What are the connections between art and activism, between creativity and social change? How is it that stories can heal and transform both the storyteller and the listener? How do art and activism, when interconnected and creatively woven together, inspire and transform the world? When art is inspired by action for social justice, when activism produces profound artistic commentary – connections are made, the “other” becomes understandable, a potentially foreign experience can be brought close, made real, even become your own. Often the experience is displayed through images: the photo of a boy pulled from the rubble in Syria; a migrant child drowned in the Mediterranean; a young girl running from the burning effects of Napalm in Vietnam; the face of Emmitt Till; dogs and water hoses unleashed on children in the American South, the video of the last moments of Eric Garner’s life – sometimes intensified by words: “I Can’t Breathe.”
We live in a time when so many crave connection – even with the onslaught of social media and access to communication around the world, too many of us feel unconnected, unmoored. For this reason, in part, an abundance of constructed or intentional communities are being created, formed around shared ideas, focused on exploration or solutions, music or art convenings, social change efforts, politics, or commonly desired destinations. People are seeking affiliation with people who seek similar experiences in a world of alienation and separation. For many reasons people long to connect.
The word “radical” means to “to grab something at its root.” I am the co-founder and Executive Director of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol (Bro/Sis), an organization where we are dedicated to providing comprehensive youth development, training educators on our model, and working to influence policies that affect our young people. We are a radical organization because we seek to bring a deep political analysis to our work, we organize for social justice, and we help our children grasp things at their root, and once they do – to develop their voices – voices for action and change.
A deep and profound disconnection is felt by many of our young people. They are disconnected, in many ways, isolated and dissociated, because they are still told, each and every day, with unnerving clarity, that they are not expected to fully participate in this nation, that this nation is not fully for them. The reminders and lessons are multiple – and repeated with numbing frequency. One often experiences exhaustion at the repetition, exhaustion at the cyclical nature of your mother’s story and your father’s story becoming your story, of having to continue a struggle as old as this nation.
To be born black in this country, to know the unique experience and reality associated with this identity, is often to feel disconnected and detached from the nation’s narratives, the false stories of origination, the fallacy of a meritocracy. It is to be dulled and enraged. One knows that equal opportunities have not only not been afforded – but instead that one faces a much more difficult path in life due to no other reason than the color of one’s skin, that we live not in a post racial time, but in a virulently racial time. It is to know that to be black and American is an inescapable conflict.
While the immigrant has been central to the development and expansion of this country, historically immigrants of all colors and nationalities, today’s immigrant experience is framed as one of brown people, the “other” – “other faiths” and “other languages.” To see the nation through the eyes of an immigrant, whether the immigrant is one’s self or one is the child of immigrants, and to live in a time when the national discourse is one of vitriol towards your people, your reality, your religion, your language and your very journey to becoming an American – all of this leaves you feeling isolated and unmoored. The policy of deporting millions of people – hard working and industrious people – of building walls and banning faiths – is an attack on you, for even if it is not your specific story, the policy will touch you and your community. Your people.
There is a national conversation around education – yet one that offers few solutions to the systemic issues which economically poor children, overwhelmingly black and brown, face in a failing public school system. If you are a child in such a school, if you know that you are not being prepared to compete in society, that you are not learning the necessary analytical and technological skills to participate fully, and that you have been sold a false map, one that depicts hard work as the inevitable path to success – what feeling could that provide but one of disconnection, a daily reminder of the educational caste system in which your are mired, that you are caught in an educational system of mediocrity? If your community is policed in a racially disparate manner, if you know jails are filled with people from your community, your family and friends, many of whom would not be incarcerated if they merely lived in a different zip code and had committed or been accused of the same crimes or misdemeanors, if they had not been born economically poor, black or brown, then one cannot help but feel disconnected from the platitudes of equality and equity.
