Episode 20: Creative Change

From Utah, Rebecca speaks with people who are using their art to close the book on solitary confinement, achieve comprehensive immigration reform, and more. Subscribe to Off-Kilter on iTunes.

There’s been no shortage of news this week, between the healthcare debate, a House GOP budget proposal that slashes nearly every program that helps families afford the basics to pay for millionaire tax cuts, and Sean Spicer’s resignation. But Rebecca spent the week far away from all of that at Sundance, alongside dozens of incredible artists, comedians, writers, documentarians, and others using art and culture to make change, at the Opportunity Agenda’s annual Creative Change retreat. This week’s episode features a few of Rebecca’s conversations with some of those artists — who are working to close the book on solitary confinement, achieve comprehensive immigration reform, stop police brutality, and much, much more, all through cultural means.

This week’s guests:

• Betsy Richards, Opprtunity Agenda
• Brer Rabbit, Flobots
• L. Kasimu Harris, writer, photographer, videographer
• Katie Bowers, Harry Potter Alliance
• jackie sumell, artist, organizer, and prison abolitionist

For more on this week’s topics:

• More on the Harry Potter Alliance (who wouldn’t want more?!)
• Take a trip through New Orleans’s Solitary Gardens
• Visit L. Kasimu Harris’s work
• Who are the Flobots?

This program aired on July 21, 2017.

REBECCA VALLAS (HOST): You’re listening to Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. There’s been a ton going on this week with the health care debate continuing the rage on in the halls of congress and in communities across the country. House Republicans released a budget that would slash nearly every program that helps families afford the basics, all to pay for millionaire’s tax cuts under the banner of building a better America. New shoes dropped everyday and nearly every hour it seems regarding Trump and Russia, and new evidence uncovered R. Kelly’s role in luring young women to what family members described to police as “an abusive cult,” and much more. But I spent the week far away from all of that at Sundance in Park City Utah, best know for the eponymous film festival, Sundance is also home to an annual gathering of artists and activists working at the intersection of art, pop culture and social justice, brought together by the Opportunity Agenda. I had the honor of being part of the group who spent the past week here. And over the past several days met dozens of incredible artists, comedians, writers, documentarians and others using art and culture to make change.

I’ll admit, I arrived as a skeptic. You want me to spend a week out of the office amid so much swirling in Washington, talking about art, I said to myself while boarding a plane the Utah. But the past week has opened my eyes to a whole world of amazing work going on in New Orleans, Los Angeles, New York and even in my own backyard in Washington D.C. With the goal of ending poverty and hunger, closing the book on solitary confinement, achieving comprehensive immigration reform, stopping police brutality and much, much more, all through cultural means. For this week’s episode I’m excited to share a few of those conversations with you, starting with Betsy Richards. She’s one of the amazing people at the Opportunity Agenda who fuels this gathering every year.

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I’m sitting with Betsy Richards. She directs the Opportunity Agenda’s creative strategies and public programs and she leads their national anti-poverty initiative. But she’s also the engine as part of that work behind this amazing retreat that I’ve been at this week and that I’ve been so privileged to be part of. Betsy, thank you so much for joining the show.

BETSY RICHARDS: Of course, I’m so happy to be on it.

VALLAS: And for what you do. So I will admit, I was a skeptic, I didn’t know what this retreat was about. I think I thought I understood what it meant to explore the intersection of art and pop culture and social justice and activism but I found out this week I had no idea what that meant and what that intersection really looked like and who was working at it. How did you get to this intersection and why does it matter to you and why should it matter to the listeners who maybe share my skepticism from a few days ago?

RICHARDS: Well I think it’s one of those things that we already know in our hearts is that culture precedes politics. That if you don’t have people believing and engaged with empathy, with excitement, with what’s popular, with what, the stories that excite them, the laws that we pass don’t necessarily have teeth. People have to believe, they have to be engaged, they have to, and I come from an arts background. I was at the Ford Foundation with the president of the organization, he was in human rights. And I was in arts and culture but all of my work has always been at the intersection of kind of, furthering the voices of artists into the make the world we want to see. And that’s a really, really important thing, kind of, that artists do that others don’t do, reports don’t do. They have, this world of imagination. You have to have an imagination and vision. We all have it with inside of ourselves. But it’s something artists really spend their time in is kind of, not only talking about what we don’t want, but what we want to see.

VALLAS: So make the case. For someone who says, “yeah, you know, art is what I do in my spare time. I watch TV, I go to see films, if I live in DC maybe I even go to E St. I even go to see art-y kind of films. But that’s not something that’s part of my work, work.” What’s your case for the person who says that the two are actually mostly separate?

RICHARDS: Well I think creativity is in all of us. It’s something that we, it’s a value that guides our organization but I think within the worlds of business, within the worlds of advocacy, it’s really important to be in touch with our creativity. Doctor King said we’re going to need creative extremists in the letter from the Birmingham Jail. It really takes us tapping into imagination and creativity, so this retreat that we’re at, upholds artists and entertainers in their practice but it also invites persons like yourself, that work really more in a specific advocacy space into tap into their creativity. And one of the theories of change behind this retreat is really that we work in isolation from each other and that often artists don’t know how to tap into the advocacy that is behind the kind of, the stories that they’re telling that are about changing the world. It could be translated into systemic stories. And advocates don’t necessarily know how to work with artists and understand about their processes. So I think they’re really complementary parts of the same thing. And just coming from different places, and if we are going to succeed, if we’re going to have solutions we need to put the two sides of ourselves together.

