Sometimes the best way to tell a story is to tell a story. You’ll note that I’m not using the very current word “narrative,” which is a fancy word that I believe obscures meaning. No child ever went to bed asking their parents to “Tell me a narrative.” (I also detest the words “problematic,” “impactful” and “contextualize,” but that’s another story.)

In any event, we deal with some complicated ideas here at The Conversation. As a writer as well as an editor, I’ve long felt that even the most complex political concepts can often best be communicated through the stories of people whose lives illustrate those concepts. This week’s offerings from the politics desk include a number of those kinds of articles.

Scholar Chris Lamb’s “When a Black boxing champion beat the ‘Great White Hope,’ all hell broke loose” highlights America’s struggle for racial equality through the story of Black boxer Jack Johnson. I asked editor Jeff Inglis to describe what he wanted the story to accomplish:

History often appears to me to flow through a series of cycles, where issues some think are long in the past resurface, still unresolved and demanding new reckonings. The details of the Johnson-Jeffries fight crystallized for me a series of interlocking dynamics in American race relations:

• A Black man claiming both his physical and cultural power was being challenged by an out-of-shape, retired white guy.
• The event was literally seen by people at the time as a battle between the races.
• The establishment made clear, in newspaper editorials and other public statements, that if the white man won, it would be evidence of white supremacy – but if the Black man won, it would not be evidence even of Black equality.
• When the Black man did win, whites felt threatened and engaged in widespread brutal violence to reassert their dominance.

All this happened in 1910, but these themes strike powerful chords with today’s state of race relations in the U.S. – and highlight exactly how important it is to recognize the age and depths of these wounds in our society.

Similarly, editor Catesby Holmes commissioned a story from scholar Lihong Shi about China’s one-child policy. This wasn’t written from the analytical perspective of policymaking. Instead, the story is told via the experiences of parents who have lost their only child long after they could ever conceive another one. Here’s what Catesby said about the story:

China’s ‘one-child policy’ left at least 1 million bereaved parents childless and alone in old age, with no one to take care of them. 

This story was both deeply human and exhaustively researched. It’s rare to get both of those features in one article. The author interviewed hundreds of elderly Chinese parents who’d lost the only child their government would allow them to have. In her story, she captures not only their grief but also the government’s responsibility for these couples’ financial precariousness in a country that depends on adult children for its old-age care.

I hope you have some time this holiday weekend to read these stories and the others highlighted in this newsletter. But I hope you also spend lots of time outside with family and friends, under blue skies and a not-too-hot Sun. My job after work today is to thumb through my late mother’s many cookbooks to figure out what to cook for July 4th. One nonnegotiable: Strawberry shortcake.