Personal stories uniquely reveal racism’s cumulative emotional toll

Evidence

Stories are one of the best rhetorical tools because they connect the storyteller and the message with the audience. Stories help to show the listener how to identify with a topic because of the detailed manner in which the stories are contextualized. Accounts are useful in revealing the emotional toll of constant exposure to discrimination (Williams et al., 1997). Personal accounts of the lived experience prove most illuminating in telling what everyday racism is about: injustices recurring so often that they are almost taken for granted, nagging, annoying, debilitating, seemingly small, injustices one comes to expect. … In this article I examine the various ways in which everyday racism is expressed and contested in ordinary situations. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1458