Apart but Connected: Envisioning a Future of Equity, Healing and Democracy

By: Jordan Seaberry*

“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”

-Arundhati Roy

It’s impossible to know what the COVID-19 pandemic will mean to our fragile nation’s future, but across the country (and globe), people are starting to see how this crisis is shedding a light on our present. Here in the US, Black and Indigenous communities are disproportionately impacted, recovery policy rewards big business and the banking industry, and life itself seems to be at the mercy of an economic system that’s built to serve the well-off. In a matter of months, national discourse has drastically shifted on adopting the social supports that help us care for vulnerable neighbors— paid sick leave, moratoriums on evictions, universal healthcare, universal basic income, housing for the unhoused, ending cash bail, ending detention, and protections in the gig economy. 

This crisis has laid bare the inequities of our country, but it’s also spurring communities to dive right into the work— to make real what might have felt impossible only months ago. Mutual aid, a value with deep roots in anarchist thinking, has been embraced by neighbors of all stripes. These are the beginnings of the policy propositions we’ll need to step into a brighter future. On top of policy, we’ll also need the narratives— the culture— to get us there.

At the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC), we knew we had a responsibility to respond. We center our work around a grassroots action network, where we aim to incite creativity to shape a culture of empathy, equity and belonging. Many of the folks in our network are out of work, mourning loved ones, and simultaneously, miraculously, building creative support systems. At the USDAC, we’re filling the void and asking the question “why don’t we have a federal agency for arts and culture?” Without one, how can we build a culture that names the wrongs of the past and envisions better futures? We saw our first role as listening. We reached out to thousands of members of our network, partner organizations, community members and thought partners. We heard three priorities loud and clear: Fund communities, heal communities and change the damn system.

Fund Communities

We all know that communities everywhere are struggling economically, but the pain is asymmetrical. For those in the cultural organizing world, cultural work in this crisis cannot mean providing fiscal support to the elite arts institutions at the expense of community artists and culture workers. We encourage any organization with a seat at the table in these funding conversations to urge funders to directly support grassroots communities— especially Black, Indigenous and other communities of color so disproportionately harmed by bad policy. Indeed, the radical imaginations of these very communities will plant the seeds of our more equitable future.

Heal

At the time of this writing, our country is on the precipice of a staggering milestone: 100,000 American lives lost to COVID-19. Doctors weigh rationing life-saving medicines. Families grieve from thousands of miles away. We are in new, shared territory of grief, and we will need new healing modalities, rooted in ancestral knowledge, solidarity and community.

Indigenous communities have been particularly hard hit. Members of the Navajo Nation, pioneers of healing technologies are grappling with the pain of loss, compounded by generations of tortuous policy from the federal government. Funding to tribal nations through the CARES Act only very recently began flowing, and hardly at the rates needed to stop COVID-19’s spread. Many of us feel fortunate to have a home that is safe, where we can shelter healthfully, but consider that the vast majority of us are living on stolen Indigenous land. Perhaps a healing modality for past wounds: imagine that when we reopen the schools, churches, and workplaces, each day in that space began with an action-oriented land acknowledgement. 

Change The Damn System

We’ll need new narratives for the coming moment. The United States’ overarching narrative of military might and economic domination has been brought to its knees by something we cannot shoot, arrest, or infiltrate. Elected officials peppered cable news programs with death march slogans, urging elders and the sick to sacrifice their lives so that we might be able to go back to our local shopping mall, our favorite restaurants, or our barbershops. But that bargain cannot be the bold narrative solution we need.

Moving Forward in Solidarity – Apart, but Connected

The truth is that the critical community work is already happening around us. Future generations will ask us what we did during this pivotal time. How did we bring a better future into being? 

That work doesn’t sprout after the crisis passes, it’s built in the present moment. 

Here in my city of Providence, RI (on traditional Narragansett land), we’ve seen vibrant mutual aid projects take shape: neighborhood grocery deliveries, an early grassroots victory to postpone evictions, and organizing to release inmates at the state prison, to name a few. 

The pathways to a better world aren’t somewhere off in the future, they are all around us right now. We get through this in solidarity, apart but connected. 

*Jordan Seaberry

Jordan Seaberry serves as Co-Director at the U.S. Department of Arts and Culture, building a creative network of cultural organizers and activists across the country. He is a painter, organizer, legislative advocate and educator. Born and raised on the Southside of Chicago, Jordan first came to Providence to attend Rhode Island School of Design. Alongside his art, he built a career as a grassroots organizer, helping to fight and pass multiple criminal justice reform milestones, including Community-Police Relationship Act, the Unshackling Pregnant Prisoners Bill, and laying the groundwork for the “Ban the Box” movement in Rhode Island.

Jordan has worked as an educator with the Center for Dynamic Learning, as the Prisoners Rights Organizer with Direct Action for Rights and Equality and most recently as the Director of Public Policy at the Nonviolence Institute. He serves as a Board Member at New Urban Arts in Providence, and Protect Families First, working on community-oriented drug policy reform. He has received fellowships from the Art Matters Foundation, the Rhode Island Foundation, and he currently serves as the Community Leader Fellow at Roger Williams University School of Law.