 Come, grab food, grab drink, and grab a seat. Good morning. Wow, it got so quiet. So fast. I am going to just start welcoming you, even as people get food, get drink, and come to their places, because we have so much to do together. So good morning. I'm Hillary Pennington, and I'm the Vice President for Education, and I'm here today in Free Expression, the world's greatest job title, here at the Ford Foundation. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to Art, Identity, and Movements for Change. There are so many people, as I look out around this room, who are Godparents of this day, and it's so exciting to have you here together in a conversation that we've had in spokes, one-on-one, to be able to begin into a collective conversation. And I want to say that this gathering, I want to situate this gathering, because it is one that is a part of a year-long series of activities that the Ford Foundation is undertaking to explore the interplay of art and justice and equity around the world today. And we're calling this initiative the Art of Change. And for many of you who received Darren's communication, I think last week, about the new directions of the Ford Foundation, this is really a critical piece of that work, because even though we have set some aspects of our course together, we see this year of exploration with people who are not of the Ford Foundation, but people who are doing the work out in the world as a way to help us think and plan as we think about what our work and our programming in arts and culture should look like. So we're not rushing to figure out everything about that. We are taking the time to listen and explore and talk to different people and think hopefully in new ways so that that work can be as generative and powerful as it possibly can be. And I know you probably have lots of questions and curiosity about where Ford is and its strategic planning, and we promise we'll make time to talk about that at the end of the day today, but not now. So today, and really across this year of the Art of Change, our goal is to engage a wide cross-section of artists, cultural leaders, scholars, activists, and leaders in social justice movements to think with each other and to think with us about the role that artistic expression and creativity plays in shaping more just and more equitable societies for all. And there are a number of other components in addition to this convening to the Art of Change, and it includes fellowships for 13 distinguished artists and cultural leaders who are pioneers in linking art and social justice, and we have a number of them here with us in the room today. Carrie Mae Weems, who is where? Here, and I want to thank her because she has given us permission to use a video that she has just produced from her experience at the Venice Biennale, and we'll be showing that in a loop later on this morning. David Henry Wong, Arthur Lehmann, Bill Rausch, so we are really thrilled to have you with us both today but across the course of your year as fellows with the Ford Foundation. We also will have several other convenings and workshops, and we have a website that's capturing and elaborating on ideas that we're going to be exploring together this year. So I want to also just take time to give a huge shout out to four incredible partners with me in this work without whom none of it would be possible, and they are Holly Sidford, sitting back there, you all know, and Alexis, where is Alexis? There, who is the champion of today's meeting. He has just done an amazing, amazing job. And then my two amazing colleagues at the Ford Foundation, Fiona Guthrie, who is where? Fiona. And Charlene Karen, and working all the time back there over at the boot. So today we are going to look at the dynamic relationship between art, identity, and movements for progressive change, and I, as many of you know, have wanted to do a convening like this since I came to the Ford Foundation 18 months ago because I believe that reconstructing the ways in which we think about how identity is conceived and how it's appropriated is essential to the work of advancing social justice and human dignity in the 21st century, especially when you look at the various forms of fundamentalisms that are polarizing our politics in so many places around the world today that are shrinking the space for civil society and are tearing apart our world. And there could be no more horrific expression of that than what happened in Charleston last week. And because of this, I think we are all challenged to think about how acts like that are based on rigid definitions of identity that exclude complexity and demonize difference. And my vision, and I think our shared vision for the Ford Foundation is that we can help support people like you, we can help support a counter narrative and a movement towards more inclusive conceptions, more inclusive concepts of identity and principled ways to bridge or to mediate difference. And that is going to challenge old mental models that trap us in thinking about identity as binary, whether that's gender identity or sexuality or racial or ethnic identity, but to set aside those narrow and constraining ways that we think and that we restrict society because all of us hold complex identities much more complex than those kinds of binaries that should allow us to find commonality. And I think we all have personal stories that bring us to this kind of awareness. You know, for me, I came of age obviously as a woman in the 60s and the 70s in St. Louis at the child of a single mother, a working mother, and I was able, because it was the 60s and the 70s, because of the pioneering work she and other women had done to have opportunities that were unimaginable and unthinkable and impossible for her. I also grew up experiencing the privilege of having a white skin as I went back and forth between the places of my parents, St. Louis and South Africa, and I saw whether it was de jure apartheid and shrine and law or de facto apartheid and