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The Sanctuary

RI4A: Finding the right Dr. Seuss metaphor for our movement

by: Sneetch

Wed Jun 10, 2009 at 13:28:01 PM EDT


(Great article. - promoted by DreamActivist)

I didn’t attend last week’s Reform Immigration summit in Washington, DC but as I watched media about the event roll in, I began to wonder where I’d seen this all before. Over the weekend, it dawned on me: It’s “Horton Hears a Who” by Dr. Seuss writ large. “What?” you ask.
Sneetch :: RI4A: Finding the right Dr. Seuss metaphor for our movement
Yep, think about it a little. Horton is an elephant who makes it his life’s mission to protect the tiny Whos he discovers are living on a speck of dust. “After all, a person’s a person,” he says. “No mater how small.” No other animals in the Jungle of Nool believe Horton. When they take drastic measures to address Horton’s seeming insanity, Horton implores the Whos to raise their voices and make as much noise as they can. It is only when absolutely every Who is shouting that the other animals realize that Horton isn’t crazy after all. They ultimately join in protecting this tiny world.

What’s wrong with that? Well, to start off with, the entire frame is unhelpful. National advocacy groups have set up a dynamic where immigrants are portrayed as little defenseless people in need of protection.  We’re told we have to yell as loud as we can (or send faxes), all at the same time (under a big tent) to be heard in the jungle inside the Beltway. Horton also is the one who dictates when and how the Whos should raise their voices. As one young participant at the RI4A summit put it, "The three day summit was mostly a group of SHOUTING speakers telling us what to do." Within the Horton/Who frame, what’s the end result? The kangaroo (or Congress?) is holding an umbrella over Whoville to protect it because they’re still small and powerless.

If we’re looking for a better metaphor of what our movement SHOULD look like, I say, look no farther than the Sneetches. If you remember, the Sneetches were this community of Seussical creatures living on a beach somewhere. On some of their bellies, there were stars and others “had none upon thars”. As a result, there is discrimination between the groups. A scam artist, Sylvester McMonkey McBean, takes advantage of the situation, by charging the Sneetches to go through machines that put on or take off stars. At the end, the Sneetches have forked over their money (which I still wonder where this came from) and suddenly realize that there is no real difference between them.

In this frame, the implications are clear. Immigration status is an artificial label that we humans invented to segregate ourselves. But who is McBean? One view could be that they are the unscrupulous employers or even our entire economic system. On the other hand, I wonder if the Nonprofit Industrial Complex is the real moneymaker. After all, many advocacy groups have no base constituency that elected them or informs their actions. Often these organizations are even less transparent than McBean’s machines. Instead of herding and stage-managing advocates who came from around the country to DC last week, imagine what the summit would have looked like if participants were listened to and consulted.

I always wondered what happened in the next frame of the Sneetches story, the moment when they realized that there is no difference between those with stars and those without. Perhaps they see opportunity to organize themselves across their difference? As Ernesto Cortes Jr., of the Industrial Areas Foundation said during the summit, “The only way we can get immigration reform passed is to communicate with people different than ourselves.” In today’s world, we have new tools (like this blog) for group action like we’ve never had before. The challenge will be discovering which tools are the most effective to achieve our ultimate goal: creating the America we believe in. After all, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
Poll
Do you think the Immigrant Rights movement is more like 'Horton Hears a Who' or 'The Sneetches'?

Results

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Great post. (0.00 / 0)
I love this! Storytelling, metaphor, and speaking truth to power. All in one. I agree, these groups play games, capitulate the real fights, and are in bed, on the whole, with corporate interests and politicians that cripple their ability to do real good on a long term or widespread basis. If that was ever their goal, and I wonder.

And the stars on the belly? That cuts across legal lines and ethnic and class and so on. That fight is a long one, and it spans the entire world. Different colors of stars, different sizes of stars, and some have different groupings of them. There are so many lines to be drawn. Once we start inventing illusory differences (especially based on moneybloodlines in the sand) the divisions can go on and on and on until we are all alone on an island of wealth....which is what so many "elites" want. But those elites are also everyday people who have no urge to really question the system and all its "gifts" and all its poisonous inertia.

Rock on!



Horton and frames (4.00 / 1)
Great analysis of the framing of immigrant policy!  You might be interested in this Pat Bagley editorial cartoon from a while back, using the Horton frame:

http://danielhernandez.typepad...

Also, here are two interesting pieces on framing and coverage of immigrant-related news:

http://smudgedink.org/research...

http://ejc.sagepub.com/cgi/con...

I find a key component to successful framing on this issue is to include a frame about the U.S. as the host.  In other words, before we ask how we see the other person, we have to decide who we are and who we want to be.

As part of the Welcoming Tennessee Initiative in 2006, I put it this way:

The immigration debate does not start and end with how the immigrants behave and who they are.  The immigration debate in Tennessee should start with our values and who we are.
John Lamb
http://www.hispanicnashville.com

See also http://www.welcomingtn.org


the immigrants issue framed by Who/Horton etc. (0.00 / 0)
this is sweet, but casting a group of workers as problematic is just the usual way of maintaining cheap labor.  Immigrants have to sneak to work.  They can be paid little and often nothing and have no benefits.  However, their existence threatens job access for citizens, so they - citizens work for cheap.
It's simple, really.
Without cheap labor there'd be no capitalists/capitalism/ imperialists' wars... et alia.

backward (0.00 / 0)
Yes...but that is a senseless hypothesis, as there will always be "cheap labor." It is not the job of people in bad economic straits, to right "Capitalism." It is "Capitalism"s job to justify itself-through fair conditions-or be tossed aside for another model.



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