Six Artists Advancing Justice, Healing, and Envisioning a Stronger Future

How can art/artists/culture bearers contribute to social change and community healing?

Being a person of color living in rural MN can come packaged with extra weight. Maybe it’s a lightweight, bridge builder role. Or maybe sometimes it’s a more heavyweight instigator of social change “role”. In the midst of accommodating those roles tokenization is still real. Whether it’s the tokenization of the artist or the identity being featured, I’ve come to accept it as a kind of a polite expression of curiosity. In this setting, artist processes have inadvertently become a way to frame and contain curiosity. Sharing our stories and sharing art experiences provides safe boundaries for learning about each other and making discoveries together. It’s where human connection has a chance to thrive long enough for healing to begin. Even if it’s just one person at a time, in a small town the impact is deep if not wide.

What inspires or motivates you in these challenging times?

Art has long been realized as a tool for inspiring social change. Social change starts with connection. Nothing motivates and encourages me more than seeing relationships begin and grow at a performance or a show or workshop. It’s incredible to see how quickly strangers become friends when they have a chance to build something together.

“Reality, however one interprets it, lies beyond a screen of cliches.  Every culture produces such a screen, partly to facility its own practices (to establish habits) and partly to consolidate its own power.  Reality is inimical to those with power.” —John Berger, And our hearts, our faces, brief as photos

What artists do is tell and show and narrate truth to power; our task is to penetrate beyond the screen of cliches and lies and gaslighting that power creates to consolidate its power. As I tell my writing students, we writers drag things out of the closet or from under the table and bring forth unpleasant truths those in power want to deny—whether in a family, a community or a nation. We artists complicate the portraits of reality we are given. And we are not just looking for the obvious always, but instead we are searching for a language, an art to express what we know unconsciously but don’t yet have the language, the art to express.

So many of us are told our stories, our voices, don’t matter, but when we see others from our community expressing their truths, narrating their lives, giving voice to what they see and think and feel, we feel empowered to do the same. Art gives us that freedom, and artist tells others to avail of themselves that freedom.

Of course that is more easily said than done. Clearly we live in difficult troubling times. In my last book, The Stories Whiteness Tells Itself: Racial Myths and Our American Narratives, I examine the lies, myths, distortions and omissions in many of the narratives white Americans tell about our history and our present and I offer in contrast the narratives—both of history and of fiction—that African Americans tell of their lives and experiences.

One of the key points of the book is that after every progress this country has seemingly made towards racial equality, often in the form of laws, such as the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, there has always been a racial backlash where a significant, if not majority of whites, push back against that progress and try to undermine it. Their goal was to return the country to the previous state of racial inequality. In this backlash, they worked to circumvent and render powerless or negligible any legal or political progress towards equality.

We are now in the midst of such a backlash. And so we must remember that others before us have struggled against these retrenchments, these reversals, and they too had to fight on, fight on even as their hopes and elation at some seeming progress were dashed. Their endurance, their persistence, is what has enabled whatever progress, whatever rights we now exercise, and so we must remember we are fighting for the future, as the past has fought for us, for the opportunities that we have that the past did not.

Recently I saw the History Theater play, Secret Warriors, by Rick Shiomi, which tells the story of the Military Intelligence Service Japanese Americans who studied the Japanese language at Fort Snelling; these soldiers went out in World War II to serve as battlefield guides, interrogators of prisoners and translators of captured or intercepted Japanese messages and documents. MacArthur’s Chief of Intelligence, General Willoughby said these MIS Nisei soldiers shortened the war in the Pacific by two years and saved a million American lives—which means there are anti-Asian, anti-immigrant Americans alive today because these Nisei soldiers helped save their fathers and grandfathers.

And yet many of these Nisei and their families, including my uncles who served in the MIS, were incarcerated by the government in camps where they were surrounded by barbed wire fences and rifle towers with guards. They were not given the right of a trial or the writ of habeas corpus. They struggled against far greater racial prejudice than I have ever experienced. So I owe it to them and their memory to continue fighting for the rights of all Americans.

But it’s not just the past which inspires. In 2022 my daughter became the first Japanese American legislator in Minnesota when she was elected to the House of Representatives from her South Minneapolis District. She sponsored an ethnic studies bill by saying, “My father was not able to study the internment camps in school and I was not able to study the camps in school. I want my son Tadashi to be able to study his Japanese American heritage in school”.

Despite the current attempts to quash any true discussion of our country’s racial past, this ethnic studies bill is still in place in Minnesota. It is the product of four generations of struggle by the Japanese American community. So I owe it to my grandparents, my parents, my children and my grandchild, and to those who are fighting against injustice in all our communities, to continue that fight.