shrine and cultural practices that live on today in St. Louis, what a devastating legacy all forms of racism and exclusion create in societies. And I also have a sister who in the 1960s and 70s has learning disabilities but was labeled mentally retarded. And I watched throughout her life the ways in which those kinds of labels diminished and constrained her sense of who she was and who she was able to be. So we all have those experiences, we all bring them with us. I'm sure that it is because of experiences like that for each of us in this room that we do the work we do. And it is such a privilege then to begin to think about how we shift and change that. And this is obviously complicated territory. Obviously from a political perspective, important movements have sprung up and Ford Foundation has proudly helped to support many of them over its history, have sprung up from focusing on the needs of specific groups of people. Civil rights for African Americans, women's rights, human rights for indigenous populations, LGBTI protections, as many, immigrants rights as many examples. And there are still contemporary fights for racial justice, for domestic workers' rights, for immigrants, for marriage equality, and so many more that make it clear that the need for advocacy on behalf of people who are excluded or oppressed or disadvantaged in our society is not over. But at the same time, I think it's more obvious than ever before that all of our fates as human beings on this planet are inextricably linked with population growth, with record numbers of refugees worldwide, increasing natural resource challenges, and highly interdependent and inequitable multinational economies. Connecting to our shared humanity and finding common ground is a necessity for building a just and sustainable future together. So I know I'm not alone in this view and that's why you're here today. And this is where art and artists come in. Art challenges us to examine our assumptions and reframe how we see reality. Art stirs hearts and minds, it spurs the imagination, and it helps us build empathy. Art is both the content and the container for the stories that we tell ourselves, stories which shape our sense of identity and possibility. Art can challenge our unquestioned assumptions and it can complexify our narratives while at the same time helping us make meaning out of difficult experiences. And art can help us imagine new and different possibilities for our future. As James Baldwin said so wisely, art lays bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers. So that's our work today. To stand at the intersection of all of these complex things, art and identity and movements for social change and look at the dynamic relationship between them. How can we understand the complexity of identity today and address the areas where inequality and injustice persist? How do arts and culture help us see things in new ways and therefore create spaces for new social and political possibilities to emerge? And how might we build on arts power to connect people across differences as well as its role in enhancing individual and group identities? So here at Ford, both here in the United States and around the world with all of our regional offices around the world, we think this is a unique time to help us assert and build on the power of the arts and we really appreciate you being here together with us to do that thinking together. We hope that this day lets many of you reconnect with people that you know and knew well and have worked with as you came into the room and also helps introduce you to what you have not known and worked with yet today. And we're so grateful to you and so look forward to an amazing time together. And I am my last thing, which I have dropped my piece of paper for, is to introduce our amazing speakers. Where are you? David Chang Who? Ten. But you barely need introductions to this group of people here and we know that you came a long way from challenging time and we're so glad to have you here with us today. This is a person who has thought, I think, and written as deeply and provocatively about identity and race and art and culture as anyone we have in the country today and we're thrilled to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much Hilary and thank you to you and to Darren and to Fiona and to Ford Foundation for supporting such great work for so many people all around the world. We appreciate it. I also wanted to send a big shout out and thank you to Am I loud enough here? Should I talk a little louder? I also wanted to send a big shout out and thank you to Roberta Uno who introduced me to the Ford Foundation who has been the most generous of teachers and just a huge influence in my life, in my thinking. Thank you so much for all you've done for me and for all of us. Thank you. And a huge shout out and a thank you to Helicon, to Holly and Alexis for the kind invitation and the opportunity to be here today. And to all of you, it's been such an honor to be able to work with so many of you inspired by so many of you over the years. I hope I do your justice today. So what to say about art and justice and beauty and identity and culture. I really have to confess that I started and stopped many drafts of this talk. So many that I hardly know up from my down. I mean last week we started off with the story of a girl, right? A woman in Spokane who was white and then she was black and now we don't really know. But we were kind of consumed by the start. It reminded me of this old lefty canard that history appears twice. First is tragedy and then as farce. And so I wrote a draft and I had to throw it away because it was really unfocused but it was also really snarky. It was way too snarky. But then the events of last Wednesday evening happened and here was the history of race not at all as farce but reappearing as the great and still unresolved tragedy of America. In times of trouble whom else do we turn to but John Stuart who has daily heroically