The arts continue to transcend restrictions and ongoing oppressions that stem from inequalities. As the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) states,
NO CRISIS TOUCHES ON A SINGLE CAUSE OR ISSUE, all are intersectional, with overlapping impacts connecting race, gender, religion, orientation, ability, and every other characteristic that has been targeted for oppression. Every emergency, whatever triggered it, is also a social emergency, and social emergencies demand cultural responses (Art Became the Oxygen, 2017, p. 7).
Artists and cultural workers continue to bring people together through performance, song, visual imagery, and stories. At the same time we are re-examining, as a global creative community, what is culture for? Who is it for? Who is present and who is absent?
As a collective we, ArtsAction Group, are a work in progress. We commit to continually questioning our own privilege, to ask difficult questions and to carry forward, with our partners, the work of individual and social transformation through the arts, culture and education.
As an organization based in the United States, we call upon the elected officials of that country to start a formal process of truth and reconciliation centered around our history of slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of land and resources, and the persistent racism that continues today. We support H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act put forward most recently by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee as well as H.Con.Res. 100 put forward by Representative Barbara Lee which notes the United States long-overdue debt of remembrance to not only those who lived through the egregious injustices connected to slavery, but also to their descendants, proposing a United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. This is to properly acknowledge, memorialize, and be a catalyst for progress toward jettisoning the belief in a hierarchy of human value, embracing our common humanity, and permanently eliminating persistent racial inequities. We also direct people to the work being done by Campaign Zero and #8cantwait.
The ArtsAction Group Collective.
As a collective we, ArtsAction Group, are a work in progress. We commit to continually questioning our own privilege, to ask difficult questions and to carry forward, with our partners, the work of individual and social transformation through the arts, culture and education.
As an organization based in the United States, we call upon the elected officials of that country to start a formal process of truth and reconciliation centered around our history of slavery, the genocide of indigenous peoples, the theft of land and resources, and the persistent racism that continues today. We support H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act put forward most recently by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee as well as H.Con.Res. 100 put forward by Representative Barbara Lee which notes the United States long-overdue debt of remembrance to not only those who lived through the egregious injustices connected to slavery, but also to their descendants, proposing a United States Commission on Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation. This is to properly acknowledge, memorialize, and be a catalyst for progress toward jettisoning the belief in a hierarchy of human value, embracing our common humanity, and permanently eliminating persistent racial inequities. We also direct people to the work being done by Campaign Zero and #8cantwait.
The ArtsAction Group Collective.
