3 opportunities to safeguard our narrative priorities amidst Trump's chaos

As a Kenyan living and working in Kenya, my initial instinct is to steer clear of adding one more reactionary thought-piece on the current crisis in global development after Trump's return to the White House.

I am hesitant to speak for two main reasons.

First, as a native African, I feel it would be disingenuous of me to talk about the human cost of Trump's Executive Orders without also addressing the obscene amount of influence that this one country (the United States) has on global development. It seems hypocritical - to me - to show concern only when the tide of U.S. power and influence turns against me. Especially when I have largely been silent when the same fiscal muscle supported numerous social justice ventures that I affirm.

Secondly, I am hesitant to weigh in because the moment invites language and frames often used by other autocratic leaders when they criticize U.S. power and influence. How can I talk about the amount of say that the U.S. government has on my own country's healthcare infrastructure and not sound like Vladimir Putin when he criticizes the U.S. influence on world democracies? Somehow, qualifying my statements with "context is everything" just seems insufficient at a time when people are overwhelmed by shocking headlines and looking for bags to punch.

Eyeing the storm

I am going to say something anyway, because every voice, however small or insignificant, counts in building the collective narrative power we need to weather these storms. As everyone attempts to make sense of the whirlwind of Executive Orders by Trump and the ongoing U.S. foreign policy faux pas, I will speak primarily for my people and to my people. My people, in this case, being the social justice activists and the creators that craft and amplify their narratives.

Though saddening and maddening, the events in America should not be shocking. Trump seems to be marking his territory in the history books with all this peeing around -- at great cost to people's lives and livelihoods. Yes, the current firehose of infuriating executive decisions is dizzying and overwhelming to the senses. But the underlying "spirit" of it all is not new, and defenders of social justice must do their best to not get distracted or worn down -- its what they want, after all. I will frame the next several points as opportunities to do something good with the current chaos, not in spite of the chaos or in reaction to the chaos.

From a narrative strategy perspective, the current changes in the U.S. have given us a rare opportunity to clarify our commitment to defending and promoting human dignity. Here are three ways we can right the moment (not merely ride it) to emerge stronger on the other end of the current crisis.

1. We, the prophets

This is the time for storytellers to step into our prophetic shoes (we shouldn't have removed them anyway, but you know, funder reports happened). Like prophets who address the spiritual state of their people, storytellers have a unique vantage point to explore the depths of human experience, our struggles, joys, and relationships. Stories can ignite our imaginations, evoke empathy, and motivate entire communities to think and act differently.

This is the moment for us, the prophets, to step up and provide moral clarity and missional purpose to the social justice cause. We have yielded too much moral authority to funders. Yet, storytellers and the activists that live and breathe the daily realities of oppression -- not just the movers of money -- are the ones better placed to play this prophetic role.

We also have to embrace this role because it is our stories that remain with our communities when everything else is taken from us. Trump and his cronies want to take our stories away. They are trying to invalidate our experiences. They want us to question our truth and our realities. They want to distract us from our formative stories and turn us into critics and apologists. But we were always meant to prioritize stories of our worth as human beings with valid hopes and dreams. Our rights and our dignity were never contingent on any policy environment but on the inherent worth of every human person. They may take our money (or take back their money), but not our stories. Those are ours. Our stories are us.

No “stop work order” can stop the heartbeat of hope that courses through our lives via storied experiences, unless we let it. No foreign funding freeze can defund our native narratives of community and resilience… American storytellers also need to remind their compatriots of their country’s history, the founding hope for their nation… because the decisions that Trump is making right now affect them and the marginalized American communities even more acutely.

As prophets, we need to use this moment to confront the concessions of conscience that we made when the tide favored us. For the longest time, many of us that claim progressive values in our rhetoric have operated as if the U.S. was the big father who knew best and did not have to be told off by anyone else. We instinctively chafed at the likes of Putin when they criticized (rightly or wrongly) America as we unquestioningly affirmed "the U.S. knows best." But now we're realizing that U.S. is just like the rest of US. No budget can solely protect humanity from the cruelty of a few selfish billionaires.

2. Money is king, a tyrant

"Money is a good servant but a bad master", is one of the lessons I was repeatedly taught while growing up (whether I learnt it is another story). But if Elon Musk is anything to go by, we know that being the richest person anywhere says little about your character or your humanity.

