Resistance here doesn’t mean revolution. It doesn’t mean storming the barricades. Resistance means using art for the things that it does best, which is to create human portraits and communicate ideas and forge a climate where people of different races or classes are known to you because they make themselves known. In the simplest terms, art humanizes. It opens the circuit of empathy. And once that process happens, it’s that much harder to think of people as part of a policy or a statistic. Art reverses the alienation that can creep into society.

Questlove

I want to think about the connection between art and freedom, between empathy and freedom, between love and freedom. I don’t feel free in my country right now. I don’t feel free from gun violence. I don’t feel free to make choices about my healthcare. I don’t feel free to have my voice heard at the ballot box. I don’t feel free to live in a healthy environment. I don’t feel free to worship, or not worship, a God of my choosing. I know that if some are not free, all are not free.

I seek solace in the thought that art humanizes. I write because I have no choice. My voice trembles, but I still write. Through writing, I make my voice heard. I join a chorus of artists who make themselves known and, in so doing, soften hearts and open spaces that isolation, alienation, and cruelty destroy. I have always felt safe and beautiful singing in a chorus. Ideas like peace, justice, and love are big ideas, and art is big enough for all that and more.

As I think about freedom, I want look forward. I want to pay attention to the beauty and pain of the past, look honestly at the present situation, and create a future where the as if, not yet, and why not dance. A future better than any past we have ever known, worthy of generations.

I want to say a few words about the Summer of Soul, the movie directed by Quest Love chronicling the Harlem Cultural Festival of 1969. I watched the film for the first time in the summer of 2021 with my parents. Watching it with them opened a conversation about what the country was like then. They were college students involved in student life and the civil rights movement. I learned that around the summer of 1969, Mom and Dad hosted dinner for the Fifth Dimension at their apartment. Listening to music and stories from 1969 reminds me of the struggle of it all: that not-so-distant history holds cruelty and injustice right next to soul and beauty. We discover 1619 and Juneteenth and learn our history. We learn about the Trail of Tears. We learn about Stonewall. It is the story of our nation. We understand wounds run deep and scar tissue remains. If the arts humanize, then the music of the Harlem Cultural Festival makes us a little more human. Our story, explicitly telling the truth about our story through the arts, has never been more critical.

Weekly Wide-Awake: Summer of Soul

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