Race Class Narrative Messaging Guides and Checklist

Introduction

Explore resources about Race Class Narrative including guides, examples and a checklist from We Make the Future in the United States.

Resources

• Race Class Narrative (RCN) Messaging Checklist
  Use this quick guide to ensure that your campaign messages and communications materials – whatever they might be for – follow these basic tenets of Race Class Narrative messaging.
• Race Class Narrative Example Language
  In this resource, you’ll find sample language articulating how to follow these basic tenets of Race Class Narrative messaging:
  • 1.Open with shared values that name (and/or show) race.
  • 2. Name villains, their motivation, and how they use strategic racism and scapegoating to divide and distract us while they harm us all.
  • 3. Uplift victories and/or everyday collective actions that solve problem(s).
  • 4. Describe a vision for what will change that includes everyone coming together to achieve it.
  • 5. Insert a specific call to action.
    Use this sample language as a guide to create your own Race Class Narrative inspired messages, or feel free to use this language verbatim as needed–we’re absolute believers that if our words don’t spread, they don’t work! 
• Guide To Messaging Our Freedoms
  In this guide, we provide examples—developed by We Make The Future, ASO Communications, and partner organizations—for how to message towards the future that we deserve. These messages are rooted in the freedom frame, the Race Class Narrative, and other empirically-based messaging practices. What we share here are proven approaches to motivate, inspire our audiences to take action, and push people toward our desired solutions.
• Amplifying Organizing: Using Race-forward Narratives in Organizing Programs
  Building a multiracial democracy requires effective communication, in person, and online. Every organizer, campaigner, and advocate is faced with the same fundamental challenge: we need to spread the word about our cause in order to meet our goal. By spreading a narrative across layered modes of communication – including real time organizing – we can win power on our issues, in our statehouses, and at the ballot box. This guide is specifically designed for Organizing Directors, Canvassing Leads, and others in the field, so you can use Race Class Narrative (RCN) and other empirically-based messaging research on the doors, in the streets, and at the mic.
• Guide: Responding To Harmful Content or Disinformation
  In 2023, We Make the Future and the Black Race Class Narrative Project cohort began developing content to combat disinformation — specifically online racialized disinformation targeting Black communities.  
  Based on insights and strategies from Kelsey Suter (Drive Agency), this guide can be used by organizers responding to harmful content or disinformation targeting their audience. It aims to help organizers know when to respond to disinformation, how to respond, and how to better integrate long-term trust-building into their work. 
• Building Narrative Power For A Just, Multiracial Democracy
  Our team at We Make The Future is pleased to share this 2023 Impact Report. This report tells the story of YOU, our partners. By using race-forward, empirically based messages in your work — from the scripts you use to organize your neighbors to the digital content you share online — our movement has been able to push back against our opposition and build multiracial power that leads to real changes in people’s lives. It’s taken discipline, creativity, and a whole lot of hard work, but together, we’ve proven that we can create narrative echo chambers with people of all races, classes, and genders that are powerful enough to counter our opposition’s divisive, dog-whistle tactics.

Black RCN Project

Freedom is for everyone, no exceptions.

We Make The Future’s Black RCN Project is a cross-state coalition of Black leaders and activists in the Midwest who are committed to building narrative and cultural power towards winning policy changes that will allow Black people the agency to live free and happy lives. Together, these practitioners look at the latest message challenges facing Black communities, and work collaboratively to develop open source materials that build Black support and advocacy within a multiracial coalition.

Centered in the Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan), this group is committed to winning economic empowerment, racial justice, and gender equity for all. In 2020, they developed the Deliver Black Dreams campaign and messaging guidance to aid in the mobilization of Black voters.

Explore Further

• Explore more Resources from the We Make the Future Library
• We Make the Future Action Website
• The Race Class Narrative: A race messaging framework to engage the base and persuade the middle
  Watch a video on Race Class Narrative – an approach that weaves together economic empowerment, racial justice, and gender equity.
• Leaderful Organizing Tool: Race Class Narrative Checklist
  Race Class Narrative Checklist is a tool for increasing inclusion and solidarity in movements, by ensuring we push back against racism and classism.
• Every Worker in Australia: A Race Class Narrative
  This guide offers a blueprint for building and sustaining the collective power needed for workplace and electoral wins.
• Framing Issues for Social Justice Impact: Directory of Messaging Guides
  Looking for research on how to frame an issue on a certain topic area? This collection of reports, articles, videos and podcasts on issues including climate, crime, equality, nature, poverty and health will help you develop powerful messages and narratives.
• Building Narrative Power for Racial Justice and Health Equity
  Report about narratives that promote racial justice and expand our understanding of health, human rights, and the public good.
• Talking about Race: Racial Equity Resources
  Resources to talk about race from the Living Room Conversations. This includes 5 Conversation Guides, a glossary, videos and readings.