Across America, the places we live are deeply shaped by racial and economic injustice. Together with an advisory board of dedicated and experienced organizers, we’ve developed framing strategies that have proven to:
- expose the systems driving injustice
- build understanding of how racism and capitalism work together to enable exploitation
- mobilize collective action at scale
We’ll be sharing that research in the weeks ahead. Today, I want to preview one particularly powerful frame: using the language of “extraction.”
The Context: Power in Local Communities
Working-class communities, particularly communities of color, are losing the resources and services they need. Meanwhile, corporate profit margins are at an all-time high.
Organizers have worked and are still working to build people-powered movements to address the needs of their local communities in multiple interconnected ways—from addressing industrial pollution to redressing racist housing policies to increasing wages.
As movements engage in this work, one framing move can be particularly helpful: drawing on the language of extraction.
The Frame In Action
Use the language of extraction—both literal and figurative—to explain how systems take from communities. The extraction frame can help you paint a picture of how our current system makes it possible for value, resources, and services to be pulled out of communities, profiting the wealthy few at the community’s expense.
Below are several examples of what the extraction frame can look like in practice:
“For years, out-of-state developers have extracted value from our community.”
“Corporations are draining the tax base to build warehouses and pad their own pockets instead of investing in our clinics and schools.”
“We demand council members keep our community’s resources in our community.”
The idea of extraction works like a metaphor, taking something material and concrete and mapping it to more abstract and complex ideas.
Extraction can be communicated through words like ‘taking,’ ‘removing,’ and ‘stealing.’ Other words and phrases that can be used to convey this idea are ‘pulling out,’ ‘siphoning,’ ‘hollowing out,’ and ‘draining.’
Why Is Talking about Extraction So Effective?
Our nationally-representative experiments show that talking about extraction:
- builds understanding of the way racist policies have shaped communities
- shifts blame away from communities of color
- motivates people in impacted communities to participate in collective action and community organizing
In focus groups we gained insight into why and how this frame works. Overall, the frame of extraction makes big, complex processes into something simple and tangible.
- We found that the idea of extraction can be used to link local issues with larger economic and political systems. This helps people understand the role of policy and power, and helps shift blame away from local communities and onto systems.
- This frame also links multiple issues together under a single concept. It helps people see how different issues (healthcare, housing, pollution, wages, etc.) are connected by explaining how they are caused by removing what the community needs and extracting profit.
In focus groups, we also tested the effects of introducing only the idea of extraction—the removal of valuable material resources from communities—to see how people used the idea when they talked about it as a group.
The focus group members took the idea and ran with it. They easily generated their own examples of other forms of extraction, including high rents, corporate tax incentives, data centers, and corporate monopolies driving out local businesses. These impacted community members also responded to the idea of extraction by thinking in structural ways about local injustices, talking about power and profit to explain local community harms.
What is helping people think critically about the causes of the injustices in their community (and motivating them to want to take action) isn’t any particular words or phrases—it’s the explanatory value of the underlying idea:
Extraction is happening for profit at the community’s expense.
To learn more about this frame, see more examples of it in practice, and find the other recommendations from this work, make sure you’re signed up for our Culture Change Project newsletter to be the first to dive into the new research report and toolkit later this month.
For additional reading, check out:
- The Terrain of Spatial Justice, FrameWorks Institute
- Place Matters: Communicating the Relationship Between Place, Racism, and Early Childhood Development, FrameWorks Institute
Issues: Economic Justice, Racial Justice