Stop Telling People to “Speak Their Truth”

Truth doesn’t take a possessive pronoun

Oprah Winfrey famously popularized the saying “speak your truth.” Over the last few decades, this phrase has become ubiquitous in our popular culture. And don’t get me wrong, I’m all for “activism rooted in the individual story, grounded in personal experience,” as Garance Franke-Ruta has said. But then tell me about your experience and your interpretation of events. Don’t tell me your truth. Truth refers to our shared reality. If everyone gets to define truth for themselves then, as Conor Friedersdorf has pointed out:

“What about the people whose earnestly held ‘truth’ is that immigrants are ruining America; or that the white race is inherently superior to all others; or that the rules set forth in Leviticus or the Koran are the only way to live; or that the latest Alex Jones conspiracy theory is correct; or that climate change is a hoax cooked up by liberals to gain control over all aspects of life in the United States?”

To see why this phrase should be buried once and for all, let’s take a closer look at the concept of truth. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines truth as “the real facts about something; the things that are true.” The word “facts” tells us that we are interested in more than just one person’s experience, or their interpretation of that experience. A “fact” is something objective, its existence either self-evident or the object of consensus among many minds.