transformed society's maddening absurdity into humor so that we can wake up the next morning and continue to push the rock of justice up this hill that seems to have grown during the night, right? But even he had to admit he had nothing for us. He had no jokes. He had nothing to let us know that we were going to be alright. We live in strange paradoxical times. We live in a time of a black president but yet we still have to take to the streets to affirm that black lives matter. It was a new draft and it was just as unfocused but now it was despairing too. I couldn't help but share the feeling that as John Stuart sort of raging about color blindness and him saying even if we were not to be color blind we would still look into this and see it for what it is and we still wouldn't do jack shit. Now, I'm not a pessimist by nature and as one who believes really deeply in what we have to talk about today I know that this is no way to open a talk about art and identity, right? There are the doubters of art's power to affect justice. Those who believe that there is no natural relationship between justice and beauty. Those who believe that art might do everything for the soul but change it and those doubters are many and there are the derogators of identity. Those who claim that identity is a trifling concern to all those but themselves whose identity somehow rises above transcends everybody else's who believe that blindness is the best way to see and those derogators are many as well. Perhaps now in this moment of change and confusion and fear in this moment of powerful feeling and equally powerful inertia to see the arts when we need the arts to see through the fog to clearly apprehend what's going on what our new realities are and perhaps even more the arts and culture may be the only place to start to make change. So I wrote another draft and I hope this one is at least less unfocused. What I want to talk about today is colorization. It's discontents. I want to talk about the complicated ways that we see identity now. I want to discuss how social and arts movements are pushing us to rethink identity and finally I want to get to the question of what can art do and what can we do and in the process I'm going to be asking a lot more questions than answering them but that may just be the nature of where we're at now. Things are complicated and that's why we need each other. The Civil Rights Act the Voting Rights Act the Immigration and Nationality Act we're passing this is the last great consensus for racial inequality to fight racial inequality and cultural inequity in our country and through these landmark pieces of legislation and the innumerable policies and decisions that flow from them the US began to dismantle legal segregation and open avenues for African-Americans and other folks of color to flow into the mainstream of national life but no one could legislate how we're going to live together and so for that, for visions of a post segregated America we had to turn to the artists and this is where we begin to see the process of colorization beginning to transform America. In the mid 1970s Ishmael Reid named the multiculturalism movement in the Berkeley barb and he wanted to describe a fertile counterculture in the Bay Area that was producing poets playwrights and artists who were ready to crash the cannon and at exactly the same moment hip-hop rose in the abandoned neighborhoods of New York City. If multiculturalists were consciously in avant-garde, hip-hop kids they just wanted to get out there and have fun but they too became an avant-garde in time. So multiculturalism and hip-hop alongside other insurgent movements centering the poor, centering feminists sending queer, indigenous, disabled and differently abled and other voices offered alternative notions of belonging and wholeness. They critiqued the old model of integration as a model of forced assimilation. They argued that America had never been a singular culture it always been plural and the time had come to account for this the nation's radical diversity but critics saw in these loud and proud movements the fraying and the decaying of their US and so those of us who lived through the 1980s and the 1990s remember that it was a period of a rise in hate crimes in church burnings a fervid reaction against artists and against the young. My generation the first to come of age after the civil rights movement was then the most diverse generation that the nation had ever seen and that's something that's going to be said about every generation until well past 2042. But that was enough to unleash an anti-multicultural backlash when the Pecanon came to call the culture wars. On campus debates over ebonics the canon and hate speech broke out and in Congress anti-multiculturalists attacked and defunded the national endowment for the arts precisely at the moment when artists of color were beginning to come into the field and so while students and intellectuals and artists were pushing forward what Cornell West called at that time diversity, multiplicity and heterogeneity still hard to say those words the anti-multiculturalists were pushing back in the arts and the humanities and they succeeded in effectively defunding and dismantling national policy around the arts and culture. If you read Dylan Storm Roof's racist manifesto you might have been as stunned as I was to find how closely it echoed some of the anti-multiculturalist talking points of the 1980s. White culture Roof wrote is world culture an anti-multiculturalist from George Wallace and Richard Nixon to Papu Cannon and Sarah Palin they've always argued for a kind of restoration the way that Roof departed from the rest of these was in his insistence that the restoration be violently begun and maintained and he took the metaphor of war seriously but what we continue to witness is a struggle over the soul of America a clash of competing narratives if you will the story of a great America that we're in danger of losing forever versus the