For generations, such experiences have produced the simple question: Is this nation my nation? If you are an aware human being, this question is constant. And yet, paradoxically, the answer has always been, and must continue to be: Yes. It may be a conflicted, eyes wide open, steeled, yes, but a yes all the same. For it is a reality of history that black and brown people, the immigrants, those cast aside, the workers, the poorly educated, the expendable – these people have built this nation.
Bro/Sis has been an intentional, formed community since it was founded in 1995. It was created to connect young people to one another, to their historical legacy of the African diaspora, and to a community of elders who would guide and support them. The themes our community was founded on have been a part of our very logo since our creation – Positivity, Knowledge, Future and Community. These are aspirational goals – the connective tissue that binds us. To be a part of The Brotherhood/Sister Sol’s community, to find community with us – these too must be your guiding aspirations: to live positive lives, to always seek knowledge, to work towards a better future for all: to create community. The work to reach these aspirations may be hard; it involves self-exploration and discipline, self-awareness, and at times, profound change – but we know we will travel with others along the way.
As important as the adult guides are to the young people on this journey, the young people’s peers are equally essential – they form a community of children, young men and young women, who will walk together – often acting and believing differently from what society expects of our children in general, and especially of black and brown children from tough urban communities. The building of this community also takes work on the part of the adults – difficult, hard, steady work: to confront who we are – our natures and how we have been nurtured. During one of our many staff meetings, one filled with reflection and tough conversations, a long time staff member said he had never been in a work place before where he had been asked, as an adult, to grow so much, to work on his own issues and development so deeply. To guide our children to be more connected, more reflective, more moral and ethical in their behavior, more steadfast – we too, as the guiders, must do this difficult work.
Art has always been a central aspect of movements for social justice – art spurs creative thinking across disciplines, provides what has been named “imaginative identification,” by Chinua Achebe. Imaginative identification. It is a depth of identification that has the liberating and mighty power to allow us to truly connect to another – not merely to empathize or intellectually understand someone else’s experience, but the more expansive, deeper work of actually imagining the other’s experience as your own. Achebe writes: “Things are not merely happening before us; they are happening, by the force and power of imaginative identification, to us. We not only see; we suffer alongside the hero and are branded with the same mark of ‘punishment and poverty’…” I know of no concept that can better respond to our current crisis of connection, the disparate and divided worlds that so many hide within. Rather, Achebe asks us to truly identify with the crisis, or pain or journey of someone else – someone different – younger, older, from an unfamiliar corner of the world of city, with a different skin color, gender or sexual identity, set of beliefs, or religion.
Richard Wright once said: “The blues were created on the pavements of the city, in saw mills, in lumber camps, in short, wherever the migrant Negro, fresh from the soil, wrestled with an alien reality.” These migrants, black folk from the South, left an old world, and entered a new world. Immigrants in experience if not in name, they used their experiences to create an artistic form that accomplished two things: they formed a common language that bound them to each other, an expression of their pain and lived reality that built community and belonging through music; and their voices expressed an experience that informed a wider world. Their creative expression made them less alien to others and created a sense of belonging for them. For decades – for a century – many of varied backgrounds heard this story, one that was new, even foreign, and yet somehow familiar, and it became their own.
Much of the work we do with young people is based on developing “voice.” By voice we mean the external, the effort that hopefully leads towards Wright’s concept of commenting on their world so that others might understand what they have experienced and seen; and also the internal process, an interior voice that allows them to heal from trauma and make sense of the world. At Bro/Sis we help young people to redefine manhood and womanhood, to confront outworn and sometimes destructive norms of masculinity and femininity, so they can imagine and act on being who they truly are, reclaiming personal identity, often in ways that counter the voices and images they hear and see, and are taught to obey. They learn the glorious and horrific history of their people in America, a history that helped to form them – and this knowledge is liberating as it connects them to a long shared struggle for freedom and equality: a place of belonging.
