Mkz’s Reviews > It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics > Status Update

...battled over how to make decisions and allocate resources because the real problem, namely, generating the sense of radical purpose that would reenergize organizers and appeal to residents, was difficult to get a handle on.

“Sometimes it's more comfortable to talk about structure, because it's so concrete,” one staffer explains now. “And goals were so much more difficult to talk about.” In other words, SNCC workers...

So framing theorists may be wrong to insist that people need a clear specification of agents, antagonists, and targets, and an easily interpretable rationale for participation. The stories protesters tell to make sense of what is happening may compel others to listen and to act not by providing a sense of the ease or efficacy of protest, but by reproducing its inexplicable character.

In a working-class black community in the American south in the 1970s, parents encouraged their children to tell tall tales as a display of linguistic competence. In a nearby working-class white community, parents encouraged more factual stories with clear moral conclusions.

Far from discouraging concerted action, the story's ambiguity may have enabled groups with very different agendas to come together in a common stance of indignation.