story of a hopeful emerging America the end of American civilization versus the transformation the beginning of a great national transformation a nation in which color blindness restores our innocence versus a nation in which the recognition of difference gives us a new kind of vitality and so in 2008 the time that seems so far away now at the dawn of the post-racial era that never really actually broke the horizon President Obama was elected in part as a symbol of racial reconciliation he was presented literally as a black and white man colorized into red, white and blue underneath which the word hope appeared but not long after the election the image was transformed once again into the symbol of all things other Obama was not just black a product of miscegenation he was also suddenly a Muslim a socialist illegal alien and so the culture wars returned and they formed a backdrop for this moment that we're in now you can call it the post-post-racial era now President Obama has said that those who claim that nothing has changed they're wrong they don't know what it meant to be black or gay or a woman or of color in the 1950s or the 1970s and he's right the really simplified version of this argument is that in the past the cultural mainstream in the U.S. looked like the Brady Bunch and now it looks like Empire of course it might be more accurate to say that it looks like Iggy Azalea with TI dancing in the background or a Cameron Crow movie set in Hawaii but the point is that even in this time when we talk about politics, marriages and Jay-Z and Beyoncé and Sasha and Malia the question of identity is no less trouble than it was before things have changed identity reigns as the chosen currency of global capitalism and I mean that in a quite personal sense where all algorithms are our buying habits and together we can be aggregated into any number of niche markets and in this way demographic change has been reconstituted into rationalized markets historically at the turn of the millennium we found that media corporations were taking a Noah's Ark approach as they consolidated Viacom had BET for the black market logo for the LGBT market Nickelodeon for kids and maybe 25 other channels for white males 18 and 34 diversity is now not only an important value because people have marched for it it's not only a sound legal principle because the Supreme Court has reaffirmed it it's also supplying substantial value to individuals and institutions who recognize and utilize it so the Rachel Dulles-All controversy had me running back to David Henry Huang's yellow face and I don't want to steal any of this thunder here but I do have to confess that when I saw the play for the first time I thought the ending in which the character DHH talks about a world in which quote an Asian can be Jimmy Stewart and a white guy can even be Asian was totally unbelievable I couldn't have imagined a time when a white woman might call herself black or the white brother of George W. Bish might call himself Latino but I was wrong, sorry DHH after the Dulles-All news broke I found myself looking at a University of Alabama promotional website picture from 2013 in which a black man appears to be posing in a graduation gown among four other graduates white graduates to male to female and he's been congratulated and one of the white men reaches out to shake his hand and I look closely and I saw that the black man's hands were several shades lighter than his face that is to say there was orange as Rachel Dulles-All's and what had happened is that the University of Alabama had photoshopped a black man's face onto a white man's body and they had done so not because orange is the new black but because diversity is a dear currency in this new world that the legal scholar Nancy Leon calls racial capitalism in this regard it might be argued that in Rachel Dulles-All's shifting identity from the days in which she sued Howard University claiming to be discriminated against because she was white and pregnant to the days when she served as a chief the chair of the Spokane NAACP and the representative to the police commission as a black mother or black children we see her searching for an identity that might yield the greatest surplus for its exchange value but then Nancy Leon cites a recent study done of 10,000 images produced by 371 historically white institutions see what I did there right it found that students of color tended to be over represented in university photographs blacks and asians tended to be shown at rates 50% higher than they were enrolled judging by this fake photo you might think that blacks made up 20% of the U of A student body in fact they make up almost 30% of college age young people in Alabama but only 12% of the student body so in other words we live in a world in which individuals and institutions value diversity so much that they'll fake it in order to show how much they support it and we live in a world in which obviously all identities are still not equal when Thelma Golden named the post 90s generation of black contemporary artists post black she too was noting that things had changed artists of color could now demand to be seen not only in terms of their blackness or by extension their latinidad their asianness, their queerness but what a lot of critics did not understand and Thelma and those artists did is that even if they did not shoulder the same burdens of representation as previous generations had they still shouldered the burden the main question is how do you now create and what do you create a year ago the collective that called itself how do you say YAM in African withdrew from the Whitney Biennial to protest the inclusion of a piece by Joe Scanlon in which he a white male professor hired black female actors to play the part of an artist named Donnell Wilford in part the YAM's collective was calling attention to the ongoing underrepresentation of non-white males in American arts institutions Kim drew the black contemporary art block put it best in a