VALLAS: And that will get a lot more concrete the more that folks get to listen through this episode to conversations I’m having with artists who use all different kinds of mediums to advance social justice in many different forms. But the last question I want to ask you is why do this at Sundance? What is the significance of doing this here, a place that I’ve never been and a place that’s like nowhere I’ve ever been. But which means a lot of different things to different people.

RICHARDS: Well the first two years of this retreat were at other places. And I joined the organization the first year we came to Sundance. And we were invited here by one of our partners, [INAUDIBLE] who at the time, who is now at Ford and at the time was head of documentary film. Sundance has a legacy of upholding the arts but upholding kind of social justice in a particular commitment to the environment. So it is made for that, it is made to, as a, as both a kind of resting and relaxing place but also a place to nurture artists and talk about the environment. So it was perfect home for us and also I think there is really something, this is, we call this a retreat, not a conference. There is really something about getting people out of their silos and putting them in a place that is this beautiful. I know you can’t see this on the radio.

VALLAS: The wind is blowing, you can kind of hear it a little bit, right? It’s beautiful, breeze is coming, the trees are sort of swaying a little bit. There is mountains, blue sky, you know you’re jealous, I know I’d be jealous if I were listening to this and I weren’t here right now.

RICHARDS: But it really does make a difference in creating that connection and kind of tapping into the two sides of ourselves that we really need to kind of super power social change.

VALLAS: Betsy, thank you so much for what you do, for powering this amazing experience and for bringing me together with so many people who are so much cooler than I am this week. [LAUGHTER] And thank you for being on the show.

RICHARDS: Well thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So don’t go away, lots of conversations with artists using all types of mediums to advance social justice. More Off-Kilter after the break.

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VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Still talking with amazing artists and change agents at the Creative Change retreat at Sundance. And another amazing person whom I’ve met here is Katie Bowers. She’s the campaigns director for something called the Harry Potter Alliance. It’s a non-profit that turns fans into heroes. Katie, thanks so much for joining the show.

KATIE BOWER: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So I’m going to admit, I’ve never heard of the Harry Potter Alliance before this retreat and before meeting you and hearing about what you guys do. What does it mean to turn fans into heroes?

BOWERS: Oh yeah, so the thing that’s so fun about the Harry Potter Alliance is our work is really on helping fans connect with issues that either they feel passionate about and don’t know how to make a difference on or that they have never heard of but it’s something that becomes really important to them in their life. We use metaphor from the story or like chunks of different stories, not just Harry Potter to talk about this is how injustice plays out in the stories you love. This is how oppression plays out in the stories you love and this is how the heroes that you admire, that you hold in your heart responded. And so like, these issues, they aren’t made up, they exist in the real world and you can be just like your hero. So we talk thought how to be like a hero, basically, and to be one.

VALLAS: So give an example of what that looks like in practice. You’ve worked with various organizations and advocates who specialize in certain issues but who maybe haven’t incorporated culture or pop culture into their work. Give me an example of what this looks like in practice.

BOWERS: Yeah, so kind of one of our biggest, proudest successes is a campaign that we did called ‘Not in Harry’s Name’ that was looking at chocolate and chocolate that Warner Brothers produces, specifically, under the Harry Potter brand. And any who’s read the stories knows that chocolate in the books is a force for good. It’s like this healing power, and in the real world chocolate is connected with a lot of unfair labor practices, child labor, slave labor, it’s hard to know if the chocolate you’re eating, how it has negatively impacted other people. And so one of our volunteers said hey we should try and make all Harry Potter chocolate fair trade. And we thought, oh that’s really cool we should totally do that! We don’t know what that means. [LAUGHTER] And so we got to work with some really amazing advocacy groups. One of the really big ones Walk Free, who works on issues of slavery around the world. And our connection as to be engaging fans in talking about this issue that like, never would have come up and it was huge and through that partnership and the work of many other people working on this campaign, all Harry Potter chocolate is fairtrade now or is certified. So you can feel good about the chocolate you eat. And that’s the work that advocates and fans did together.

VALLAS: So how did you get involved with this work? And how did the Harry Potter Alliance come to be? What’s the origin story?

BOWERS: So our origin story is that Andrew Slack and a couple of his friends, Paul DeGeorge, [INAUDIBLE] kind of saw all this energy going to Harry Potter, this way like 12 years ago. The books and the movies were coming out and they thought wouldn’t it be great if all of this energy poured into fandom was getting poured into social justice? And how can we use pop culture and humor and story to engage people on these issues? And it was really successful, I think because there are a lot of people who like me, when we find the Harry Potter Alliance, feel like these two pieces of ourselves, of like I love Harry Potter and geeky things and Star Wars and everything else and I care deeply about social justice and just like an intrinsic sense of like fairness and wanting things to be better for everyone. And those pieces of your life have been separate before and all the sudden, oh my God there are people who are combining them? Like that’s exciting, I have to be a part of it. And so that helped build the momentum of the organization. So I started there as a volunteer four years and came onto staff a couples years after that.

VALLAS: So what is it like working on something that is, I don’t want to say it’s not real but it’s a fantasy world that was constructed by a brilliant author. But that’s the basis for most of what you guys do everyday. What is it like having a fantasy world as the basis for trying to change the real world?

BOWERS: I think it’s great for a couple of reasons. Like one, it’s a really easy way to connect with people who are not already connect with activism and who haven’t thought deeply about the way injustice is woven into our lives. And it’s a easy way to like have examples, so it’s a teaching tool but one of the other reasons I really love it is because it’s an instant community builder, like people come into the work and you might, you don’t feel that sense of awkwardness that you feel when you meet new people because you know like, we love Harry Potter, we can talk about what a Hogwarts house is. You have an instant bond with people so it makes doing that harder work of self-examination and examination of systems and like pushing back against things, it makes all of it easier because you have like this built in love and community already.

