jim crow | The Direction of Intention

Tell The Full Story [on Merely A Thought Monday]

Posted on April 25, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

If you Google Harriet Beecher Stowe you’ll come across a confounding question: Did Harriet Beecher Stowe cause the Civil War?

Think about it. Tease it apart. If the question doesn’t make you shudder ever so slightly, you’re not paying attention to the happenings in our day.

A woman in 1851, a full seventy years before women in our nation had the right to vote, wrote a book depicting “the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans.” She did not write a fantasy. She wasn’t concocting a circumstance. She wrote a book “which highlighted the evils of slavery.” She called attention to a moral horror story.

The question jumps the long and legislated history of slavery in the land of all-men-are-created-equal. It ignores the economic engine that made enslavement of human beings an institution in our nation. It suggests that shining the light, calling attention to the immorality, not the immorality itself, caused the war. The slavery wasn’t the cause, the industry and economics and political drivers had nothing to do with the war. Looking at slavery, calling attention to it, was.

If we close our eyes it doesn’t exist. If we ban the books it will not be part of our history. It’s a game we play with infants. It’s the puerile mentality of Fox news.

“Since January of 2021, 42 states have introduced bills or taken other steps that would restrict teaching critical race theory or limit how teachers can discuss racism or sexism, according to an Education Weekly analysis.”

To be clear: “Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”

Why do we work so hard to cover our eyes and plug our ears? The path to health begins with admitting and taking a good hard look at the disease. Slavery is a part of our history. As is Jim Crow. The Civil Rights Movement. Red lining,…Black Lives Matter. A clear narrative path.

Isn’t the frenzy to introduce bills restricting discussion about our history yet another example of racial bias embedded into our policies? We are watching critical race theory in action.

Talking about what ails us isn’t the cause of our division. Our inability to fully look ourselves in the mirror and acknowledge all aspects of our story – perpetuates our dis-ease. We would do well to revisit the Serenity Prayer and muster our courage.

According to Harriet, there is hope. There will someday come a place and time that our tide turns, a time when we can without fear or shame or legislation, look at each other and tell our full story.

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE TIDE TURNING

Filed under: Identity, Merely A Thought Monday, Perspective | Tagged: artistry, black lives matter, civil rights movement, Civil War, courage, Critical Race Theory, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, education, Education Weekly, Fox News, Harriet Beecher Stowe, hope, hsitory, immorality, institution, jim crow, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, legal systems, legislation, racial bias, redlining, Serenity Prayer, slavery, social construct, story, studio melange, the melange, Uncle Tom's Cabin | 2 Comments »

Gaze At The Seam (on KS Friday)

Posted on March 25, 2022 by davidrobinsoncreative

Some things are hard to grasp. When that’s the case, it’s a good time to look at the sky. You’ll not find many explanations up there but gazing at the seam between us and the infinite-universe can, in moments of clenched fists, bring some perspective. As Kerri says, “It just keeps rolling.” No problem can remain large when measured against the seam, that fragile ozone layer that makes breathing and every current dilemma possible.

Sometimes when I look at the sky I wonder how many people across the ages have engaged in seam-gazing.

I imagine, one day in Kansas, 1932, as his fields turned to dust, a farmer looked to the sky. All his appeals for rain exhausted.

I can’t imagine how many women looked to the sky over the 100 years of protests and parades before being afforded the right to vote.

Can you imagine how many African-Americans looked to the sky as slaves in a nation that boasted to the world about its freedom and equality?

I look to the sky every time another state in the union passes legislation prohibiting discussions about our history, so fearful are we of critical race theory and the equality that we profess.

I find nothing in the seam that explains anything, but the clouds remind me that it just keeps rolling and, since I believe we tend toward wholeness, I catch a whiff of hope in all the blue and moving puffy white.

Someday, somewhere down the historic road, someone will look to the sky, in a post-nonsense era, and will, perhaps, imagine me staring back. To them, from their perspective, my unanswerable questions will have found resolve. They will have questions of their own, no doubt, but won’t it be nice to have a new set of questions to thrust at the seam?

read Kerri’s blogpost about THE SKY

Filed under: Edges, KS Friday, Navel Gazing, Perspective, Possibility, Uncategorized | Tagged: artistry, civil rights, clouds, Critical Race Theory, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, dust bowl, edges, jim crow, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, ozone, perspective, presence, questions, sky, sky gazing, slavery, story, studio melange, sufferage, the melange, time, vote, voting, wholeness | Leave a comment »

Pop A Cork And Ponder [on Two Artists Tuesday]

Posted on November 3, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

It is, at long last, election day in these-once-united-states. If I had a wine cellar it would be stocked to the top with election night libation and reality-numbing assistance.

Through Kerri, I received a loving and gentle push back against my use of the phrase these-once-united-states. Our reader reminded me that these-states-were-never-united. Not really. Of course, there is the very real possibility that division IS what identifies us. In a stroke of planned obsolescence or perhaps a nod to the absurd, our forefathers wrote that all men are created equal while participating in and promoting slavery as the driver of the economic engine. They certainly knew what they were doing. It might be that division is what unites us.