tweet she said I take back all of my Whitney Museum excitement did account 903 artists are black and one is a fictional black person bye even if diversity is a value commodity is not so valued that we've achieved anything close to cultural equity and that's why we all await the findings of the New York City Department on Cultural Affairs let's return to the entertainment industry for a second two decades after the media deregulation we find a consolidated marketplace that has more holes to fill with content than ever before and yet is still more risk averse than ever so why did it take until President Obama's second term for scandal to be greener and almost to the end of it for shows like blackish empire fresh off the boat to get their chance it's because we still live in a world that sees actors directors, writers, dancers musicians create as a color as risks as people who are working far outside the bounds of mainstream taste I asked Spike Lee and Justin Simeon recently about the question of the Academy Award snub of Eva de Verne's summer and they reminded me that there's no person of color in Hollywood in a position to green light hers or their movies now I want to complicate this narrative we can all agree that race is not a question of biology we can agree that races like the academics like to say it's a social a social construct in my book I wrote race emerges between appearance and the perception a difference and he added that seeing difference in itself is not a problem it's the systems that we've attached to difference the systems of engagement and abandonment of mobility and containment of slavery and freedom and I think this is what Kerry May Weems and works like your series from here I saw what happened and I cried who work helps us to understand that what we now call profiling is deeply and historically rooted that these views create their own systems of seeing and unseen of knowing and unknowing and that justice movements are always about the transformation of seeing and knowing Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown and Rikia Boyd and Tamir Rice and Antonio Zambrano-Montez and Guan Zhang-Kao they're not with us today because of the way that they were seen and known most of us may agree that we want to undo these systems of inequity because they distort a truer sense of seeing that they blind us to each other's humanity that these systems of inequality prevent many of us from experiencing true freedom from gaining the agency to live and express ourselves the way that we want to to the world but then how do we deal with someone like Rachel Dolezal who may believe her true self is black who by many accounts has been doing the work even more than that in our own mathematics of being are we merely the difference between what we want to be and what society will let us be I hope not it seems to me that there needs to be more discussion about ethics of identity how we express our agency of creation towards what values and towards what ends and I hope that will take up this call in earnest ways that are attentive to the continuing inequities in the arts and in society still we live in a world a post civil rights and post multi-cultural era that's dominated by this regime is seen the internet makes us feel like we can go to sleep every night having seen all that we need to see but in fact we've developed massive blind spots economic and racial inequality grow like poison weed in these blind spots racism in particular is supported by a denial of empathy by a mass world blindness we need to be blind to color many people say in order for us all to move forward but this is merely a justification for doing nothing and all we need is for people to do nothing all we need is for people to do nothing to know that things are going to get worse more to the point the great paradox of this period right now is that because of the new value diversity has acquired in this post civil rights post multi-cultural era our images show us as one happy rainbow nation but all of our indices show that segregation and gaps in income wealth and housing are rising rapidly indeed for the last 25 years a nation has not just been creeping it's been vaulting to pre-1954 levels all across the country in 2010 80% of Latino and 74% of black K through 12 students attended majority non-white schools but whites remain the most segregated group of all the average white student attends a school that's 75% white and this mirrors the fact that the average white lives in the neighborhood that's 77% white it is true that so-called millennials have grown up in the wake of multiculturalism and of hip-hop but by all measures this generation has grown up much more segregated than those of us who came of age in the 80s and 90s and it's no mistake that the flashpoints of the 21st century have been the re-segregated suburbs like Ferguson and Sanford with the arrival of so-called millennials has come some irrational exuberance about their understanding of race and identity we often tell ourselves well we don't see older generations that they just don't get it and when they finally die off they get out of the way everything will be great the younger ones don't have any of the baggage of the older generations they don't see race in things the way that we did and they'll figure out how to get along and somewhere in the background somebody's playing a Whitney song I believe the children of the future or whatever George Benson if you're of that age but even there really were an aberration or an outlier on the spectrum of millennialness right we might still be too exuberant there was a recent MTV poll study that was done and it asked millennials what they thought needed to be done in order to ensure a racially harmonious society and 73% of millennials believed that quote never considering race would improve society and the poll also showed that 81% believe that embracing diversity and creating the differences between the races would improve society now these two views one