VALLAS: Are people more readily able and even reflexively able to be good people and sort of good social citizens when they’re thinking and talking and processing about a world that isn’t real than they are in the real world?

BOWERS: I think it’s not necessarily that it’s like talking about a world that isn’t real but I think it’s talking about like, we tell these stories over and over again, whatever they are. If they’re Harry Potter or they’re stories from your family that you grew up telling or stories from culture, we tell them over and over again because they have these things in them that our culture, or that like we hold to be very important. So they’re based in love, they’re based in friendship, they’re based in like taking action when something is wrong. Like so often in the real world when we see something bad happening we freeze or we like don’t know what to do but in a story the heroes always know what to do and so we start to see that in, it’s clear we value that. And so I think when people are thinking about action through the lens of story, like you already know what it is you want to be. You want to be like a hero and a hero does you know, x, they stand up for what’s right, they stand up for their friends, they take action, they don’t freeze and so I think it gives you a frame already of knowing what to do rather than what often happens in the real world where you feel a little bit lost and don’t know what to do.

VALLAS: I’m thinking as I ask that, in part about one of the storylines in the Harry Potter books. I’m gonna assume that most of my listeners have read them.

BOWERS: Spoiler warning.

VALLAS: Read or been exposed to them through the movies or something. But there’s a family of characters in the books who are the Weasleys. And Ron Weasley who is one of Harry’s best friends, they’re even roommates at points, he comes from a low income background and that’s made pretty clear in the books. But at the same time, as you’re reading, characters who are mean to Ron or who make fun of him because of that are portrayed as villains. One in particular is Simon Malfoy and his family and they’re very wealthy.

BOWER: Draco Malfoy.

VALLAS: Right right. And I’m wondering, right Draco Malfoy, thank you, thank you. Draco Malfoy. But I’m thinking about that as sort of an example of one where does that help readers think about and even see modeled behavior that maybe we don’t see as reflexively in the real world?

BOWERS: Yeah, I absolutely, I think about it all the time, like why is it that as a culture, we so identify and root for the underdog in literature and in like film and story. But we don’t always connect that to the real world. And so I think part of that is just there is so much talk on TV and maybe in your families that like is reinforcing these negative stereotypes about what it is to be poor. And so these models, like in the Harry Potter book where it is not a negative thing, like Ron does feel shame about it. But his everyone close to him in his life you know, is very clear that it isn’t a bad thing, the family is not lazy. The family is full of love and very active and awesome and the people who reinforce those stereotypes are the problem. I think like seeing that example, because you don’t see it in real life makes it powerful in literature and having more examples like that is, would be powerful for our culture.

VALLAS: What issue areas have you guys not worked on yet that you are just absolutely thirsting to work on if there are people out there to partner with you?

BOWERS: Oh wow what a great question. We have worked on a lot of different issues. I think one of the things we’re really interested in doing more of is climate justice because that’s something that we haven’t dug in on. It has incredible intersections with poverty and race and just the future of all of our lives. So that’s something we’re very excited about for sure. Just doing more with everything racial justice, feminism, if you’re listening right now and you have a great idea you just Harry Potter and you want to work with us, get in contact with us. We’re thehpalliance.org. Or you can just google Harry Potter Alliance, we’re the only one. Because chances are if you come to us and say I really want to work you on this, we’re going to try and figure out a way to do it because we’re just, we’re excited, we have the big hearts of heroes and we want to be able to help everyone else develop their hero’s heart.

VALLAS: Well I know you and I are already planning on working together so something for other folks who are listening right now to think about. Katie Bowers the campaigns director for the Harry Potter Alliance which turns fans into heroes. Katie, thanks so much for joining Off-Kilter.

BOWERS: Thank you.

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VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas. Back with more from the Creative Change retreat at Sundance. Another amazing artist that I have met here and spoken with is L. Kasimu Harris. He’s a storyteller who uses writing, photography and video to push the narrative. Thank you so much for joining the show.

L. KASIMU HARRIS: Thank you for having me.

VALLAS: So you’ve spoken here at this retreat about your work in the area of photojournalism, but also something that you call constructive reality. What is the difference and what does that mean in work that involves using photography as your medium?

HARRIS: Constructive realities, yeah. My process of storytelling has been photojournalism. I started off, well I’m still a writer, so I went to graduate school for journalism and then my approach to photography had always been photojournalism where you can’t alter anything, everything as is, it’s a certain level of ethics that you have to have. And sticking to the truth. So that’s a beautiful in photojournalism. I don’t have to work as a photojournalist all the time. But I still want to incorporate narratives. And when you remove yourself from photojournalism you get to unlock a lot of things. So constructive realities for me are real stories, real narratives, but the visuals I get to stage, I get to construct, I get to shape the narrative visually the way I want to.

VALLAS: So give me an example of some of your work that falls under the header of photojournalism.

HARRIS: Most of my work in “The 10 Year Journey: Reflections of Family, Identity and New Orleans,” which is a solo photography that I did for the ten year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. So I documented just family, New Orleans, if I went to a second line I took that as is, whatever news events that I felt were important is taken as is. You know, photojournalism is not asking someone to, “Hey can you stand this way?” or “Can you move this? Can you change that?” So that’s where a lot of my work is in photojournalism.