Who would we be if we actually practiced equality and made sure that our institutions were not only the guardians but promoters of our central ideal?

Mostly, those wacky forefathers kicked the can down the road. They understood that the nation would one day have to reconcile its split-intention. We’ve made a run at it more than a few times and, like every good fractal, rather than deal with our shadow pattern, we manage to repeat it. Slavery becomes Jim Crow…and here we are. BLM meets The Proud Boys.

We are so far away from dealing with the can kicked-down-the-road to us that the mostly-men-on-the-red-team deny the very existence of systemic racism. That, too, is part of the fractal. Take note of how much energy has been spent making it hard for black Americans to vote. Right here in the year 2020. Some things never change. Some things need to change.

So, today we line up to cast our ballots. In this seemingly endless and ugly election season, we’ve been witness to an undermining of the postal service, the removal of ballot boxes, the stuffing of the supreme court, a president casting doubt on the very system he was sworn to support.

So much energy spent to ensure the continuation of the divide! Another squirt of glue? An organizing principle of negative and positive charges? Opposite charges attracting?

We need a new organizing principle. Division is a threadbare story and, as we know, can only run in a vicious circle. I hold little hope for it but wonder what might come about if we attended to a simple basic, just like the sign says. “Be Nice. Say Hi!”

In the absence of general kindness and courtesy, something every mother teaches and every grandmother upholds, I will pop a cork and ponder what we might have been if the system had been set up and penned by our foremothers. I suspect we’d all know how to play nice by now.

read Kerri’s blog post on BE NICE. SAY HI!

Filed under: Pattern, Two Artists Tuesday | Tagged: BLM, david robinson, davidrobinsoncreative.com, division, election, equality, forefathers, foremothers, fractal, inequality, jim crow, Kerri Sherwood, kerri sherwood itunes, kerrianddavid.com, kerrisherwood.com, organizing principles, pattern, red wine, slavery, split intention, vote, wine | Leave a comment »

Treat The Origin [on KS Friday]

Posted on June 26, 2020 by davidrobinsoncreative

it's a long story copy

Yaki called. He wants to dust off our Prometheus project and give it another whirl. The Creatures Of Prometheus is one of Beethoven’s early works, a ballet that is nigh-on impossible for a contemporary ballet company to afford. Besides a symphony, it requires scores of dancers. Twelve years ago, Yaki asked if I would write and perform a narrative – a storytelling- that would weave together the movements. It lives among my all-time favorite collaborations. Yesterday he asked, “Can we update it? Can we make it relevant with what’s happening in the world today?’

My first thought: it’s already relevant! It is a creation story. Prometheus is given the task of creating human beings, a man and a woman. Although he is instructed to make them dull and crude, he creates them to be beautiful, to see and appreciate their connection to the earth from which they were made. Angered by his disobedience, Zeus punishes Prometheus by corrupting the new creatures; he fills them with fear and division. He twists their fear into a lust for war. He makes them dull and crude. Now, Prometheus waits for them to remember and recover their original sight, to remember their capacity for pure seeing, fearless living. To drop their madness and return to their senses.

My second thought: people are notoriously incapable of grasping metaphor. It’s the Zeus thing in practice. The update has to be a direct statement. It must leave no doubt and puncture the commitment to dullness. “Gear down!” as Kerri constantly reminds me.

“How can Prometheus speak to Black Lives Matter?” he asked. We are both artists in the later stage of our career. Yaki added, “I want my work – my art to really speak to what’s happening today. I want it to help.”

I’ve been sitting in his questions since we talked yesterday. We are standing again at a moment in time when change is possible. We are also standing at the moment when the system, a living thing, a wizard of recreation, will fight to maintain itself. Consider: we had this moment with the abolition of slavery and the system responded with Jim Crow. Segregation. Institutional racism. We had the moment again with the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and the system responded with a draconian judicial/policing/incarceration apparatus, disproportionate tax structures…segregation by legislation (again and again and again).

In our current moment, in this latest moment, how can we make the necessary changes that are not merely the existing system putting a new face on a 400 year old mechanism? Real change requires steps in unknown directions [the rule: if you know where you are going you are merely re-creating what already exists]. How can Prometheus speak to that?

We focus on behavior when we need to stare at the underlying structures. Behavior, as Robert Fritz reminds us, always follows the path of least resistance – the sub-structure determines the path of behavior.

In the story, Prometheus is in it for the long haul. He knows his creatures are made for beauty and will inevitably see beyond their made-up fear and return to their source. They will one day stop listening to the fear mongers and race baiters. They will wake up and recognize that they are not made to be dull and crude and divisive. In fact, quite the opposite. They were made to appreciate and participate in the creation of beauty and betterment. Nature.

Prometheus is in no hurry. He waits for his creatures to remember. He plays the long story. What will that look like?