GOSZTOLA: In your experience with grassroots organizing, how have artists and media makers proven to be a viable asset in effecting change?
CYRIL: Absolutely. I think there are two ways that cultural artists and media artists participate in grassroots organizing. One is as messengers and as mediums to deliver the message of organized constituencies, as partners in the effort to shape a story or shape the debate around a given issue. They are able to bring complexity to a story. They are able to bring nuance through songs, through poetry, through theater. They are able to bring depth and make one-dimensional stories three-dimensional because of the added value of emotion. They are able to popularize ideas through ways that organizers cannot do.
On the other hand, they are also a constituency to be organized. So, around issues like the open Internet, artists are an example of a kind of small business that will lose if the Internet has gatekeepers. Same thing for journalists in particularly freelance journalists. Those folks lose if they can't use the Internet without gatekeepers. They are not able to innovate and expand and reach a larger audience in that context.
So, on both counts both as a medium and as a vehicle for messaging--and adding the emotive value of messaging but then also as a constituency to be organized--artists are a crucial part of this work. You know the quote the job of the artist is to make revolution irresistible. That's real. That's not just rhetoric. It's the most powerful recruiting method known to mankind--to have people tapping their feet to your song because that's how it really deepens I think in terms of changing the community's beliefs and vision.
GOSZTOLA: What would you tell a young artist or media maker who had not been turned on to issues of social justice? Why should they be moved to give their art greater depth? What message would you give to them?
CYRIL: All of our entire lives are shaped by the stories that we're told. If we believe that we don't ask for anything, we don't demand anything. If we believe that we deserve the same as everybody else, then we'll organize for change. Every single thing that makes our lives better including your weekend, including school lunch, including most of our rights to go to college. All of those things were won by community organizers.
As artists, even your own right to speak a language, to write and read--for many communities those were won through organizing campaigns of some kind. So, for the artist, the fact of having language--the fact of having a medium through which to express one's own work and one's own passion and one's own belief--you don't secure that right by wanting it. You secure that right by fighting for it. And so, given that we have some things that our parents didn't have, our parents had that their parents didn't have.
The question for the artist is what do you want for the next seven generations. What do you care about? What do you think is important? What do you think our people need? And what are you willing to give through your art to make that happen?
Malkia Cyril will be speaking on the "Navigating Media Landscape" panel Friday morning, April 9th, in the 1104 S. Wabash Ave Building on Columbia College's campus in downtown Chicago. For more information on the Summit, please click here. And if you would like to learn more about the great work that the Center for Media Justice is engaged in, click here.
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