VALLAS: So thinking about some of the photojournalism work that you’ve done telling that story of ten years after Katrina, this may sound like an obvious question but as someone who cares about art but who also cares deeply about using art for purposes of social justice, why did you think it was important to go to the place that Hurricane Katrina happened ten years afterward?

HARRIS: Well I’m from New Orleans so when Hurricane Katrina happened, I was in graduate school so it was my first year in graduate school and I knew I wanted to do a thesis project, and I wanted to write a thesis and someone told me early on if you find a topic that you’re really passionate about, everything you do in graduate school, make it about that. So therefore when you get to the end of the finish line you have a lot, a big body of work. So I started going back to New Orleans forty five days after Katrina and that’s when I became a photographer. I started using photojournalism to tell stories. And it’s just the documentation of going back as much as I can and I moved back to the city in 2008. I worked briefly as a writer at a newspaper. And that didn’t work out so well. But then after that, it just was a commitment to telling the story and telling it in a way that I hadn’t seen before. I thought a lot of it was parachute journalism, or a lot of it where they really did up the disaster point. I think it was important to document the city as it is, because my mother would tell me about Hurricane Betsy that happened in the ’60s. But I just couldn’t, she would tell me being on a roof of a house, you know, 10, 12 feet, 13, 15 feet of water and I couldn’t really see it in my mind. So I think it is important to document those things but I think that it was overdone so I wanted to tell a different narrative and I wanted to use photojournalism and writing to do that.

VALLAS: So what’s the narrative that you felt wasn’t being told that you need to tell?

HARRIS: The humanity. The beauty, people, the story of the good people coming back, some of the adversities that they faced. But they were determined to overcome them. Folk determined to come back and vote. Folk determined to continue practicing their cultural traditions, be it food, black masking Indians or second lines. So those things as they were committed to that, I was committed to them.

VALLAS: And what did you see ten years after? What was it like there?

HARRIS: Well I would say, it’s almost, I think, we’re back. We’re back. I mean, families are back, businesses are back, the city has changed drastically, it’s been flipped a lot. I think that it’s always been a predominately black city, but I think that the stakeholders a lot of them were black. But one of the things, like the whole black middle class is wiped out with the education, where all the black teachers were fired and then you came in and they had charter schools. So I didn’t really explore that much in the “10 year journey” a little bit. But I did that more in the project, the constructive realities, “War on Benighted.” The city, like most places in the world, is gentrified. But it’s still New Orleans. And I think New Orleans is fighting to stay New Orleans. Fighting to change, fighting to remain, and fighting to move forward to the future. So I hope that my documentation has and will continue to illustrate that.

VALLAS: Another topic that you’ve explored through your photography has been police involved shootings of black men. And that’s one of the areas of your work where you’ve explored constructive reality. Tell me a little bit about that and how you arrived at the need not to just use photojournalism in exploring that issue.

HARRIS: It was 2014 when I first kind of, I reached a tipping point personally in my emotions, I was tired of seeing it on TV, and it was my response, what can I do? And what type of lasting impact could I have? You know, I think protests are good, it’s a lot of things that are good. But I wanted to use my talents as best to try to make some change. Photojournalism wouldn’t work for that because I wasn’t at the scene of the crimes and I wanted to go back throughout history. But I started at a point of 1955, where on record lynchings pretty much stopped, alright? And so I picked up at that. And my, what I’m arguing is that now this is a new lynching. So lynchings was a thing, it was a public spectacle, a lot of people came. Now with the advent of video devices, mobile video devices, we have become spectators to what’s happening. Because you can see it on your timeline, you can see it on the news. So I just wanted to examine that and humanize these people. To let them know that they’re not that much different than you and I. these could be noble people that had be shot dead.

VALLAS: So what are some of the examples of some of those constructive realities that you’ve assembled and tell me a little bit about them.

HARRIS: Well it started off with George W. Lee, who was killed in Belzoni, Mississippi in 1955. He was actually Reverend George Lee, he was just merely trying to get people to vote. Apparently he was a progressive man, being a reverend, he was also a grocery store owner. So this is at a time of deep oppression, and wasn’t a criminal at all. But because he was ambitious, because he was trying to do what he knew to be right, he was killed. The last person I explored was Walter Scott. He was a, he had served in the U.S. Coast Guard and in broad daylight, I mean he was shot like a worthless dog, a cur. It’s just crazy that a human can treat another human like that. And I wanted to show people, like this is how ludicrous this is, and so I explored that. Another one that hit most close to home was Henry Glover, who was killed in New Orleans by the police department. Obviously everyone has been killed by the police department but in the way that he was killed and the gruesomeness. Not only did they kill him they also burned his body.

VALLAS: And I’ll admit, this was a story I had never heard before until you actually spoke about it at this retreat.

HARRIS: Right, you would think that the people who are there to protect us wouldn’t treat us like that. So I think it’s just trying to illustrate like, this is what’s going on and I’m trying to make it where no one could dismiss it. So the project isn’t like, punching over the face, but I think it’s moreso showing you a mirror into humanity, one where you should be able to look, well I hope that people can look, accept and try to make a difference.

VALLAS: It’s hard to explain a visual thing like a photograph on a medium like radio or podcasts but help me describe what some of the work, for example, describing Mr. Glover’s horrible, tragic and completely just abysmal and inhumane death looks like in your photos.

