Theater’s role, said Paulus, is to show “a world where we’re stuck and angry but hope for transformation. … The theater is always about the impossible becoming possible.”
Later in the morning, a panel on “Race, Culture, and Civic Space” considered the role of public spaces in race and justice. Artist Theaster Gates, founder and executive director of the Rebuild Foundation, which focuses on urban renewal in Chicago, said the proliferation of grim strip malls in urban areas impact people’s ability to be their “best selves.”
“Justice requires we not only have beautiful places in the downtown, we have beautiful places in the hood,” said Gates, a professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago.
Another panel focused on the Flint, Mich., water crisis. Mona Hanna-Attisha, the pediatrician, professor, and public health advocate credited with revealing that children there were being exposed to high levels of lead, told Clinton during an interview that officials neglected Flint but would not have ignored a majority white community.
“People chose to close their eyes to Flint,” Hanna-Attisha said.
The conference also tackled how people of color are portrayed in politics and the media. Although Hollywood is becoming more diverse, racial minorities remain dramatically underrepresented. Speaking on a panel titled “Race, Childhood, and Inequality in the Political Realm,” Yara Shahidi ’21, star of the ABC sitcoms “Black-ish” and “Grown-ish” and a Harvard University student, said that meaningful progress would come when TV and movies are made about people of color “doing nothing in particular.”
“To just exist on screen and for people to be hungry for that, that would mean a lot,” Shahidi said.
Wadler, a 12-year-old from Alexandria, Va., who protests gun violence, particularly against African American girls and women, called attention to the “adultification” of black girls, saying they are viewed as older and less innocent than white girls and, as a result, more responsible for their actions, resulting in harsher punishments.
Like Shahidi, Wadler said she wants to see people like her reflected in national institutions.
“I looked at the editorial board at The New York Times, and it was very white and male,” Wadler said. “I want to see a black female like myself.”
Friday also featured an interview of conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas by Cheryl Finley, an associate professor of art history at Cornell University; a section on “Race, Technology, and Algorithmic Bias”; concluding remarks by Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and a professor of African and African American studies; and a public reception at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African and African American Art, which is currently exhibiting works by documentary photojournalist Gordon Parks from the collection of Dean and his wife, Alicia Keys.
In his keynote address, Stevenson began with an extended personal anecdote about his experience with bigotry as a child, saying the nation must fully confront its painful history of slavery and racial violence if it is to become a truly just society.
“We cannot create justice in this country until we change the narrative. Until we create a new relationship to our history, I don’t believe we’re free in America,” said Stevenson. “Our artists and our storytellers and our historians are so critical to the struggle. We can’t have justice without poetry, without dance, without music, without art, without sculpture, without leaders who are finding ways to shift this narrative.”
Under Stevenson’s leadership, the Equal Justice Initiative has fought to exonerate death-row prisoners, confront abuses of the incarcerated mentally ill and others, and help children prosecuted as adults. He recently won a historic Supreme Court ruling banning mandatory life-without-parole sentences for children 17 or younger.
Last year, Stevenson led the creation of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Ala., to honor victims of lynching in the South.
Stevenson said the greatest evil of American slavery was the “narrative of racial difference that was created to justify enslavement,” an extension of the bias used to justify genocide against Native Americans. He said that ideology of white supremacy endured even after slavery.
The 13th Amendment “talks about ending involuntary servitude and ending forced labor, but it doesn’t say anything about ending this narrative of racial differences. … I don’t think slavery ended in 1865; I think it just evolved,” he said. “It turned into decades of violence and terror and lynching. … And we haven’t talked about what that era of terrorism has done to us.”
The historic migration of millions of African Americans from the South is one legacy of that violence, Stevenson said, observing that blacks relocated to northern states not in search of economic opportunity but “as refugees and exiles from terror in the American South.”
Even the Civil Rights movement failed to eradicate the legacy of bias, Stevenson noted. He said it “breaks my heart” to have to tell Harvard students that even today, “If you’re black or brown your Harvard degree will not keep you from being presumed dangerous and guilty.”
Stevenson said South Africa, Rwanda, and Germany have recognized the need to remember and learn from the violence in their pasts, “but in this country we don’t talk about slavery, we don’t talk about lynching, we don’t talk about segregation.”
His intent is not to see the nation punished, he said. “What I’m interested in is liberation. I believe there’s something better waiting for us than what we’ve experienced. There’s something that feels like racial equality, that feels like justice, and it’s out there but we can’t get there till we change the narrative.”
Despite the challenges, Stevenson urged his listeners to remain upbeat, saying, “We cannot create justice without hope.”
Still, he cautioned that to succeed, “We’re going to have to be willing to do things that are uncomfortable.” He noted that he himself had endured times when, “I’ve just been completely shattered by inequality,” recalling the anguish he felt at the execution of an intellectually disabled death-row inmate whose life he had tried to save.
“The truth is when you try to change narratives, when you stand with the poor and the condemned,” he said, “there will be moments when you feel overwhelmed.” But he urged his listeners to join the fight. “You don’t have to be the most talented and gifted artist. But if you have a heart and a mind and a willingness to change narratives, if you’ve got some hope, if you’ll do some uncomfortable things, you will contribute to the justice quotient that we’re trying to create in this country.”