Introduction: Method(s), Narrative, and Scientific “Truth”

Recently I was asked by a student organization to talk about “white privilege” in America. For 45 minutes I did nothing more than narrate the history of the Federal Housing Authority and the state-sponsored racialization of property during the twentieth century. My audience consisted, for the most part, of African American college students and administrators. And, as I told this tale of “redlining,” “blockbusting,” and the slow transition from de jure to de facto residential segregation after the Second World War, I caught their attention, until they were literally leaning forward in their seats, anticipating each sentence. I’d like to say that their enthusiasm was due to my gifts as an orator. But I don’t think that’s an altogether accurate interpretation. After the talk, a young woman, an administrator at another state university, came forward. Holding her 10-year-old son’s hand, she recounted her experiences with racism, and her son’s, whose learning disability went undiagnosed, she believed, for racist reasons. She then said about the story I’d just told: “You know, I always knew something was wrong. I just didn’t have the language to express it. Now I have the words.” Here we have both an explanation of the students’ rapt attention to a rather dry institutional and political history and an illustration of the power of narrative, the power of theory. Narrative, the story we use to explain events, gives us a power over those events—the power of meaning. By endowing events with a sense, an interpretation, the historian gives her audience the ability to understand themselves in a new way. And since history is an interpretation, a form giving narration, it is a theorizing (or re-theorizing) of reality.