The educator, Maxine Green has written: “It is a conscious endeavor on the part of individuals to keep themselves awake, to think about their condition in the world, to inquire into the forces that appear to dominate them.” We are trying to help young people comprehend and question concepts that have dominated them, to discover their own powers and their ability to transform themselves. Our theory of personal change is connected to a broader understanding of social and political change. One sphere is intimately connected to the other. We provide comprehensive guidance, love, support, and education. We teach our young people, from early childhood to high school age and beyond, to value discipline and form order in their lives; then we create access and opportunities within which they can develop and experience agency. We teach our young people to question the origins of poverty and oppression, the poor schooling they receive, the violence and trauma many are faced with on a daily basis, and then to work to counter these forces. We want them to open their eyes, or as one of our founding youth members expresses it, our work is to help youth to open a third eye. We want them to awaken.
We practice and believe in a holistic approach to supporting young people. Our members experience month-long international study in Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America. Through community organizing training they learn to become social change makers. They learn the skills and use our platform to speak out against the poor schooling that has been deemed acceptable, the unconstitutional policing that has become a part of their lives; they speak out for access and opportunity and justice. Part of our work involves exposing our youth members to the wonders and diversity of the arts, to the possibilities of college and a life long love of learning, and in our community garden we teach environmental sustainability. Through single gendered rites of passage programming we work to help them hone a moral and ethical code of conduct. Our young people travel on this journey of defining for themselves who they will be in society – and then speaking of it, out loud, in their own creative and deepened voices.
Albert Camus: “A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But on the other hand, in a universe suddenly devoid of illusion and lights, a man feels an alien, a stranger.”
There are many times when, as a staff, we debate the best methods and approaches for revealing the illusions and façades our youth are confronted with – we know from our own experience that illusions removed too callously can result in pain. Our children are called “the poor.” The word poor is defined as lacking in value or worth, without quality, inferior, deficient. Many of our children observing the conditions they were born into, initially believe there is something wrong with them, that they are the ones who are deficient or lacking in worth, that they have limited value due to being born black or brown, or undocumented, or with a lack of access, without financial resources. But there is also profound strength to be found in this awareness. This unsettling of a previously familiar world can be the beginning of struggle, the birthplace of great art, the earth from which social justice grows. Once such awareness occurs, a central part of our work is to guide our young people from feelings of strangeness, from this initially alien reality, to an understanding of their connection to generations who pushed back against these realities, and to those currently struggling around the world.
A young member once came to me seeming distracted. Clearly much was on his mind. While he was doing well in school and usually had a comedic and vibrant personality, this day he seemed on edge, and it was obvious he needed to talk. As is common with so many young people who have been traumatized in urban America by what they have seen – his story was slow to come out of him. As youth grow and pass through their developmental stages, it is not what they want from you as a caring adult that changes, or the substance of the conversations they need that alters, but instead, it is your approach as the adult that must change and the tone and rhythms of your questions and advice. They want the same guidance – they need a new language.
As we talked his words flowed. Over the past week he’d been exposed to a level of trauma that would have left well-formed adults needing medication, therapy, even potentially hospitalization. He had experienced this level of trauma because he was born poor and lives in one of the toughest housing projects in New York City – a place society explains away with bad reasons, an explanation based on making those in power and with access and resources feel comfortable, a desire to create a familiar world and order.
In the span of a week, his next door neighbor had been shot and killed, a woman had been burned and thrown off an adjoining building’s roof, and one hot evening the police had raided the housing projects’ collective courtyard and beaten up and arrested four of his friends – all on low level charges of smoking marijuana, “carrying open containers” and “resisting arrest.” He told me all this as if it were an ordinary occurrence. This had been his “familiar” world. Yet now, with growing consciousness, a part of him knew it was truly alien and needed processing. He had been a part of our organization for years, he had travelled with us to Ghana for a month, had seen college campuses and the art of New York City. The too often learned approach to manhood, to value dismissiveness and a tough shell, had morphed: he needed to express. This is one part of healing: understanding that this terror and such attacks on the spirit are not normal, but instead represent a crisis.