for color blindness the other for multiculturalism they're competing positions in the culture wars and perhaps we should be celebrating millennials for being able to hold two opposing ideas in their minds at the same time but it's just as likely that they're just as confused as the rest of us that they too don't have the language to describe how to get to the promised land and yet it's important for us to also recognize that these are times of amazing and powerful creativity these are times when it seems that what's happening in the streets is impacting what's happening in the arts and what's happening in the arts is impacting what's happening in the streets the Occupy Movement launched this attack on inequality with the image of a ballerina balancing on point on the Wall Street Bull the encampments themselves often seem like public performance art print makers, poets, musicians they all gave these spaces a sort of carnival-like joy and even the ritual of the mic check it seemed like a conceptual intervention a new form for a new kind of communication and a new time of social engagement the Black Lives Matter movement has produced an amazing amount of art and its protests have sometimes been art as in the dramatic and performative say-her-name actions in which thousands across the country took to the streets to call attention to the stories of police assault and murder of black women exposing the breath of voices still missing from even the insurgent narratives the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the arts has already been substantial over the past six months we've seen three new classics we've seen D'Angelo's Black Messiah we've seen Kendrick Lamar's The Pimpa Butterfly we've seen Kamasi Washington's The Epic in which the artists seem to have been driven to new heights of ambition and clarity by the movement these new social movements seriously take the question of seeing they protest to erase the invisibility of the 99% they protest to show how modes of unseeing to borrow this phrase from the writer of China Meville unseeing such as color blindness and implicit bias produce vast brutal deadly structures of segregation and violence the Black Lives Matter movement calls us to see all black lives as Alicia Garza puts it young and old and middle aged disabled and differently abled transgender immigrant incarcerated and more and if we can see and hold space for all those black lives then we really can see and hold space for all lives I'm also excited these days by the young artists and activists and organizers who during these times of political inertia and inaction speak in the language of dreams who call us to build the social imagination young people like the dream activists and the dream defenders to reconsider to reaffirm the core values behind legal citizenship the dream defenders remind us of Martin Luther King's vision of the beloved community in which we are all deeply connected indeed indebted to each other that we owe each other a better more open more just and inclusive society and what all of these young dreamers pushes toward is articulating an ethics of identity to announce and uphold a radical uncommodifiable diversity multiculturalism sometimes led us into the trap of asserting identity as a way to claim our piece of the pie toward an essentialist way of understanding identity often strategically but sometimes not so much what began in the 1970s as a movement expressing a radical aesthetics sometimes devolved into an entitlement politics of our got mine and gone but the current moment calls upon us to reflect upon what's real and what's right before us to burn away our illusions and pretensions and blind ambitions what becomes important is to see our individual and collective responsibility and our individual and collective possibility to visualize who we can become and to see each other fully and each other's complete and realized humanity what matters is to re-envision how we can find our freedom and how we can live together we need cultural equity for the same reasons that we needed in the 70s and the 80s and the 80s and the 90s we still need to be able to expand representation to be able to expand the diversity of narratives but cultural equity is also a question of access to the arts for all aesthetics are important beauty is important the human experience is important we are living in a time when the arts and humanities have literally been devalued we worry about their future like we worry about the future of our soul it's an era of empiricism when big data is triumphant and numbers loom large over all of us and the numbers don't favor us right now we are constantly being called upon to provide metrics of our success but how do you evaluate the transformation of a mind how do you measure the opening of a heart bell hooks once wrote that she grew up in an ugly house where quote things were not to be looked at they were to be possessed space was not to be created but owned a violent aesthetic she wrote I could see in our daily life the way consumer capitalism ravaged the black poor nurtured in us a longing for things that often subsumed our ability to recognize aesthetic worth or value but art and creativity she wrote was a way to challenge racist thinking that blacks were uncivilized it was a tie to the past and a way to imagine the future most of all it was the gift of hope or possibility of creation of difference and in this world we have devoted tanzakis in praise of shadows the quality that we call beauty must always grow from the realities of life in our ancestors forced to live in dark rooms presently came to discover beauty in shadows ultimately to guide shadows towards beauty's end then in turn expression can foster empathy empathy is the engine of the revolution the jazz musician and scholar vj iyer reminds us our brains mirror neurons fire we understand another's pain or joy at the root level of our being however psychologist and neuroscientist also warn us that visual racialized difference