HARRIS: Ok. One of the more popular pictures I saw of Henry Glover was in a white tuxedo. So in this video, in a white tuxedo and for all 8 minutes I explored, except one, it’s them walking, them facing the camera, them looking. So for Henry Glover he has on his white tuxedo and I’m in New Orleans and it looks like a swampy area. Obviously a reference to being close to the Mississippi river. It’s just him facing the camera. It’s him looking, it’s him walking, because I’m using trees as a portal in a sense, to kind of go through time but also as a reference to lynching. So that’s what it looks like.

VALLAS: For folks who are interested in finding your work, and want to see and hear more about what you do, where can people find more?

HARRIS: It’s LKasimuHarris.com, that’s LKasimuHarris.Com.

VALLAS: And we’ll have that in the syllabus as well. Thank you so much for joining the show and for sharing your amazing work with us here.

HARRIS: Thank you.

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VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas broadcasting from Sundance where the Creative Change retreat is happening. I’ve met some amazing people, one of those people is jackie sumell, she’s an organizer, she’s an artist, and she’s a prison abolitionist. jackie, tell me a little bit about how you got interested in working on prison abolition work and how you got into working with people behind bars.

JACKIE SUMELL: Thank you so much for having me, Rebecca, it’s a real honor to speak with you. It was a really unexpected journey and it’s nothing I think my over-educated middle class mind would have scripted. It was about 15 years ago and I was a graduate student at Stanford University and this organizer that I had a crush was organizing this event and he said there’s this man coming from, who was just released from Angola Prison in this state called Louisiana after spending 29 years in solitary confinement for a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed. Do you want to go? And all I heard was, do you want to go? And so I just sort of like, was on my way to this event which was being hosted at the Luggage Store Gallery and I remember very vividly being cut off by an SUV, I was riding my bicycle and I got cut off, and I sort of like pulled my earrings out as if I was going to throw down with this person and was like snaking my head. [LAUGHTER]

Tons of expletives and I was literally going to fisticuffs with a total stranger for something they may or may not have seen, right? Cutting me off. And then I reapplied my makeup and climbed up the stairs of the Luggage Store Gallery and sat in front of a man who spent 29 years in a six foot by nine foot cell for a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed. And he wasn’t angry. And I was like, shit, I have something to learn from this guy. And you know, that really was the beginning of a complete reorientations of my priorities and reorganizing what was valuable and important and reorganizing what I loved. And it happened just in that moment. It was really trusting that there were gifts to be given in these worlds, in these realms that I was told not to pay attention.

VALLAS: So a documentary was made coming out of this work but that’s not the only medium that you have been involved with using. In terms of art to raise awareness about solitary and about the need for prison abolition. Tell me a little about the need for some of the art that’s come out of that experience.

SUMELL: Well I try not to be so rigid about how I define my practice and I think that sometimes we are conditioned in the West to really compartmentalize our identities. I’m jackie, I’m a teacher, I’m jackie, I’m a yoga student, I’m jackie, I’m an artist, I’m jackie, I’m an activist. But we’re also so many other things at the very same moment and that’s a very important idea to honor in terms of the way that we present these complex issues like hyper incarceration, over-sentencing, cruel and unusual punishments like solitary confinement. And in relationship to the folks who are condemned to the very worst conditions, they are much more than the worst thing they’ve ever done. Some of them are innocent, some of them are not and so part of what I do as an artist is really try to expand the space that we engage or invite these stories. And sort of recognize that within our own complexity. And sometimes that means in the way that I work, there’s this through line of compassion that I try to bring in all the different realms where people might want to sort of pigeonhole me or identify me.

VALLAS: Well one of the mediums that you’ve used and you talked a little bit about this at this retreat is actually that of a garden. What’s the symbolism, what’s the meaning of a garden and how does that possibly relate to prison?

SUMELL: Yeah, this is another really unexpected journey. So Herman Wallace spent 41 years in a six foot by nine foot cell for a crime he couldn’t have possibly committed in the state of Louisiana and he was released on October 1st, 2013, he died on October 4th, 2013. So three days of freedom, which another one of those moments where you can really look at it and see this complex system of emotions because it’s such a tragedy and it’s such a miracle. And rather than allowing those emotions to cancel each other, like create space so that we can see them both. He died free surrounded by those of us who loved him most. And I had just spent the last 12 years of my life working with him to design his dream home, a vision that he was creating from inside a 6 foot by 9 foot cell. And one of the things that he prioritized in his house was gardens, he always wanted gardens. Rooftop gardens, gardens in the front of the lawn, gardens in the back.

And it was this, there’s this Audrey Hepburn quote, to plant a garden is to believe in the tomorrow. And I think when you have sort of expectations that you project on folks who are serving their sentences in solitary confinement, you know, there’s sort of this broad stroke of them being the worst of the worst. To have a human being who could not have possibly committed the crime for which he was condemned in a 6 foot by 9 foot cell for 4 decades, to still believe in tomorrow is a testament to his humanity and his ability to love and to believe in a better future. And in the wake of his passing, when Herman joined the ancestors, one way to honor that legacy was to honor his gardens. And so I’m sort of adopting the language of gardening as a mechanism to seed hope, to seed compassion, to seed love but also to talk about the reality of torture. So the garden beds are 6 foot by 9 foot, they’re same size and blueprint of solitary cells. And they’re co-created by folks serving their sentences in long term solitary confinement and volunteers like ourselves on the outside.