Still, part of him thought he should be able to process easily what he had experienced, to merely brush it off, to place the mask back on his face that enabled him to navigate this world, and then go about his daily activities. He came to us because he did not have support elsewhere that would help him through the process. His mother, while a loving and steady presence in his life, was also traumatized, and so when such incidents occurred, she simply prayed to god, turned up her music and continued making dinner. His underfunded school did not have the necessary social workers on staff to help him confront these assaults on his life and find a way forward. He found his necessary support, guidance and love with us – elders trained to help him, to explain that pain and rage and sadness and fear were healthy, that he should not hide these feelings away but do what had so often brought comfort in the past: write and talk. And so he did. He found words for his feelings, exploring what he had experienced in his life, describing the very trauma that had caused him to believe that this level of violence was his acceptable future and conditions. He was not burned and thrown off a roof; he was not brutalized by the police; he was not shot and killed – but part of him felt that this was to be his “ordinary” reality. If so, then such a world would make sense. It was simply what happened. But if not, such a world would need explaining, to be fought against and changed.
He found words to describe the poverty and violence of his world – his sense of deprivation. He said, “Why do I have to experience this? Why am I living in this kind of condition?” Those questions were a part of learning context, of transformation – a step toward an understanding of the world. He needed to hear and to express that it wasn’t his fault that he faced this world as a mere boy, that there was nothing wrong with his family, that no child should be confronted with this kind of violence and that no child – none – should be expected to have the skills to navigate such a world. He had to know that in our society, grown and powerful adults allowed his current condition to continue and that he had been born into a world long established on premises of injustice and inequality.
Over 20% of New York residents are living in poverty. New York County has the greatest disparity of wealth of any county in America, with the top 5% earning $865,000 a year while the bottom 20% is allowed to live on less than $10,000. Our school system of 1.2 million children only graduates 35% of its students college ready and without need of remedial support. These are conditions that our society has allowed to continue. Such conditions speak not to this young man’s lack of worth or quality or value – but to ours. We allow children like him to be born into a world where such horrific occurrences are familiar and known. This is allowed by our society because some children’s lives are not deemed of sufficient value.
We often speak of the destruction that violence can reap – the murdered and injured, the families torn apart by gun violence in America. But what of the children born into those communities, neighborhoods rife with violence, where, even if they are never the victim of the bullet, even if they are never struck down, they live with a daily reality and awareness of the presence of violence, the danger that lurks around the corner, the specter that their lives are transient, lacking in security, can be snatched up at any moment? This too causes great violence to the human body, it is destructive of the psyche – it wounds terribly and causes so many children to become inured. They wrap themselves in protective layers, their faces so often become impassive – but the pain runs throughout them, and for some, the rage strikes out. In the end many cannot contain it – to do so would be to ask too much, to become inhuman. They seem to cry out with the poet Nizar Qabbani: “Love me… away from the lands of oppression and repression, away from our city which has had its fill of death.”
To be truly connected to the world it is often necessary to heal from our own trauma. But so many of our children born economically poor, don’t have the access to support systems that might allow them to heal, so they move through life not merely scarred, but actually carrying massive open wounds. What does it mean to be one of our undocumented young people? To be described in the news and popular culture as “illegal” or an “alien?” Imagine, for just one moment, being a child who is described with such words – to be told each and every day that you do not belong, are the other. Imagine being told that your very being, your existence is “illegal.” Use your imagination to identify with this reality. We have members who arrived in New York City from the Dominican Republic or Jamaica or Ecuador when they were just 3 or 4 years old, brought by parents or aunts and uncles, and brought on a family member’s passport. They had no idea they had arrived without the proper paperwork, that their names did not match their social security numbers – that is, until they had already become American in identity, had lived here for over a decade, had, like many other American high school students, done their expected work and had begun, with us, their college preparation process. Suddenly the family whispers made sense – the averted eyes when they needed some form of paperwork began to become coldly clear. When they confronted family members, some of them undocumented themselves and thus also living in the shadows, often the adults struck out, and refused to help the children, afraid for their own status, of being uncovered and found. The children of Bro/Sis slowly learned that America was having a “national conversation” about sending them “back” to a “home” of which they had no memory, that this America had deemed them “illegal.” And they began to wonder: what is home? Can home be the only place you have ever known – if you are not wanted? A personal crisis, had begun, one that affected their entire worldview – for if a child cannot claim a home, she has no foundation. Who are her people? Where is her community? Again a poet’s words, this time Audre Lorde’s: “If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive.”
