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Weekly Wide-Awake: Summer of Soul
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 am reminded 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 that make themselves known, and in so doing, soften hearts and open spaces that isolation and alienation and cruelty destroys. I have have always felt safe and beautiful singing in a chorus. Ideas like peace and 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 movie for the first time in the summer of 2021 with my parents who are in their mid-seventies. Watching it them opened a conversation about what the country was like at that time. They were college students involved in student life, and by extension the civil rights movement. I learned that right around the summer of 1969, mom and dad hosted dinner for the Fifth Dimension at their apartment. Sitting in now, listening to music and stories from 1969 reminds me of the struggle of it all: that not so distant history is riddled with injustice. We find out about 1619, and learn more history. It all is the story of our nation. We learn that the 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. It feels like our story, specifically telling the truth about our story through the arts, has never been more important.
About Katie
Born in Louisville. Live in Atlanta. Curious by nature. Researcher by education. Writer by practice. Grateful heart by desire.
Buy the Book!
The Stage Is On Fire, a memoir about hope and change, reasons for voyaging, and dreams burning down can be purchased on Amazon.