And in many ways that sort of collaboration opens the complexity of emotions when you’re engaging with folks who have been dehumanized and kept in a cage for 6 months, 6 years, 6 decades. And so part of the intention with like really bringing the language of gardening is not only hope and possibility and rehumanization but to also suggest that there are alternatives to incarceration to deal with these very, very intense and sometimes violent situations. And to recognize that it’s not going to be resolved with the sheer motivation of punishment, of domination and of control. That there has to be regeneration, there’s only life after death, right. And there’s the experience of gardening, there’s so many failures from personal experience, so much of my garden has been unsuccessful. And then so much to rejoice about and you learn all of that when you’re intimate with nature. I also think one of the most beautiful, sort of, outcomes of this project is that each one of those solitary garden beds becomes a portrait of the human being that’s been condemned to a cage. And so in the last year we’ve been able to collaborate with a few folks who are in solitary confinement and just for example, one person asked that the gardens, because they are in proximity to a school, that they grow food, because they grew up hungry. And they didn’t want any other child to be hungry and could that food go to the kids who are playing in the solitary gardens, or playing in and around the solitary gardens in New Orleans, Louisiana. That is a compassionate individual in spite of everything they’ve been through. Another person, his mother is sick and has leukemia, and he very specifically picked all of these plants that have medicinal values to help somebody fight cancer.

And so I think if you don’t know anything about the human being or their history or anything like that and you just recognize that the intention that’s going into their garden comes from a very human place, this ability to love. Then it becomes a remarkable journey that maybe challenges, that diffuses some of the sort of stereotypes or projections you might have for someone who is incarcerated.

VALLAS: jackie sumell is an organizer. She’s an artist, she’s a prison abolitionist and she’s one of the people responsible for the amazing project that is Solitary Gardens. jackie, where can people learn more about it if they want to go find it in New Orleans?

SUMELL: Thank you so much. So the Solitary Gardens are actually a park in the lower 9th ward in New Orleans. Right now we have ten beds blooming. The idea is that the project will become a national effort and so if you are interested in hosting a garden bed yourself, you can email grow@solitarygardens.org. Check out the website, it’s still under construction, very much like the project, this is our first year of a public presence. The website is solitarygardens.org. We also have a pretty awesome instagram feeds where you start to see some of the things that folks are growing, and the park itself in New Orleans is a really beautiful space for contemplation and to engage with issues surrounding mass incarceration and cruel and unsual punishment like solitary confirement.

VALLAS: And the instagram handle and that email address will be in our syllabus. jackie, thanks so much for joining Off-Kilter and thank you for the amazing work that you do.

SUMELL: Thank you Rebecca, this was great.

[MUSIC]

VALLAS: You’re listening to Off-Kilter, I’m Rebecca Vallas, still broadcasting from Sundance at the Creative Change retreat. Another amazing artist I’ve met here is Brer Rabbit, and he’s part of something called the Flobots, I’ll let him explain what the Flobots are.

BRER RABBIT: Flobots are a live hip hop band with a very strong social justice orientation. We try to provoke questions and we’re hoping that when we’re doing our songs that we’re not trying to tell people how to think but encouraging them to do so. That’s what our hope is. We want people to have their own soap box, we don’t need to give it to them. But in the process we’re hope we’re provoking with song.

VALLAS: So why music and song as part of social justice?

RABBIT: Because that’s how Johnny Clive and myself actually kind of grew up. Both of our families were very involved in the civil rights movement. And in the civil rights movement you saw song being paired, being used as a piece of technology, as a way of getting everybody to participate, as a way of having a group of strangers feel collective power as a way to demonstrate invitation, your emotional messaging of the moment and of your cause. And that stuff is just too valuable to let go. So in the process of being musicians we’ve been digging deeper and deeper into that.

VALLAS: I want you to talk more about music as technology.

RABBIT: Absolutely.

VALLAS: What does that really mean and what’s your call to action for people who maybe view themselves as musical people, people who even listen to music, why is, how is that a form of technology when you’re talking about activism

RABBIT: Absolutely. A lot of times, so in this case when I’m talking about technology as a method of problem solving. So one of the main problems is when you bring a bunch of people together who are outraged, how do you make them feel like they’re together? How do you move them in the same accord since you don’t have the time to sit down and train every single person. How can you imbue that with purpose? And all we have to do is look back at our history and every single one of us comes from some tradition where at one point in time, all of us sang. Like we can go back three generations, most likely, you could go back three generations of anybody, I don’t care where they’re from, there is probably a room where a bunch of people are sitting down singing or playing instruments. There’s a reason for that; because it’s a great way to bring people together and to be more technical, music is a beautiful way to initiate a shift of state. A shift of emotional state. If you get a room full of people and you get together and you’re about to have a two hour long talk, and you go into the talk, the minute the powerpoint goes on you’ll see people like start checking out.

VALLAS: Glaze over, all eyes glaze over.

RABBIT: You take that same group of people and you get them all to sing and it’s something, you introduce it in such a way with the context that they can get behind it, they will be invigorated and feel more connected immediately. It’s just the way that we’re written as far as the way, we’ve organized ourselves around music for millennia. Music used to be, and for the history of our society, most of the time that music was not something that was sold. It was something that we participated and used because it works to bring us together. So when people get together there would be music, that’s how it used to be. So we’re hardwired for that. And that’s why I’ve been so passionate about ancient technology that very quickly can get people on the same emotional accord. And right now in this day and age, that’s essential technology.

VALLAS: Now you actually did this with us last night.

RABBIT: Yes.

VALLAS: There were, or two nights ago. There were a group of us and we were all kind of at a show, people were all showcasing their work. And you were the last act, and I think I expected to sit there and watch and listen to you. But that’s not what you did at all.

RABBIT: No.

VALLAS: Tell the listeners who weren’t there a little bit about what you did.

