Interconnected: Black Lives Matter
CPS Community Protest, Lincoln Park High School
“We and the rest of the world are but part of a single sphere, our destinies inevitably linked, our paths interlocked.” - Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay
The 2015 murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore at the hands of the police was the first act of police brutality that I paid attention to. That was the first time I made time to learn what was going on. In retrospect, I think about the particular circumstances of that period in my life - I had lessened my load by pausing some of Soham’s programming; I was splitting time between Chicago and California; and the change of scenery supported my reckoning with my own tunnel vision of the previous many years. What did it take to rip me away from the self-imposed demands of an often selfish, self-preserving life to notice the daily violence inflicted upon millions of my Black American siblings struggling to stay alive?
I wonder about this now, too. In this moment of heightened visibility for the Movement for Black Lives, what has it taken for more and more Americans to make time to pay attention to the injustices that surround us and that we help to perpetuate?
My journey toward better understanding Black history likely began my first year of college in a seminar entitled “W.E.B. Dubois: The Making of a Radical Scholar Activist.” Still to this day, I look back on this as the most influential class I attended at NYU. Studying Dubois left a lasting inspirational mark on me, but I will admit that as an 18-year-old, my myopic conceptualization of time made it hard for the 19th and early 20th century, during which Dubois lived, to feel palpably connected to the world around me. It has taken years of study since to widen my lens and realize that the tidal wave of events that gave birth to the United States as we know it is still cascading with momentum; we are inescapably in the midst of dealing with the torrent of our past karma as much as we may wish to escape or deny it:
The stealing of land. The annihilation of indigenous peoples. Slavery. The mass abduction, buying, and selling of humans. The shackling and torturing and raping of humans. Exploitatively building industries and generating American wealth on the backs of slave labor. Suppressing and manipulating human minds and spirits. I feel the need to say it in so many ways; the word slavery used to feel more archaic than barbaric to me, so I want to be sure to invoke its visciousness both for me as I write this and for you as you read. Slavery. Reconstruction. The failed promise of 40 acres and a mule. The problem of the color line. Jim Crow laws. State-sanctioned lynchings. Strange fruit hanging from a poplar tree. The Great Migration met with northern hostility. The gruesome murder of Emmett Till. Segregation. Real estate redlining. Mass incarceration. Poisoning of water supplies for profit. Intentional-posing-as-accidental power-hoarding policies. Systemic-posing-as-benign racism. Brutal-posing-as-righteous police misconduct. The heinous killing of Breonna Taylor. The ruthless taking of George Floyd’s life in front of all of our eyes. The obvious dots are connected by an overwhelming number of often-invisible dots -- the ongoing assault against Black life and humanity is ubiquitous. None of this was long ago. What was, still is; only its form keeps changing.
In recent weeks, I have become very busy preparing two students for their arangetram. This situation lays bare to me how busy-ness is frequently a tool of the status quo. It’s a servant of capitalism that keeps us too preoccupied with our own obligations to have energy left to help one another. I have struggled to make time in the past one month to regularly give my energy to the fight for Black liberation and a better world for us all, and so I keep thinking about time as it relates to justice. Day in and day out, during rehearsals I acknowledge -- my bubbles of privilege make this arangetram possible under the most unusual circumstances of the pandemic, which has otherwise shut down the performing arts industry. My bubbles of privilege allow me the luxury to decide what is urgent. How am I doing any better than simply reinforcing my and my students’ privileges by producing this program in this particular moment? I want badly to pop these bubbles. For now, my hope is that my students can walk away from this arangetram experience having felt more alive, fulfilled, and nurtured by the gifts that only dance can provide, and that that insight into a wider range of human emotion and imagination can kindle the kind of compassion and visioning that radically cares for others.
With my students, I have been opening up space for conversation about racism and casteism and the necessary sensitivities we must develop as we understand and fight against oppression in America as well as in South Asian communities, where anti-Black, anti-Dalit, and anti-Muslim sentiments are prevalent. This feels especially important as we learn, practice, perpetuate, develop, question, and adapt various forms of art and culture, which is constantly reflecting back to us our world. Art and culture expose the how and the why while also allowing us to question, how, why, for whom, by whom? As we go through bharatanatyam adavus and train for a culminating performance, what -- on all the micro and macro levels -- are we even doing?
To be in a position to learn about and act on the urgent issues of our time is a chance not everyone gets, but it is also often a choice. How can Soham Dance Space prioritize making time for and spending our resources on exactly this? It is evident what a critical time this is for South Asian Americans and South Asian-led organizations to step up right now, because we are so clearly beneficiaries of the Black-led Civil Rights movement and also peculiarly positioned as a “model minority” wedge between white and Black communities.
I share this reflection to invite us all into an ongoing and active journey of more and more learning, solidarity, and anti-racist work, and to also publicly convey that Soham Dance Space is committed to deepening our role in pursuit of a more just world. I am grateful for the opportunity over the past year to slowly rebuild and re-envision the future of Soham Dance Space with a new and still-developing Board of Directors. A year ago, we wrote Soham’s Values Statement, articulating our desire for “challenging the status quo, developing alternative approaches to hierarchical practices, and embodying anti-racist, anti-casteist, anti-ableist, anti-capitalist, and anti-elitist values.” To translate our values into tangible programming is a work-in-progress, but Soham Dance Space is dedicated to this path and to this vision. We will keep sharing our actionable commitments to this along the way.
I began with freedom fighter Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay’s passionate words from a 1944 speech at the All-India Women's Conference: “We and the rest of the world are but part of a single sphere, our destinies inevitably linked, our paths interlocked.” Her insistence, understanding, and embodiment of how we are all interconnected is a constant reminder to me of how and for what we need to make time.
In solidarity,
Anjal