a moment of clarity.
words.
"To defend the place of millions of immigrants and their progeny in American society, we need not only protest of political changes but also more art.
We need to bring the ambitions, the foibles and the soul of immigrant America into the collective American mind. And for that we need television shows and movies, and more novels, poems, paintings and songs. High art and low.
We need stories told in Spanglish and Korean slang, and erudite English, and in bright and moody colors by artists who represent the sons and daughters of the African, Latino and Asian diasporas.
...Art and culture might seem like a luxury at this dark moment, with the Trump administration’s announcement that 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived here legally since 2001 will be forced to leave, and with young Dreamers brought to this country when they were just children left to face an uncertain status after the government reopened without Congress securing protections for them.
But when a people see their humanity denied, art is a defense of that humanity. Perhaps President Trump understood this when he proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities last year.
...This normalization of Latino and immigrant culture is an essential act in the Trump era, a time when I’ve heard stories about white school kids yelling “Trump!” at their brown-skinned classmates as if it were a slur meant to remind them of their inherently second-class status. Resisting the spread of hatred requires all sorts of actions. Go to a march, call your representative — but also bring a great work of literature by an immigrant writer to your book club and support arts education everywhere.
When we feel powerless to stop the hatred and injustice directed at our people, we should remember art’s potential to enlighten the uninformed and to slowly eat away at prejudice.
...I feel a renaissance coming. I see it in the discipline and ambition of our young people. They eat Oaxacan mole and Korean kimchi, and they read, joke and create in Spanish, Amharic, Creole and Arabic. But above all, they also employ the same language used by James Joyce and James Baldwin: English, spoken with accents from the Midwest, New Jersey and East Los Angeles, and all the other places they call home."
THE NEW YORK TIMES: We Need Protests. And Paintings.
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