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| | | -- By JabariMatthew - 26 Feb 2021 | |
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< | Introduction: My Journey to Law | >
> | The Power of Creativity and Law | | | | |
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< | When I was three years old, I began learning ballet dance at Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York City. As such, I regularly classify that age as the one in which I began my long journey of figuring out how to best empower both myself and others through different forms of expression. I began to discern what societal issues truly bothered me in the world and sought to expose them. I did ballet regularly from three to 18 years old, and throughout that time, used it to tell a multitude of stories concerning my experience as a Black male from the Bronx, as well as the stories of others as it relates to societal inequities. In college, I majored in Theatre to circumvent the heightened risk of ambiguity inherent in dance when attempting to tell important stories. Through theatre, I similarly told stories regarding issues of mass incarceration, economic inequality, and police brutality. A particularly noteworthy event during that time was when I performed in the play, Detroit ’67, by Dominique Morisseau, which concerned the 1967 Detroit Riots. Days after seeing a performance of the play, I spoke with an audience member who told me that she would think about the issues brought up in Detroit ’67 regularly. I remember having two thoughts about what she said: One, there is a great opportunity through performance art to inspire thought, provoke conversation, and raise awareness; and two, I hope you are doing more than thinking. I hope you are also taking action to change society. In short, these moments leading up to these thoughts are part of the reasons why I came to law school. I wanted to be able to inspire change and also have the tools to help both myself and others effectuate change. | >
> | As a performance artist, I have come to appreciate the powerful tool of drama and the performing arts in awakening the moral conscious, amplifying voices, and inspiring participation in important societal issues. As a law student, I have had the privilege of furthering my own ability to actively effectuate change through the legal system. Gaining exposure to both disciplines, from the way they both intersect and diverge, has led me to this conclusion: Performance art and creative expression is uniquely suited to empower and engage people, and if effectively utilized in tandem with the law, I believe that the two have the ability to remind people of their own self-worth, and the incessant and urgent need to fight for the kind of world that they want to see. | | | | |
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< | The Problem: Do People Care About The Law and How Do We Make Them Care More? | >
> | How I Got Here | | | | |
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< | When Carl Wylie stated in Lawyerland, “I really don’t care what the law is” I was struck by his blatant dismissal of a discipline I view as very much about people, for people, and affecting people. If lawyers do not care, why should a non-lawyer? Throughout the monotony of extracting blackletter law from cases, I have found it easy to forget that underneath every case is a story, and underneath every story are people. I want to always care about the law, but more importantly, I want people who are non-lawyers to care about the law. The issue I seek to tackle then is figuring out how we effectively create that genuine care. | >
> | My sentiment about the power of art and law came about less as an, “a-ha,” moment and more as a gradual process. When Carl Wylie stated in Lawyerland, “I really don’t care what the law is,” I was struck by his blatant dismissal of a discipline I view as very much about people, for people, and affecting people. If lawyers do not care, why should a non-lawyer? Why should I have cared before law school? Before law school, I cared about stories, and I cared about the human condition. As a performance artist, I naturally cared about stories and the human condition, but it can be hard to care about something that feels inaccessible. I believe however, that this feeling of inaccessibility is exactly that – a feeling. Throughout the monotony of extracting blackletter law from cases, I have found it easy to forget that underneath every case is a story, and underneath every story are people. The actual, structural barriers existent in obtaining a law school education, however, is not the same as actually caring about the law. The point that I reminded myself of the world outside of law school and the existence of people living in every case, was the point that I recognized the feeling of inaccessibility for what it was. Like art, the law is nothing without people and their stories of hope, pain, fear, and joy. | | | | |
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< | The Solution: Recognize the Strength Between Creative Expression and Law | >
> | Breaking past the mental barrier that law is a specialized field accessible only to a few required my own leveraging of my past performance art experiences to truly understand the connection between the two. Therefore, creative expression can be a key to dismantling that mental barrier in the minds of others towards to law, and to fully recognize the responsibility and power that they have to stay engaged and create change, respectively. | | | | |
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< | While this is by no means the only way, I posit that creating that care requires truly recognizing and strengthening that link between two worlds filled with people too often classified as belonging to opposite sides of the spectrum – Type A risk averse lawyers, and Type B creative artists. | | | | |
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> | Modern Day Approaches for Utilizing Creativity With Law | | | | |
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< | People Come First | >
> | Story Preservation | | | | |