Self-definition becomes the process and the goal. It is often clarified by talking, reading, and collective conversation – and by the outlet of the arts. Their language, in their poetry and prose, personal oaths of commitment and collective definitions of who they are – all collected in Bro/Sis’ anthologies and performed on our stages; in drawings and paintings that hang from our walls; in the videos and documentaries we make that tell their and our stories – these fill our rooms and atmosphere – an unquestioned home.
“My job is making windows where there were once walls.” Michel Foucault’s words describe our work, the work of helping young people find grounding and community and opportunity. When society has told our children they do not belong, when laws are enforced to tear apart their families, we help them to form windows. We counsel and support them; we hold them and talk with them; we help them to advocate on their own behalf; and we secure legal representation so they can apply for documentation and come out of the shadows. One of our young women, having been supported in this way, was able to quit her job after five years as a nanny, and return to school. She now has a Masters in Social Work – and has dedicated her life to helping others. She wants to make sure that no child experiences what she has experienced – the feeling of being eaten alive.
Nicholas Peart is a name known, now, to many who have followed the news in recent years of police misconduct, harassment and violence. He has been stopped and frisked by the New York City Police six to eight times at gunpoint. He was stopped when going to the corner store to buy groceries for his siblings. He was put in the back of police cars for walking down his block. On his eighteenth birthday, while sitting on a bench on a New York City street, eating McDonald’s with his cousin, he was thrown down onto the sidewalk, a gun to his head, and searched. When the officer saw from his identification that it was his birthday, he laughed, dropped the ID on his prone back and wished him a happy birthday.
Nearly ten million stops occurred in New York City over a 12-year period beginning in 2002 – 84% of those stopped were Black or Latino. Of those stopped, only 6% were arrested, less than 2% were in possession of some form of contraband, almost always drugs, and less than .1% had a gun – the stated policy for the massive stops and infringement on the rights of the citizens of New York City. Though the police are required to have “reasonable” suspicion before stopping and frisking an individual – 90% were completely innocent.
This is a policy that is enforced only in some neighborhoods – and only on some citizens. Nicholas was one of many, but with our support he learned to process these experiences and the resulting rage and pain. He decided to struggle, to fight back, and to do this through the written word and then speaking out. He agreed to become a named witness in the lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights that sought to end the unconstitutional policy of “stop and frisk.” He wrote an Op Ed, printed in The New York Times, entitled “Why is the NYPD After Me?” It became the most definitive commentary on “stop and frisk,” the first-person story of what it felt like to have this experience. Generously, Nicholas allowed other people to identify with his story. Many were able to move beyond the abstractions, however gruesome, of these staggering statistics of over 10 million stops in 12 years, and to understand the personal impact of one story – one young man. He removed the illusions that comforted so many readers, exposing the alien reality New York City allowed its citizens to experience, only because they were black and brown and lived in economically bereft communities. This practice was allowed to continue for the “stranger,” the other. Nicholas provided an undeniable service, a gracious and benevolent offering to those who had been blind, opening their eyes, as they became personally connected to a festering crisis. At the same time, through telling his story, that of one courageous young man, he was able to do work that benefited himself as well, to “inquire into the forces that (sought) to dominate” him and to name them.
