​the project 

Don’t you call me out my name. For generations black people have been saying this as an admonition to other black people, demanding that they not call them something other than what their family named them; because black people have always known the identity shaping power of calling someone something that their mamma didn’t or something that their ancestors didn’t. Or the life-threatening power of being named something that someone who respected them wouldn’t. Black and brown bodies have been named from auctions blocks and written in newspapers and other media as “those people” for centuries; and that identity created and written by white people who would lynch, white police officers who would shoot to kill and white judges and juries who would acquit, has been fatal. This is not new. Black people’s collective identity has been in the hands of white people for centuries because black people’s individual stories have been in white people’s mouths for just as long. As a result, black people’s bodies have been at the mercy of these same hands that have been able to, at any moment of movement toward autonomy, equality or right revolution, re-write the human as animal or re-write the freedom fighter or the child as criminal.

From a Virginia runaway advertisement to a current news story about the background of another dead black body even before their blood stops stippling pavement, black people’s stories have been and continue to be spun so quickly and so thoroughly so that suddenly their lives seem to justify the ending of them. Just a few days ago in fact, Tamir Rice, a young black man shot and killed in Cleveland, Ohio while playing with a toy gun, was blamed along with his family by the city of Cleveland for his death. Steve Loomis, President of the Cleveland Police Patrolman’s Association went as far as to say “Tamir Rice is in the wrong… He’s menacing. He’s 5-feet-7, 191 pounds. He wasn’t that little kid you’re seeing in pictures. He’s a 12-year-old in an adult body. Tamir looks to his left and sees a police car. He puts his gun in his waistband. Those people—99 percent of the time those people run away from us.” What this makes clear is that white people have been calling black people out of their name for centuries. What this also makes clear is that there is power in controlling the narrative.




​project goals
So the purpose of this project is to do just that— take control of a narrative that, by fact and by law, has silenced black voices and black bodies through an erroneous rewriting of our stories and an in-authenticating of our existence. In order to do this, Controlling the Narrative seeks to recover and retell the stories of a multi-generational group of ancestors and descendants through community conversations, video, and a 3-act play all based on the similar themes that emerge out of the narratives of past and present youth and adults of color. These goals will be accomplished through completion of the following: 1. engage in the facilitation of authentic African American identity through recovery, preservation, and presentation of primary documents, oral testimonies, individual, family and community stories, and images of African American ancestors and their descendants as well as documentation, preservation, and presentation of community stories of young African Americans currently living in the Edison, Northside and East Side neighborhoods in Kalamazoo that would have been peers of Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Michael Brown or Renisha McBride had they survived,  in hopes these stories prove that the “those peopling” that so many Steve Loomis’ seem to write, wrong 2. re-pen, repaint and thus restore authentic black identity to the individual, to the black community and to larger culture through production of the following: a. a 3-act play that reflects the authentic narratives, and b. facilitate multiple, creative and layered community conversations that use the authentic narratives and documents, the ancestors, the descendants, the young people and the larger community to talk to each other in order to begin to accurately rewrite us. And this controlling the narrative is essential to our survival since shooting a black boy or girl or unarmed adult is so much more difficult to do, to justify or to acquit than shooting a savage, an animal or a criminal. We must have our own names in our own mouths. We must control the narrative because to control the narrative is the means to controlling our individual and collective survival.​