RABBIT: I’m sorry that I’m going to have to explain it. [LAUGHTER] because one of the things, a lot of times in trainings we get so theoretical and I used to be an elementary school teacher and there’s a point in time where you just have to show it. And one of the big factors that we see is that in America specifically we are trained to be silent. We’re trained now to raise our voices. You ask like, when do you feel most comfortable singing? Like I’m actually asking you.

VALLAS: Well, at karaoke. You may not know this, I happen to be an award winning member of the second place city wide karaoke team, district karaoke in DC. My listeners know this because we’ve talked about it.

RABBIT: What’s your song?

VALLAS: I have a lot of songs.

RABBIT: What’s the bring the house down song?

VALLAS: One of our winning songs and it’s not a solo song it’s a trio is “Hold On” by Wilson Phillips.

RABBIT: Oh nice!

VALLAS: It’s an anthem.

RABBIT: It has to be a trio.

VALLAS: Gets people going.

RABBIT: It absolutely has to be a trio. [LAUGHTER] That makes perfect sense. So other than karaoke, when do you really feel comfortable singing?

VALLAS: Um, I feel comfortable singing in the shower. I feel comfortable singing sometimes on a stage, I did musical theater when I was growing up but I feel comfortable singing with other people.

RABBIT: So like you had the musical background, sometimes you’ll feel comfortable. But one of the things that you also said was in the shower. Now a lot of people say, if they do sing, they’ll say like in the shower or in the car. And when I extract that, it’s like, when I’m sure nobody else can hear me is when most people are comfortable raising their voices. So this activity that we do, we take a bunch of people, most of them are not like yourself, who would like feel comfortable, but they, [INAUDIBLE]. So we do this whole thing, this activity that we came up with called the “sing down.”

VALLAS: And this is what you did the other night.

RABBIT: This is what we did the other night. Where we just get people very quickly, we don’t give them much information, we split the room in half, tell them to come up with a team name very quickly. They come up with a team name very quickly, and then the next thing we do is we give them the assignments. Alright now you and your two groups, you’re going to have to come up with a song that you can sing almost immediately. Like come up with a song super quickly. Not the whole thing because nobody knows the words to all the songs. [LAUGHTER] Like karaoke shows us this. The third verse is always some rough stuff, right?

VALLAS: You didn’t know the bridge, you never know the bridge!

[LAUGHTER]

RABBIT: Just some chorus, some aspect of it. People come up with that, takes them a little bit of time. And then it’s like we’re about to go, but something that you need to know, once you’re done singing the song, this is not just a one on one type of thing. We need you to keep going. So while the other group is singing you need to come up with the next song and when they finish you need to be ready. And the whole thing is like, set up as a nice light competition but you’re just trying to, you’re trying to overwhelm the other side.

VALLAS: Felt like “Pitch Perfect” but with lower stakes.

RABBIT: Yes, with lower stakes and less choreography.

VALLAS: But why do you do this? It was fun, we all enjoyed ourselves, but there was a bigger goal there.

RABBIT: Absolutely. So the biggest goal is to show how proximate our connection actually is. A lot of time activists in particular will hold and mythologize the southern freedom movement. And say, “well if we had that kind of cultural network, if we had like the black church like they did back then or if we had like the labor unions like they did back then we would have the songs.” And what we demonstrate with that is immediately like look, we didn’t give you any time at all. And in 45 minutes, you kept on going, we could’ve been going for an hour, still would’ve been fun. So we obviously, even though we’re from all these other places, we have this cultural network in common. That’s where those freedom songs came from. They came from the network and you just changed the words. So we can do the very same thing. But then also what I show is after everybody’s like having fun forgetting everything, forgetting that they’re not singers, any of this stuff and they’re sweating and they’re dancing and like singing their hearts out. I’m like so how do you feel right now? Are you in a different state than when you began? Look how easy it was to get here. Why wouldn’t we use this tool?

And once again I want you all to raise your hands, all of you who said you were afraid, you were petrified of singing in public. What did y’all just do? Now it’s not like I sat down on like some therapeutic couch with y’all, we didn’t unpack all this crap. We don’t have time for that. But we don’t need it. When we leverage the power of willing community, people can step into these places because we’re all getting each other’s back. We’re not doing it alone and we’re not freaking perform. There’s a difference, and the music that we’re trying to do in these situations is not performance, right. It’s a demonstration of power but it’s not a performance. You don’t have to get all the notes right. You just have to kind of believe it and enjoy it. And go deep into the emotion of whatever it is that you’re doing and we do that activity just to prove it. So people can feel it, they know it. The data is already there and it’s like we can do this anytime. We can bring this to the streets, we can bring this to our dinner tables. Why not use this tool? And that was the main reason we did that activity, and you know, it legitimate is fun and it feels like something.

VALLAS: So people may be envisioning protests and marches and things that they’ve been part of probably in the last several weeks or months given the level of enthusiasm and activism among even people who’ve never been part of these kinds of movements before. And song is sometimes part of that so maybe that’s part of what people are thinking about in their heads right now is, yeah yeah yeah, we use music already. What is your argument for what we should be doing that you’re not already seeing happening as part of activism?

