ABSTRACT
This chapter defines stock stories and examines the functions they serve, illustrating how stock stories operate in everyday talk to legitimize the perspectives of the dominant white racial group in our society. It describes one of the activities we use in the Storytelling Project to critically analyze the American Dream and illustrate how stock stories can be explored through art-based activities, excavating history and examining social science data. Stock stories continuously work to neutralize and defuse counter-claims and often overwhelming contradictory evidence in order to maintain their standing. Stock stories do not go unchallenged and are not immutable. Stock stories personalize story lines about other groups, creating a “social data base” or stockpile of stories individual white people can draw on to explain social reality. “Finding expression and being refashioned within the stories of countless individuals may lead to a polyvocality that inoculates and protects the master narrative from critique”.