His article was read by millions. He has told his story at press conferences and high schools, on college campuses and law schools, for international and national television. Others might have become fearful of taking such a public stand, but he was empowered. One day a New York City elected official contacted us. At the time he was the relatively little-known New York City Public Advocate. He came to The Brotherhood/Sister Sol and met with our young organizers who were working to reform policing in New York City, and he told Nicholas that his own view of the issue had been transformed, he now understood the personal experience of what it felt like to be stopped and frisked, that Nicholas had moved the issue from a general policy to a powerful personal story. Nicholas had allowed him to connect. The little-known Public Advocate become the Mayor of the City of New York, and when he became Mayor, Bill de Blasio dropped the appeal of the previous administration to a Federal Court’s ruling that New York City had violated the constitutional rights of millions of New Yorkers. When the Mayor announced the dropping of the appeal he stood on the stage with the Police Commissioner, New York City’s chief lawyer and Nicholas Peart.
“When the victim is able to articulate the situation of the victim, he or she has ceased to be a victim but, instead, has become a threat.” These are the words of James Baldwin – he too was born black and poor in Harlem, with only a high school level education, wrote words that altered national conversations. We want our young people to become this kind of threat – a threat to injustice, to victimhood, racism and sexism and homophobia, but, also, a threat to the destructive ideas that young people internalize into their own bodies and spirits, about who they should be, who they are, to question and change the future of their stories. There is a freedom that comes with imagining a different world. There’s a freedom that comes with claiming one’s own history.
When teaching history at Bro/Sis, working to remove the illusions in which so many wrap themselves, when helping young people to challenge and question the society in which they live – we often find inspiration from a West African proverb: “When lions have their own historians, hunters will cease being heroes.” We all see through a particular personal lens. It takes hard work to see the world through the lens of another, but it can bring profound illumination. A great force is released when we empower young people to tell their own stories. It is destructive of our humanity as a people and as individuals when stories are told only through the lens of those in power, only from the oppressor’s point of view. When we teach the true history of America many children come to understand this proverb.
Who tells the story?
In most of the world there is no such thing as a woman’s name. Due to long- standing patriarchy and systems built on handing down property from man to man – original female names do not exist. A woman may choose not to take her husband’s name upon marriage, but in doing so she keeps her own father’s name. If she has her mother’s maiden name then she has the name of her mother’s father. Even if two women marry each other, and want to share a name, they must imagine a new name, or choose between the names of their fathers. A woman’s name must be created anew.
Who has told us our history? Who names us, literally and spiritually? Whose language do we use when navigating our lives?
The populations of Brazil and the Caribbean and the United States are filled with people of African descent due to the “Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade.” More black people live in Brazil than in any nation in Africa other than Nigeria. Tens of millions were taken from the African continent and brought to the Americas, and millions died on the way over during “The Middle Passage,” their bodies thrown into the Atlantic Ocean. The poet Amiri Baraka once said that one can walk back to Africa on the bones of Africans. And yet this most horrific atrocity – the very experience that allowed millions to claim Haitian, Jamaican, Cuban, Dominican, Brazilian and American nationality, among so many others – is described in language from the perspective of the traders in human beings, not of the enslaved. For “The Middle Passage” refers to the second leg in the “triangular trade.” Draw the lines on a map: number one, from Europe with goods to Africa; number two, from Africa with cargo of humans to the Americas, the middle one; and finally, the third one, from the Americas back to Europe with goods for trade. For the enslaved, for the Africans, the atrocity, the experience, was not “The Middle Passage” – it was simply The Passage – the only one.
A renaming of their world. This work of art and education with young people is the work of healing from trauma and achieving transformation: it is the work of forming connections that unite and liberate. It encompasses a journey that connects people to their own history, to understand their own realities, and allows them to retell their experiences to others, bringing the light of consciousness, and enabling them to rename their world. This is the work we should aspire to for our young people. This is the work we must aspire to for ourselves. This opening of doors, the effort to remove illusions and flawed stories, fighting back against incomplete or false narratives, this difficult but necessary inquiry allows for the creation of new connections and the space for new stories – stories that reject a world that tells its children that they are without worth, invisible, that their own language cannot be used, that they do not matter, are alien, and do not belong. All of us crave and require community and connection to each other. We can provide and create this reality if we have the courage and commitment to redefine, retell and rename the world