RABBIT: Planning for the emotional trajectory of your movement. So don’t just use the songs, look at where you all are emotionally, what’s your emotional state, and where do you want people to be at the end? That is a trajectory of power. If you’re able to deliberately take people from one state to the next, then you’re also demonstrating how you have the transformative power of your movement to move things. As a teacher, when I was teaching math, I had to give my students little successes everyday so they could become lifelong learners. I don’t want them to just be doing algebra for that year. I want them to have a relationship with algebra that keeps them curious and inquisitive. I want people to be curious and inquisitive about their power. And all of the arts are ancient technologies in this way. It’s just the one that I’m most familiar with and one I’ve been studying has been music. But there are all of these art forms that we apparch as technology that keep us together and make us feel powerful. But also it’s not just about, it’s not just the streets. Sometimes it can just be our meeting when people are feeling low. Or in the process of like, we’ve been spending like four or five years exploring this. There’s groups called threshold choirs that sing songs specifically to people who are about to die. Who are about to pass, and that gives meaning and agency even in that moment. So you can sing with your family members with the choir to somebody who is on their deathbed and give them something else. Just the alternative to the very shallow grief rituals that we have right now.

And like these things are all there for us. And so like it’s a constant exploration of something that just makes life richer. And it’s really important that in breaking down the whole idea of performer and performance, that people get to see how it can be, how they can be included in the tradition of music because right now, we kind of treat music like some sort of priesthood. Where only those who are divinely ordained get to participate and otherwise, if you’re not a virtuoso you better shut the hell up. That’s a problem. And so like it’s all of, I feel like the arts in application of movement and in society get to be ways that we practice freedom. And if we don’t do it we’re actually reducing the expression of our lives.

VALLAS: The day that I first actually talked to you at this retreat this week you told me a story and I thought i knew the story behind the song “We Shall Overcome.” And I think a lot of folks think they know the story. But you told me and I want folks to hear this, the kind of much longer and farther reaching backstory that really tells the history of this song. You told me it has legs and origins that go way farther back then I was ever aware. Tell me the story.

RABBIT: And I apologize if anybody gets on the computer, there’s things I’ll make mistakes on. [LAUGHTER] But the original melody is believed to have been traced back to some hymn from like the 1700s called “O Sanctissima.” And I think it’s like the first few line are like

[TO THE MELODY OF “WE SHALL OVERCOME”] “O Sanctissima”

And through the song, the song passed through so many different hands like tobacco workers, different pastors, white and black communities and in the process the song started changing. So at first when it was being sang, it was fast, like,

[FAST CLAPPING] [TO THE MELODY OF “WE SHALL OVERCOME”] “We will overcome.”

You can kind of imagine a banjo or something like that. And then like there was a point in time, I think during the, when the southern freedom movement was in full swing, Pete Seeger tells the story of being at a march and there’s this one woman, I forget her name and I apologize, but she was known as the one who would sing “We will overcome” so slowly.

[TO THE MELODY OF “WE SHALL OVERCOME”] “We will overcome”

But then it had this kind of power to it when it was sung that way, and the Pete Seeger was saying like, his hand in it was he changed the “will” to “shall” because it felt more aspirational. And it passed through like, we’re talking hundreds of years, many hands, many communities, to make the song that is kind of like that tagline of the southern freedom movement. And I think that’s why it also so valuable that we participate now, because “We will overcome” did not come fully formed, like from, sprung from Zeus’s head like Athena or something like that. No, it took time. And what are we missing out on if we aren’t participating with it. One of us might be reconfiguring some Justin Bieber chorus into something else that maybe in 20 years our grandchildren will be using as a liberation anthem for the moon. I don’t know. But we need to keep participating in this process to carry the baton forward so that we have these tools available.

VALLAS: And in the last couple minutes I have with you, what music are you really into right now that you feel is maybe a good example of how music that people don’t think of as traditional resistance music or freedom singing, has the potential to be part of this technology?

RABBIT: Klezmer music, second line music, marching band music. Or even like Balkin stuff and a lot of these Indian wedding music, all of that stuff. There’s certain types of folk music you put it on, it does not matter where you are from, people will move. At my wedding we had like a Balkin second line band, because my wife’s side of the family is from rust belt Michigan. My side of the family is from deep south. And we couldn’t find anything in common but we brought that band in, everybody got loose. And I think that there’s something so irresistible when you get that kind of band together, when you get a second line band together. And I feel like if we start reaching out to these bands that go to honk and stuff like that, I think that we could end up having some marches that people cannot resist. They will find themselves compelled to put their drinks down and join the march because they’re feeling the power, the joy, the energy. And that doesn’t mean that your outrage isn’t in there. I think you can be joyfully outraged, and like even that is intoxicating and is a persuasive argument for people to be like I want to be a part of this. And I do think that those traditional music forms are right now so ripe to being used wholesale in the resistance movement right now. Because I think joy is revolutionary at this point. And I participate in some marches that have that, and I’ve been talking to a bunch of people here about how well that stuff works so I’m eagerly waiting, hoping and putting it out there. All you Klezmer bands, all you second line bands, all you Soca bands, let’s get out in the streets and let’s have a party. Let’s have a party that can’t be stopped.

VALLAS: Brer Rabbit is part of a band called the Flobots and you can find out more about the Flobots where?

RABBIT: At Flobots.com

VALLAS: You make it easy. Thank you so much for joining the show.

RABBIT: Thank you!

VALLAS: And for educating me about a side of music I’d never known.

RABBIT: Oh, it’s my pleasure.

VALLAS: And that does it for this week’s episode of Off-Kilter, powered by the Center for American Progress Action Fund. I’m your host, Rebecca Vallas. The show is produced each week by Eliza Schultz. Find us on Facebook and Twitter @OffKilterShow. And you can find us on the airwaves on the Progressive Voices Network and the We Act Radio network, or anytime as a podcast on iTunes. See you next week.