Social Justice

Solange Knowles has been announced as the recipient of the Lena Horne Prize for Artists Creating Social Impact, The Root reported.

A couple of days ago, men and women marched 26 miles through New Orleans, dressed as participants from a slave rebellion that happened there two centuries ago, as The Guardian and The New York Times reported. The re-enactment, led by New York artist Dread Scott, retraced the route of one of the largest -and overlooked- slave rebellions in US history: the 1811 German Coast Uprising, in which 500 enslaved people of African descent marched toward New Orleans from the surrounding sugar plantations.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded recently $750,000 to the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project (CRRJ) at Northeastern University School of Law to support its work in investigating and archiving acts of racial terror in the South between 1930 and the 1970s, explains the announcement.

The Open Society Foundations announced recently the launch of its Culture and Art program, which "seeks to advance diverse artistic practices and strengthen locally-led cultural spaces around the world through grantmaking, capacity building, and convening power."

The Arts and Activism (A&A) ColLABoration, a pilot project funded jointly by The CrossCurrents and Compton Foundations to support the work of artists in partnership with organizers and activist organizations, announced five projects that were awarded $30,000 to engage in arts-integrated organizing through themes of democracy, power, and freedom in the United States.

Films like Roma, A Fantastic Woman, and Spotlight and Ava DuVernay’s scripted series When They See Us were produced by Participant Media, a production company founded "on the mission of using visual storytelling to amplify social issues and to spur equitable social change," as a recent article at the Stanford Social Innovation Review points out.

“Contested Memory” is an essay series I recently wrote for Monument Lab (see http://monumentlab.com/news/2019/2/24/the-rebel-archive). In the first two essays, I drew from a range of theorists and writers to examine how the historical record is constructed through active erasure and probed at the radical potential that imagination holds for charting black cartographies of freedom.

After a full day of leading workshops on how to talk about race thoughtfully and deliberately that showed an overrepresentation of employees of color and an underrepresentation of white employees, Ijeoma Oluo shares her thoughts on how "so often the white attendees have decided for themselves what will be discussed, what they will hear, what they will learn."

In a recent Nonprofit AF blog post, Vu Le states that the more privilege people have, the more likely they are to complain about the lack of solutions proposed. He calls it "solutions privilege,” "the privilege of expecting solutions that would align with one’s worldview and not challenge one’s privilege."