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< | If I argue that the law is about people, then that must mean that people should come first. Art and creative expression are some of the most powerful forms of doing just that. Bryson Stevenson of EJI has stated that artists have a way of expressing truths about the human condition in a compelling and influential way. In his commitment to visual truth telling, he utilizes a memorial recognizing the history of lynching in tandem with his efforts to better the criminal justice system. Similarly, a project at Bedford Hills empowered inmates to tell their stories and obtain ownership over their identities through the opportunity to both write about themselves and their experience with the criminal justice system, and then to have their writing performed in front of an audience by an actor. Such empowerment is not only one that I have experienced myself through creative expression (though obviously under very different circumstances). It is the kind of empowerment that should be actively sought after and utilized in law to get people interested in the experiences of others in the legal system. It is also the kind of empowerment that should be used to get people interested in engaging with the legal system in the first place, because they will at least know that they have a voice that will be heard. | >
> | Bryan Stevenson of EJI has stated that artists have a way of expressing truths about the human condition in a compelling and influential way. In his commitment to visual truth telling, he utilizes a memorial recognizing the history of lynching in tandem with his efforts to better the criminal justice system. Such a fusion of art and law is surely an example of truth telling and story preservation. It is an effective means in which to keep the souls of people alive and reconcile these souls with the law. | | | | |
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< | Black Lives Matter is Cool and People Are Fickle | >
> | Self-Empowerment | | | | |
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< | Black Lives Matter became effectively became “cool” to say in 2020. I must admit that even I was mildly shocked by the amount of people and companies unapologetically stating Black Lives Matter. My shock was rooted not simply in my self-preserving tendency to expect a certain degree of a lack of genuine care for the death of Black bodies. It was also rooted in the fact that I was confused as to why now? Black bodies have died as the hands of police officers for generations, and there has been plenty of footage and/or images depicting recent police murders of Black bodies, including that of Philando Castille, Alton Sterling, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, and Eric Garner. I consistently heard that there was something different about the death of George Floyd. To see the image of a Black man being choked to death by a knee on his neck for approximately ten minutes was a different way in which to see police brutality for a large segment of America. | >
> | Similarly, a project at Bedford Hills empowered inmates to tell their stories and obtain ownership over their identities through the opportunity to both write about themselves and their experience with the criminal justice system, and then to have their writing performed in front of an audience by an actor. This combination of art and law is an example of empowerment in its boldest form. To be a prisoner in the criminal justice system and effectively relegated to what, disturbingly, can amount to a second-class citizenship status, is perhaps to feel that much more connected to the world and your humanity when given the opportunity to see yourself performed in front of your own eyes. | | | | |
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< | The only deduction I have been able to make from the response to George Floyd’s death is that people are fickle and in order to stay engaged, perhaps they have to see old things in a new way to feel as if they are re-experiencing something for the first time again. It is a human condition that I find relatively unfortunate, particular in this circumstance where such brutal acts of murder have been happening in many ways for decades. Nevertheless, I was reminded of the power of media and the great potential for creative expression to depict these stories in novel ways in order to inspire genuine concern for the laws that allow such lack of police accountability, and particularly, to inspire this concern without death. | >
> | Savior | | | | |
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> | Finally, Center for Court Innovation engages in a program in which individuals arrested on low-level misdemeanor charges are able to avoid being formally charged by attending a three-hour art workshop that encourages participants to “reflect upon their arrest and their responsibility.” Such use of art and law amounts to literal savior through prevention of a criminal record that could have life-long legal ramifications. | | | | |
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< | Resulting Question | >
> | The Connection Between the Three Approaches | | | | |
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< | A resulting question is exactly how these two disciplines can be most effectively used in tandem. That is something I am still piecing together, and I intend to devote much of my career to that. Above all, law must be accessible, empowering, and rooted in people. | >
> | What is true of the three approaches is the fact that people and their stories are instrumental and key in all of them. Moreover, the participants highlighted in the scenarios, whether from the past or present, are involved in the administration of the law, or the way it impacts their life, or the way that it may develop in the future. All are vital to the constant evolution of the law, and have a necessary part to play.
What Now?
In all of its nuances and complexities, for better or for worse, laws are just people. Creative expression can emphasize that truth in the law, and create and encourage genuine participation in society. 1L certainly reminded me of that, as it simultaneously attempted to make me forget, and I promise myself now that I will not forget in the future. The harder question becomes, exactly what is the best way in which to bridge the disciplines? I believe that no matter whether one takes the truth telling and story preservation approach, the self-empowerment approach, and/or just strives to give others a second chance, the chance of impact and the power to uplift are all similarly great in magnitude. The exact approach, therefore, will be up to me in my practice, and up to others in theirs. That, I think, is just part of the creativity. | | |
I think this draft served very well the purpose of a first draft, to get ideas onto the page, so they can be refined there. What the next draft needs in order to become better is a focus on conveying the central idea to the reader. |
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