This is the time for storytellers and social justice defenders to recognize the ancient fact of life, that having the most money does not always translate into being the most reasonable, loving, or humane person. Money is good, and money is often necessary, but money has never been the ultimate arbiter of truth and justice. Money is king, but it is often a tyrannical king. Even cheques need checks and balances.

Every once in a while I find myself in forums where I get to share my thoughts with leaders of private philanthropies, and a recurrent question is always "how can we fund better?" There's a lot of advise currently being aimed at private philanthropies. Many activists are asking the funders to step in the gap and hold the line as people make sense of the current U.S. government decisions.

This is the moment for us to remind ourselves and our people that humanitarian work is not a U.S. thing, its an us thing. It is a human thing. We don't do it because the U.S. does it, the U.S. did it because there was some humanity in the government. They may have had geopolitical interests and other foreign policy reasons behind the formation of USAID, but that did not in any way invalidate the universal need for human help.

Social justice work may be slowed down and made harder, but it will not be any less necessary. More importantly, we do it because we are driven by hope, not by money (I hope). We do it because we believe that every step taken in the right direction of protecting one life from harm contributes to a future world where no person will ever have to feel unwanted, unworthy and unloved. Our shared humanity is all the reason we need to justify our shared resources.

3. The cost of virtue signalling

Pain has a powerful way of clarifying out core values. As storytellers and social change agents, this moment should compel us to confront whether those of us doing social justice work care about real change or merely the appearance of change that is "donor report-worthy".

Trump's attacks on D.E.I. policies will cause a lot of real harm to minority communities in the U.S. But the rollback has also pulled back the curtains on the number of times we settle for virtue signaling as a measure of impact and progress. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (D.E.I.) were core human values long before they were policies on paper. Conservatives that resented D.E.I. programs were often fighting an amorphous "ideology" that they described as radical and a social overreach.

For Trump's camp, D.E.I. was always a boogeyman and a monster. They hated it from the start. They never saw it as a commitment to any meaningful diversity, equity or inclusion, they largely saw it as the imposition of a "radical gender ideology" by the "radical left". They struggled to see any noble intentions from it. They found it offensive, an assault to their moral senses. Now, they finally get the opportunity to expel the demon that was DEI.

We will prove these misinformed critics right if we simply mourn the assault on D.E.I on their terms (and terminologies). The fact that many stories on these D.E.I. rollbacks are about the impact on "the industry" or "business" or even "higher education" is worrying. This is our opportunity to clarify the values underlying D.E.I. programs in our cultures and practice, but we seem to be highlighting the legal compliance and political posturing reasons more than the underlying commitment to human dignity.

While we may be tempted to push back with cute metaphors about throwing out the D.E.I. baby with the bathwater of wokeness, I fear we are not doing much to prove the existence of a baby, or that the baby was worth protecting whether or not the bathwater is questionable. At some point, we started defending the bathwater and told more stories about the bathwater than about the baby. We celebrated the installation of new D.E.I bath basins in institutions, even when we knew that many of those basins no longer contained living babies.

A LinkedIn user recently shared her job interview experience before a global north panel for a D.E.I. expert role in Kenya. She recounts:

I asked them: “What does DEI look like for your Kenyan team?”

Their response? A list of priorities straight out of a Western playbook—gender balance, LGBTQ+ inclusion, and racial representation. All important, but I couldn’t help but think: Where’s the conversation on tribalism? On economic inequality? On the generational workplace divide that we see every day?

It felt like they needed a checklist hire to fit a global narrative, rather than someone to shape DEI in a way that actually mattered for Kenya.

Have we become so enamoured with the props that we forgot the people we are meant to prop up? You can still see the embers of that attitude in our talking points as we react to the U.S. headlines -- the fact that we are framing what Trump is doing as a "war on D.E.I." is already a lost framing battle. We are reinforcing the enemy's message. We should be talking about Trump's war on American citizens (black Americans, LGBTQ+ Americans...), and our commitment to defending the dignity of all human beings.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said: "We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." This current moment in history is the rare opportunity to appreciate the "long" part of Dr King's statement without getting discouraged by it. The direction of the bend defiantly remains the same -- towards justice.

Our messages should therefore reflect our hope and commitment towards justice, resting in the confidence that nothing the U.S. or any other wealthy tyrant does will ever change the direction of that moral arc. The only thing special about the current moment is that we are experiencing a zooming in on the arc and realizing that it is a jagged line. Let's tell more stories about the direction of the bend, and less about the troughs of the wave that forms the arc.

Until we all become full citizens (of earth, of course, not America).