San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
6 Bay Area creators debate whether love of country has role in provocative work
Protest and patriotism sit together uneasily in this country. We believe so deeply in the rights to assemble and speak freely and petition the government that they’re inscribed in our highest laws; at least in theory, exercising those rights could be among the purest expressions of love of country.
That’s not how it always works out, though, especially if you’re a person of color. Only some protesters get to be patriotic. Others hear, “If you don’t like it here, leave.”
Yet patriotism is a powerful tool to leave exclusively to one side of our political spectrum. In a year when protest has been all the more visible as part of the American landscape, The Chronicle asked six Bay Area artists about the unique power of art as a form of protest and whether they claim love for their country in their work:
Heather Arnett, artistic director of Cat Call Choir and dancer with Kristin Damrow & Company
W. Kamau Bell, comedian, author and host of CNN’s “United Shades of America”
Velina Brown, actor, director, columnist and San Francisco Mime Troupe collective member
Alex U. Inn, activist, drag king and Amazon Web Services senior machine learning ethicist
Kin Folkz, founder and executive director of Spectrum Queer Media and East Bay Queer Arts Center; filmmaker, photographer and painter
Krissy Keefer, artistic director and executive director of Dance Brigade and Dance Mission Theater
people who didn’t come from those lineages.
On a new version of patriotism — or something else entirely:
Keefer: I do think you can talk about real, deep patriotism as a resistance fighter; it’s just that I often have a hard time claiming it. We can go all the way back to Harriet Tubman being a patriot. If patriotism is associated with liberating people from oppression, then I am a patriot just as much as everyone else.
Brown: If patriotism is, as some people take it, a blind adherence to whatever the leadership says and does, I don’t do that. But I do believe that the ideals of the country are beautiful and amazing. I think critiquing where we deviate from those ideals is part of my responsibility as an artist of this country. It doesn’t sit comfortably within a box of proAmerican or antiAmerican.
Bell: I remember when I was in my early 20s and I heard Henry Rollins talk about the fact that we had let patriotism get reclaimed by Republicans. We’ve let Republicans and the right turn it into a flag pin — that’s all you need to do! — when in actuality, if you love something, you do want it to be better than it is, and you do criticize it.
As I get older, I start to understand why some people bounced: James Baldwin, Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Marcus Garvey. I get where you’d be like, “I didn’t think I’d be fighting this hard, and I need an America break.” Being Black in America is not a parttime job. It is a fulltime, oncall job. Even when you’re not working, you might get called in at any time, and that’s exhausting, especially when you also have to be a parent and a spouse and eat vegetables and take a walk every now and then.
Arnett: I believe in reclamation projects. Cat Call Choir is a good example of an artistic idea that was meant to reclaim things that had been used against women and other people who’d experienced sexual violence. Is