can get in the way of empathy vj asked the question what made the civil rights movement possible and here he speculates on the history of race visuality and popular music is it possible that music heard and not seen might have overridden the visual racialized culturally imposed constraints on empathy that was then half a century ago 1965 the last time there was a national consensus to address racial inequality and cultural inequity the question now is what would it take for us to build a new consensus those of us who believe that the arts have a role to play in all of this we've often said cultural change precedes political change we began talking about this during the Obama election in 2008 when we saw visions of change on the walls and in the streets when artists put change and hope into paper into video into sound and their hopes spilled over past the official images and agendas and party and candidate platforms we saw and heard in them even before we saw the image of the new family of the Obama family in Grant Park we had a lot of irrational hope then but we were not wrong every major moment of social change requires a leap of the social imagination to say that cultural change precedes political change is not to argue that politics are more important than art or that art is more important than politics it's simply to point out the way that change happens culture is fluid enough to be able to move politics cannot no one today would be able to move a bill in congress that would limit the spread of guns or decriminalize use of color but we might be able to transform the way that we see the world in which these are current realities at their best arts and culture generate the necessary energies for the moment for the urgent moment and then they reflect and resonate through time it was after the assassinations of Miliano Zapata and Pancho Villa in the darkest days for those who believed in the Mexican Revolution that the muralists and the painters and the photographers Rivera and Roscoe and Cicharros and Calo and Modori and Tamayo they advance their heroic images of indigenous and workers and women struggles in their form and content then they inspired the artists and the writers of the Harlem Renaissance and theistas of the farm workers movement and the Chicano movement even africobra and the black image making collectives that fostered the rise of the black indie film movement they made images of justice and they were beautiful James Baldwin once wrote that he worried that when the revolution came when the reckoning came when the vengeance came what would happen to all of that beauty then would it be swallowed by the fires in the march towards justice did we need to give up on beauty? Martin Luther King Jr. had a provisional answer in 1963 he told the world that he had a dream and since that time his speech has been reduced to that single wish that one day his children might be able to be judged by the content of the character not the color of the skin but before he spoke of the dream he spoke at length of the work that needed to be done in order to get to that dream to achieve that dream to make it a reality that's mostly been forgotten he condemned police brutality and he praised the new militancy that was happening in black America at the time and he said the world wins a revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges and on that day King imagined that we would forge a beloved community that we would honor the debts that we owe to each other that we would commit ourselves to make each other whole that we would sustain each other's well-being and fellowship it's indeed a vision and a dream that connects beauty and justice and maybe it's just that simple we must work to see ourselves and see each other clearly and in seeing the beauty of humanity is revealed and all seems possible diversity is beautiful justice is beautiful peace is beautiful and maybe that's just our job is just to make it and keep it beautiful thank you very much for listening this morning yeah I can't help but do this but if you haven't read who we be it's a must summer read it's phenomenal changed my life love you much hi everybody it's so great to see all you here so I'm just the logistical person announcing the next thing so don't get too excited so we have next up a panel of three artists who are doing exactly what Jeff was talking about who are all in their own ways through their work and through who they are in the world challenging the way that we see identity helping us see things in new ways and helping create spaces where we can envision a different world in the future so they're going to have a conversation together we have Carrie Mae Weems David Henry Huang and Julio Salgado and Gregory Rodriguez is going to moderate the panel so if you guys can come up it's great and just as they're coming up to the chairs Gregory is the founder of Zocalo Public Square which is an ideas exchange that blends events and journalism and creates a space for a younger generation that's more diverse to be able to have conversations that matter and I can't think of a better person to moderate this panel thank you guys sorry coming hello good morning is anybody as tired as I am? just me I'm happy to be here with these amazing artists who have a lot more knowledge and know about art which I don't so I'm trying to use my ignorance today to be a good interviewer but I want to start with the the idea when I got this invitation and Hillary thank you I was thinking about I was on this boondog or the State Department sent me two years ago to Venice and I just said yes because you're sending me to Venice to talk about American identity and I thought I was fairly articulate during that panel and a very eager nervous, wiry Italian man came up and said well what is it? are you Chicano? are you Mexican-American? are you Latino? and I felt a little bit assaulted and I said well it depends who I'm talking to I guess I'm all those things but who am I talking to? are you