it comes from Zoroaster, St. Paul, Edward Gibbon, Karl Marx, Carl Jung, Germaine Greer, Paulo Freire or Rupert Murdoch is a key element of the relentless human striving to give meaning to our lives. As the postmodernists see it, the old master narratives of Western culture no longer serve this function and have yet to be firmly replaced; nor, in their view, should they be, because such narratives are, by nature, inherently totalitarian.
I personally can’t go quite that far.
Because counter-narratives can be liberating. For instance, Charles C. Mann verges on the creation of a new master narrative in his book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which could be fairly subtitled, "Everything You Thought You Knew Is Wrong."
On the other hand, there is no doubt that master narratives can enslave, as brainwashing is intended to do. Think, for instance, how much the master narrative that I label, for short, "truth, justice and the American way" distorted our nation’s collective thought processes after 9/11. In terms of blood and treasure (ours and others’) the cost exacted over the centuries by the master narrative of American exceptionalism has been immense. As have the benefits to the elitists and oligarchs.
Ronald Takaki is one of my favorite dismantlers of the master narrative of American history that most of us have clanging around in our heads, even when we have been exposed to counter-narratives. Recently, I’ve been fortunate in having covered a couple of his speeches and interviewed him.
The chirpy, silver-maned historian, grandson of plantation-working immigrants from Japan to Hawai‘i, discovered when he sought a topic for his doctoral dissertation in 1964 that the master narrative has often been "devastating." It was a discovery that led him to become a leading pioneer in ethnic studies, choose African-American slavery for that dissertation, and, in 1967, become the first professor of Black Studies at UCLA.
A one-time surfer, known in his youth as "Ten Toes Takaki," he had never expected to become a scholar, something he attributed to the influence of Sun Gi Nishi, a mentor who took a personal interest in getting the fun-loving Takaki off the islands and into a heartland school, the College of Wooster in Ohio. Ten years later, Takaki took his doctorate at Berkeley.
When he appeared before students in that first Black Studies class, Takaki said he could nervously "feel them thinking to themselves, ‘Funny, he doesn’t look black’." And when one Afro-haired militant asked him what "revolutionary tools are we going to learn in this course," Takaki replied, "We’re going to study the history of the United States as it relates to black people. We’re also going to strengthen and sharpen our critical thinking skills and our writing skills, and these can be revolutionary tools if you want to make them so." He had them hooked.
But Takaki soon found himself asking what he knew about the diversity he could see in his own classroom. "I realized that even though I had a PhD in American history I really didn’t know about the history of ‘we the people’ of the United States." He set out not only to learn about it, but also to teach it. He since has authored 11 books, alternatives to the master narrative, including two about immigrants transforming themselves into Americans.
New immigrants, often isolated, alienated and stigmatized, Takaki says, "are frequently made to feel that they are not welcome in America. ...They belong to a long history of immigrants. Our ... students want to learn English. They know that learning English is an essential path to becoming American. But ESL students are also entitled to become Americans by learning about the history of America and our nation’s diversity." ESL and American history ought to be taught side by side, he says. Tataki has a clear idea of how that history might be taught. What follows is his sketchy but compelling example. You'll need more than two hands to count the number of master narrative smackdowns in this brief lesson.
Two immigrant groups to 19th Century America came across opposite oceans, 4 million Irish, and half a million Chinese. Ask most people, and the usual reason they come up with for the Irish emigration to America is the potato famine. In fact, only a fourth of Irish immigrants came during the famine.
Of the Irish who came, 52 percent were women; of the Chinese, 5 percent. Why the difference?
In the early 1800s, Takaki explains, absentee British landlords chose to switch much land from farming to ranching. Consequently, women who previously had participated in planting and reaping found themselves economically superfluous on cattle ranches run by men working for wages. Large numbers of these young, unmarried women emigrated to America, where most became maids, but a third became factory workers in textile mills heavily dependent on cotton, a crop that itself depended on "immigrants" forced to come to America, black Africans.
Expansion of the cotton economy into Texas led the Mexican government in 1830 to ban both slavery and the entry of additional U.S. immigrants. Fallout from those bans led to the war that eventually put 40 percent of Mexico under U.S. sovereignty. That war, as you can see from the presidential papers of James K. Polk, was partly fought to gain control of the port of San Francisco.
Via that port, enter the Chinese, many of them urged in the 1860s to come to America to work on the Central Pacific railroad, whose track-laying crews were soon 90 percent Chinese and 10 percent Irish.
There were many reasons more Irish women and than Chinese women emigrated, but one factor came from employers like Central Pacific magnate Charles Crocker, who testified to Congress, as Tataki says: "We want these Chinese men brought over here to work three-to-five years, and then we want them to be returned to China. We don’t want them staying here and becoming – and he used this term – ‘thick’. Here you have the master narrative shaping business policy. These Chinese workers were just workers, okay? They were braceros. It was not the intention of the employers to let them become part of the United States of America."
It’s amazing what you can find in company archives. Western Union, for instance, saved hundreds of thousands of telegrams. Takaki points to one effect of keeping Chinese women out of the country by reading from telegrams sent by wife-seeking Chinese men and written in that clipped Western Union pidgin used in those days by native speakers and foreign-born alike to communicate along the wires. Marriageable women weren’t all these Chinese sought. One man telegraphed a friend: "Send the opium up quick."
Which brings the professor full circle. That so many Chinese – including immigrants – were addicted to opium was due to another British policy, its wars to take over Hong Kong and force China to accept imports of opium from India as payment for the porcelain, silk and silver that Britons so eagerly wanted at home.
In the footsteps of these ancestral immigrants have come today’s immigrants. Says Takaki: "If you listen to them, you can hear them saying, ‘Maybe, maybe, maybe I’d like to make America my home’. Maybe I’d like to become an American. In order for them to realize this dream, they need to acquire not only English ... but they also need to acquire knowledge of this country’s history, a more inclusive, more diverse history."
A lot of native-born Americans could do with a good dose of the same diverse history lessons.