I am on my way to Santa Fe marveling at the technology that allows me to be online in flight. I slept through the first leg from JFK to Minneapolis struggling with how to finish the piece I am writing on Katherine Dunham. I woke up as the plane touched down with greater clarity than I’ve yet to have over the past few weeks of grappling with the questions at the center of this chapter. Dunham was in my dreams.
I am part of a group of very lucky scholars/artists who are participating in a week long seminar at the School for Advanced Research investigating the intellectual, theoretical, artistic and social justice (just to keep the list manageable) impact of Dunham’s legacy. In the chapter I am (still) working on, I write along the seams of anthropological theory, ethnographic practice, youth cultural studies and dance. Continually challenged by and irritated with my own and others ill defined, overused and implicit interchangeable usage of the terms social justice education and arts activism, I am writing (and dancing) towards what I crave: clearer, more productive definitions, along with greater specificity in the application of the pedagogical and creatively transformative work these terms are meant to represent. Throughout, Dunham serves as frame of reference and guide.
Over the past year and half that I have been living and working in Newark, NJ, I have been sustained by the work with young people who fearlessly dance, write and perform new pathways for realizing community transformation. In the words and movements of these incredible young women and men of BlackLight, I’ve seen the most elevated aspects of who are as a global community. And yet, as buoyed as I am by their passionate and fearless belief in themselves and a city that some would have us believe only a Cory Booker could love, I have to remind myself to not operate from a place of fear. Even after a successful series of events that culminated with a powerful performance in May, as well as the possibility of expansion and new collaborations with other grassroots organizations, I am always anxious about sustainability. Will the kids stay? How will we go on with little to no funding? How do I continue to honor this work and get tenure? Are we really having an impact? does it matter? I have recently begun to realize the arrogance of these questions. These are questions that emerge from a mindset that believes that adults have to “program” and “project” social justice for young people, and that the only way to stay relevant is through the financial support of the very foundations and corporations that necessitate our need to organize and develop radical interventions in the first place.
I have learned so much from the participants of BlackLight in both Detroit and Newark. Most of what I have learned has come from really listening to their brilliance and paying better attention to the way they move through the world outside of the context of our program. One of the first young women to join BlackLight in Newark, Jasmine, is a member of one of the close to a hundred youth-led street teams in Newark. On the surface it looks as if these groups of 40+ young women and men ranging in age from 14-25 are just throwing parties for other young people. Take a closer look and you will see one of the most progressive models of cooperative economics, community building and social networking in our society. The online presence and marketing capacities of the street teams encourage hundreds of young people to come together in peace – dancing, making music and nurturing the type of careful solidarity that leads to (or already is) mobilization. The ways in which Jasmine and others on her team have to navigate city politics and establish relationships with diverse contingencies of adults and young people throughout the greater NJ/NYC area provides them with a greater understanding of how systems work and stronger capacity to affect change in and beyond their communities — this is the real social and political mobility we often just talk about. The philosophy of BlackLight has always already been a part of how young people see their roles in community – a fact that will remain so with or without the structure of a program. But, we have much to learn from one another so instead of thinking of action as something that happens either inside OR outside of BlackLight, much like h0w most of us who care about our public school systems have come to think about education, I understand BlackLight to be everywhere – sometimes ambiguous, sometimes explicit and sometimes an emergent action buried beneath an idea, encased in a feeling. We are always starting somewhere and always moving towards new ends.
The Sexy Walk, The Patty Cake and the other dances that creatively emerge nearly every month out of a collaborative improvisation of street team DJs and the club dancers who bring the DJs playlist to life, are a visible and visceral roadmap of black folks embodied cultural history in the U.S. I love the fact that, as Jasmine told me, a new dance usually hits when someone who is trying to get (perform with skill and a distinctive aesthetic stylo) one of the current popular dances fails and comes up with their own physical riff on the original. That, to me, is the essence of who we are – continually making something newer, flyer, bolder, hotter than what came before….and not for nothing. The money the street teams raise from the parties goes back into the organization and often supports the community in charitable ways , the lifted energy they create is the fuel, the vapor in the air of cities like Newark that keeps us all alive – whether we realize it our not.
In an interview conducted in East St. Louis in 1977, Katherine Dunham talks about being “inculcated with the idea of eliminating social injustice.” We feel you, Katherine. We feel you on our streets. We feel you in our bodies. We feel you as we keep making plans and making art – fearlessly.
All love,
Aimee