American? yeah but pick one I shouldn't have answered but I was sort of in a corner here he wasn't very big but he was wiry and I said I'm an asthmatic and we all have these identities we've always had them but the premise of this panel and a lot of the premise of today is the idea that the identity is more fluid we have a greater freedom to identify in multiple ways than we ever did before in 2000 the U.S. census allowed Americans to pick more than one race, imagine that and we don't know what that means although it drives demographers crazy demography numbers no longer add up to 100 in America and then yesterday I get off the plane looking at the news from South Carolina I was sort of struck not knowing what the significance was but it seems to me I wanted to start today's discussion off with the first woman governor of South Carolina the child of immigrant who both worships in a Methodist and a Sikh temple declared essentially it time to move beyond the symbolism of a war that ended 150 years ago that seems to suggest that this woman the governor Haley's identity is very complex dealing with a more archaic if you will primal divide that we have advanced and that we haven't and I think Jeff was referring to this complexity and I want to know from the panel first of all is I'm going to pick on David first because I interviewed you years ago in a small dungeon like room at the center theater in Los Angeles and you couldn't escape either I was the small Italian guy and you were just written and were presenting yellow face and you were seemed at this point of your life in which you were sort of tired of identity you wanted out it seems to me and I don't want to quote you directly because I'll never find it but you were talking about this notion of identity having been something that comforted you at times the belonging that gave you a place in the world but it was also a place in which you can get stuck are you still there at that place and if not where are you and what do you think is happening to identity in America racial and otherwise yeah well okay at the time that we had that discussion I finished yellow face where we were about to premiere at and you know it's a play in which there's one of the things that happens is there's a white guy who threw a series of mistakes orchestrated by a character named DHH comes to be identified as Asian as a mixed race Asian incorrectly and then goes on to become a community role model and leader in ethnic identity movements until at some point he's exposed so and I think in that play I was struggling with both the joys and the limitations of identity politics of ethnic identity and it had been something because I started my career my first place produced in whatever 1980 so I feel like a lot of my career kind of paralleled the growth of what we now you know of multiculturalism and I felt that it was kind of a cutting edge thing to be writing about in 1980 and by the time this play premiered in whatever 2007 I thought you know it's kind of that discussion has happened and that something that was once daring has now pretty much been incorporated into mainstream thought and there are people who are for it there are people who are against it but it's not a new idea so I therefore felt you know I kind of want to get beyond that now and I was going to be more interested in internationalism for at least the next period of time that is how can some of these notions that we developed during multiculturalism be expanded outside our national borders and looked at in an international context which I still think is an interesting idea however at this point in whatever we're in 2015 I actually think America is really fascinating again and because the degree of resistance that has erupted over the past whatever seven or eight years the degree of division and the re-ignition of the cultural war is something that I didn't think was necessarily going to happen in 2007 and so what is happening at the present moment and for me it's a reaction to the demographic kind of shift where Caucasians believe a plurality but not a majority but how do you define it but anyway by whatever 2040 and that there is a society is having a great deal of struggle to figure out what this means and white privilege and appropriation all these discussions come back in a more charged fashion even I think than they did in the 80s so I think this sort of fascinating moment for America dealing with issues of race and identity right now and I'm working on plays that plays or plays that are kind of about these issues again because there's a lot more territory to cover thank you Kerry do you does that resonate this notion of joys and limitations of identity does that resonate with you in any way oh absolutely first I have to say that I really love this presentation that Jeff made this morning I just thought it was thank you so much it was really wonderful so thoughtful and I'm really interested in this idea I'm really interested in this idea of institutions and institutes and think tanks and places where actually these sort of ideas can be sort of talked about in a more sustained sustained way through across multiple platforms because I think it's really sort of the most interesting way of doing it and there's something that David just brought up as well I mean I think that you know I can remember I can remember in the 1980s about 1982 something like that sitting in an audience and the president of Bank of America was speaking and he said part of this address was by the year 2040 or something the white majority is actually going to be the minority in this country and I think we need to think about what that means he was speaking at a graduation ceremony at San Francisco State and that idea really really really stuck with me this idea that a man who represents the president of a Fortune 500 company was already deeply thinking about what it would mean for the demographic shifts that would take place in the country what would be the consequence of this