Common Good Collective

Poetry for Building Community, Reader, Significance Of Place, Wilderness: Sharing and Reorientation Permalink

Let America Be America Again by Langston Hughes

In Langston Hughes’s own words, his poetry is about “workers, roustabouts, and singers, and job hunters on Lenox Avenue in New York, or Seventh Street in Washington or South State in Chicago—people up today and down tomorrow, working this week and fired the next, beaten and baffled, but determined not to be wholly beaten, buying furniture on the installment plan, filling the house with roomers to help pay the rent, hoping to get a new suit for Easter—and pawning that suit before the Fourth of July.” In his poem “Let America Be America Again”, Hughes cries, “Yet I’m the one who dreamt our basic dream,” daring to imagine a new way. This meditation is always worthy to return to.

Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

Hip-Hop Continues a Protest Tradition That Dates Back to the Blues

From Bessie Smith’s “Backwater Blues” in 1929, to the free jazz of Ornette Coleman, to current day hip-hop, Black American music has always contained elements of protest. Dr. King called that spirit “being creatively maladjusted.” Artists stay maladjusted, unable to live within the confines of the current order, and that is why they continue to offer the hope of renewed imagination. Tyina Steptoe brings these concepts to life in her article written for The Conversation News.

The sound of Public Enemy’s 1989 song “Fight the Power” blared as face-masked protesters in Washington, D.C. broke into a spontaneous rendition of the electric slide dance near the White House.

It was the morning of June 14, and an Instagram user captured the moment, commenting: “If Trump is in the White House this morning he’s being woken up by … a Public Enemy dance party.”

Coming amid widespread protests over police brutality and structural racism in the United States, the song is an apt musical backdrop. It opens with a quote from civil rights activist Thomas “TNT” Todd before going into a sample-laden funk rap track referencing past black protest songs from the Isley Brothers and James Brown.

Demonstrators in other parts of the country similarly used hip-hop as a form of sonic protest. In New York, protesters chanted the hook to Ludacris’s 2001 song “Move B—-” as they were penned in on the Manhattan Bridge by police officers.

Teen Artist’s Portraits Help Frame Sacrifice of Fall Heathcare Workers

One loss among the rush to re-open: the tenderness and time needed for mourning and remembering. One artist is carving out that time as a way of helping families to remember, and to give voice to the great grief settling over the world during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elizabeth Lawrence shares the story of Xinyi Christine Zhang for Kaiser Health News.

As Xinyi Christine Zhang watched the COVID-19 death toll among health care workers rise this spring, she wanted to find a way to give solace — and thanks — to their families.

The teenager, of South Brunswick Township, New Jersey, joined her church in commemorating members who had died of COVID-19. But she was driven to try to do more, something personal.

“I thought there could be something more meaningful I could do for the families of the doctors who lost their lives fighting the pandemic,” said Christine, 15. Read more

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Poetry for Building Community, Reader, The Abundant Community Permalink

Coming To The Stage by Januarie York

For over a decade, Januarie York has been carving her own lane in poetry, writing and performance art. Januarie is a freelance writer, published author & poet who, in addition to performing original poetry, has produced several of her own spoken word theatrical shows that focus on uplifting and inspiring women. A recent graduate with her Bachelor’s in Criminal Justice, she is currently pursuing her Master’s in Positive Psychology. Januarie shared the following poem during the Abundant Community Conversation hosted by John McKnight and Peter Block with their guest, DeAmon Harges.

Coming to the Stage

You don’t have a clue why I do what I do but I do what I do just for you. Read more

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Imagination: The Prophetic Act of Living an Alternative Narrative, Possibly: Freedom for A New Story, Reader, Structure Of Belonging Permalink

What If We Radically Reimagined the New School Year? By Ashley McCall

Ashley McCall is a third grade English language arts bilingual teacher at César E. Chávez Multicultural Academic Center in Chicago, Illinois. She has taught in both public and charter settings and this is her eighth year in the classroom. McCall is also an organizer with Illinois for Educational Equity. In the article below, McCall imagines an alternative reality for her students in Chicago. She posits,”What if…we blazed a trail for reimagining what qualifies as valuable knowledge?” Rewriting the story of the marketable skills and course competency are foundational steps to creating new, healthy systems that support the common good.

Monday night I sat on my back patio staring up into a rare, starry Chicago night. I squinted and made out each point of The Big Dipper and then turned to see what I decided was Mars, twinkling in the distance. My partner and I sat in city silence, wrapped in a perfect, nearly unrecognizable temperature-and-breeze blanket. For an hour or so we reveled in this brief peace bubble and I gave myself permission to dream:

“What if?” I thought. What if we did something different, on purpose? What if we refused to return to normal? Every week seems to introduce a new biblical plague and unsurprisingly, the nation is turning to schools to band-aid the situation and create a sense of “normalcy”–the same normalcy that has failed BIPOC communities for decades.

In her memoir, When They Call You a Terrorist, Patrisse Khan-Cullors states that “our nation [is] one big damn Survivor reality nightmare”. It always has been. America’s criminal navigation of the COVID-19 pandemic further highlights the ways we devalue the lives of the most vulnerable. We all deserve better than Survivor and I don’t want to help sustain this nightmare. I want to be a part of something better.

What If We Designed a School Year for Recovery?

“What if?” I thought. What if Chicago Public Schools (CPS) did something radical with this school year? What if this fastest-improving urban district courageously liberated itself from narrow and rigid quantitative measures of intelligence that have colonized the education space for generations, and instead blazed a trail for reimagining what qualifies as valuable knowledge?
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