From Liabilities to Assets: Trabian Shorters’ Transformative Work
. . . asset-framing is a cultural hack. It’s understanding how culture works, well enough to use culture to change culture.
—Trabian Shorters
Imagine that you’re seated at a table of six at a conference. You’re sitting six feet apart, so it’s a big table. The speaker in the front of the room instructs you to look at each person at the table and . . . to think of everything that’s wrong about the individuals you’re looking at.
How does that feel? Since it’s awkward to do such a thing, you and others will usually laugh to relieve the pressure. But why is it awkward?
Because looking at people you’re sharing space with at a conference, in close proximity, just to identify what’s wrong doesn’t feel good or right. (That is, for most people who aren’t Scrooges or anti-social jerks.)
Looking at people primarily through a lens of what’s wrong, or via the problems they have, are examples of “deficit-framing.” In last week’s essay, “Narrative Warfare: Black Americans Caught in the Crossfire,” I discussed how Black Americans are often compared negatively to other racialized blacks from the Caribbean and Africa to justify an ideological argument that “white supremacy” isn’t the primary cause of various social and economic disparities faced by persons racialized as black. If those “black” immigrants can make it, the argument goes, then what’s wrong with native-born “blacks”?
Such race-based framing of what’s wrong and problematic, what’s lacking, in a segment of the American population results in narratives of pathology.
What’s the alternative to deficit-framing? Asset-framing.
Asset-Framing to Counter Stigma and Inequality
Trabian Shorters
Trabian Shorters, the CEO of the BMe Community, promotes the practice and skill of asset-framing to flip the script on the positioning of Black Americans as “marginalized,” “disadvantaged,” “at-risk,” and other descriptions that become stigmas. Stigma narratives, as Shorters explained during a 2020 interview, frame people as threats, which taps into people’s fear. Once this occurs, fear likely results in the threat being avoided or controlled . . . or killed. (Just think of roaches and spiders.)
In a recent conversation titled “A Cognitive Skill to Magnify Humanity,” with Krista Tippett, host of On Being, Shorters explained that disparities are often dramatized to attract resources. A side-effect of such deficit-framing is denigration and stigmatization of the image of Black Americans in the public consciousness as “inferior, as ineffective, as pathological.” Shorters readily acknowledges that injustices are real and are not to be ignored, yet declares “that is not what defines us.”
Shorters is a leading social entrepreneur and catalyst of a national movement to first define black people by their aspirations and contributions, then to secure their fundamental freedoms to Live, Own, Vote and Excel (L.O.V.E.) He is a retired tech entrepreneur, and the former head of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Communities Program. Shorter is a New York Times bestselling author, and the international authority on the cognitive framework we’ve been discussing, “asset-framing,” which he and the BMe Community use to enable major foundations, associations, and journalism networks to operate more equitably in today’s pluralistic society.
Shorters says asset-framing is “defining people by their aspirations and contributions before noting their challenges and investing in them for their continued benefit to society.” So rather than students of color in families who struggle financially being called “at-risk,” they can be described as students who desire to graduate and face obstacles doing so.
If we had a different orientation towards our students — if we defined them by their aspirations to graduate, their aspirations to contribute to society, to fulfill their own dreams, if we recognize that inner-city children still aspire, if we recognize that poor kids still contribute, then we would look for ways to move the systemic obstacles to their abilities to do so.
—Trabian Shorters
Ancestors of Asset-Framing: Ralph Ellison & Albert Murray
I found out about the conversation between Tippett and Shorters from a participant, Linda Marshall, in the Stepping Up course that I co-taught and facilitated with Jewel and Amiel Handelsman. She thought that I’d resonate with his vision and perspective. Her intuition was spot on.
Why? Turns out that a focus on Black Americans as assets is foundational in the work and thought of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray.
The penultimate paragraph in Ellison’s classic 1970 essay in Time magazine, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks,” reads:
Materially, psychologically and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence. Which is fortunate, for today it is the black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice and for the elimination of those factors, social and psychological, which make for slums and shaky suburban communities. It is he who Insists that we purify the American language by demanding that there be a closer correlation between the meaning of words and reality, between ideal and conduct, between our assertions and our actions. Without the black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has always threatened its existence from within.
In the same year as Ellison’s Time essay, Murray’s first book, The Omni-Americans, was published. Not only was the work a brief for what native-born U.S. Negroes liked about being both Black and American, it also emphasized the import of framing through strengths and assets. Take for instance the opening lines of “Image and Unlikeness in Harlem”:
Mass media images of contemporary Harlem reveal only a part of the actual texture of the lives of the people who inhabit that vast, richly varied, infinitely complex, and endlessly fascinating area of uptown Manhattan. Those who create such images almost always restrict themselves to documenting the pathological. Thus not only do they almost always proceed in terms of the liabilities of Harlem but what they record more often than not also leaves the entirely incredible but somehow widely accepted impression that there are no negotiable assets of any immediate significance there at all.
But not only do the human resources of Harlem exceed the liabilities, even the existing material assets and possibilities do. . . Harlem is an industry-free, ideally situated residential area with broad avenues and well-planned streets, and the convenience of its transportation facilities is unexcelled by any other residential community in Manhattan. Nor do many other areas match the charm and elegance of its architecture.
Correlations between Murray and Shorters, fifty years apart
Murray: “Sometimes Americans are disposed to fair play and sometimes they are not. But they almost always invest their time, money, and enthusiasm in assets with promise, not liabilities. Even those who become involved in salvage operations have been sold on inherent potential.”
Shorters: “I always like to point out to foundation leaders and corporate leaders that every other time you use the word “equity”—financial equity—you are literally talking about what has value. Be consistent. . . If you’re talking about being equitable, then define people by their assets. What is it we’re investing in? We’re not investing in poverty. Who invests in poverty? You’re not trying to grow poverty. [laughs] You’re trying to invest in people’s aspirations towards wealth; you’re trying to invest in people’s will to make a better future for their children or their community — those are things that are investable, but not poverty.”
Three Steps Toward Asset-Framing
According to Shorters, asset-framing has three steps:
First: recognize that asset-framing is not about what you say about people. Asset-framing is about what you think about the people.
Two: ask yourself—are you introducing people by their aspiration or contribution?
Three: think about what is obstructing their aspirations and contributions. The reason why it’s so important to include the challenges is because if you just try to focus on the positives, then you’re going to ignore or diminish or negate the legitimate, systemic obstacles that people have.
Now imagine that you’re at that same conference table. Yet rather than thinking about all that’s wrong with your fellow participants in American society, you listen to each person share their hopes and dreams, aspirations, and contributions. A different conversation would undoubtedly ensue in which shared visions of the good and what Jewel calls “relational grace” would be more present.
That’s the power of flipping the narrative script from frames of rejection and liability to frames of acceptance and assets. Indeed, the cognitive practice of re-framing can magnify humanity . . . and bolster our teetering democracy.