Behind the Scenes with Better to Speak – The Creation of ‘Your Silence Will Not Protect You’
This is a highlight story from Better to Speak’s 2021 Annual Report. To explore the full annual report, visit www.bettertospeak.org/past-work, and take a deep dive into this specific project on page 27 of the full PDF report.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You takes a comprehensive look at how Black folks’ have transformed silence into language and action today and throughout history.
The work is grounded in the legacy of Southern-led movements to achieve voting rights for Black folks in America and aims to emphasize the power of our individual and collective voices, examine the meaning of transforming silence into language and action across various communities within the Black Diaspora, and engage more Black folks in conversations to reimagine and rebuild a sustainable culture of Black civic engagement in 2020 and beyond.
The Idea
Your Silence Will Not Protect You had humble beginnings and started as an idea for a simple voting guide for young Black voters. Typically, you see this type of guide from political organizations with more of a definitive stance on social and political policies or candidates. Better to Speak hasn’t yet established those positions, or its role in the policy side of social advocacy in general, which is what stalled this idea from taking off.
YSWNPY then evolved into more of a storytelling opportunity to archive young Black people’s thoughts and feelings about a tumultuous collective history and particularly strenuous past few months as it related to racial injustice. This seemed more in line with what we realized is Better to Speak’s place in all of this – to act as a platform that captures the oral and written histories of young Black folks’ voices and stories in relation to our personal and collective power.
Given conversations about performative activism and whether the momentum of last summer’s protests and racial reckoning would sustain, it was important that Your Silence Will Not Protect You definitively engaged readers in a larger conversation about what civic engagement could and would look like in the Black community beyond November 3, 2020. This meant clear calls to action and direct discussions about what civic engagement does, and does not, mean for different people in each of our unique lived experiences.
the initial Pinterest board to gain inspiration for the design of YSWNPY
The Process
We collaborated with graphic designer and visual creative Kyrstian Green on the layout of the zine’s content and consulted Darriea Clark about the overarching narrative of the whole body of work.
We then sought contributed pieces from Black writers through a call for submissions on Twitter which received quite a bit of traction, as well as through direct emails through our founder Kési Felton’s personal network. Ultimately, Black writers across seven U.S. states as well as writers from the United Kingdom and Zambia were selected for the final contributed pieces that would live in the zine.
The Rollout
The process to create the zine was straightforward in terms of editing the content and finalizing the design. From there, in thinking about the rollout plan, we decided it would be cool to have our own “press day” with the contributing writers. Kési interviewed contributing writers about their individual pieces in YSWNPY, their other writing, as well as how they have personally navigated 2020 – from the pandemic to the racial reckoning.
Another idea for the rollout included a promo video featuring Brittani Samuel’s piece, “My God, my ground!” The video was titled “Silence. Language. Action.” and again called back to images and videos from the Civil Rights Movement, juxtaposed with images and videos from more recent protests in support of Black Lives Matter.
Finally, before the zine was officially released we hosted a first-look kickoff event with the team, where they got to see their pieces in their final design. This was a cool opportunity to simply bring everyone together and celebrate the important work we’d done to get to this point.
The Release
Once YSWNPY was officially out, anyone could view the entire zine digitally on Better to Speak’s website using Paperturn – which we found through Media 2070 after reading their “Invitation to Dream Up Media Reparations” essay. Paperturn transforms any PDF document into an interactive experience of flipping the pages of a real book or magazine.
Lucky for Better to Speak readers, they didn’t have to wait too long before getting the physical copy of YSWNPY in their hands! With the support of community donations that covered printing costs, we were able to order 50 limited edition physical copies from Mixam printing.
With costs covered by donations, proceeds from the physical copies went to an additional honorarium for the contributing writers, and we donated the final bit of proceeds to Fair Fight Action to support their work during Georgia’s Senate runoff election
The YSWNPY page on Better to Speak’s website also features a list of supplemental resources for the zine – also printed in the physical copy of the zine – that includes a list of organizations, books, and podcasts for readers to continue learning and to get connected to ongoing work on the ground.
The Outcome
Overall, YSWNPY offered a lot of insight into what our editorial systems and processes could look like, as well as the possibilities for future content projects. Our goal in the future is to create more consistent content through the ‘Stories’ page on Better to Speak’s website, and hopefully feature the stories and work of more Black writers.
Your Silence Will Not Protect You is back in honor of its one-year anniversary! Order your physical copy today at Better to Speak’s merch store! You can still view the digital version for free, forever, here.
