Tisidra Jones: is a poster child for cross-sector, hybrid creative community leadership. Trained in theater, and music, and as a lawyer, Tisidra has built a company that uses all of these assets in service to people and organizations working for change.

BIO

Tisidra is a sought-after speaker, award-winning artist and lawyer who works at the intersection of inclusion, engagement and equal opportunity policies. Her methodology blends legal and policy research, sociological studies, and arts-based approaches to community and civic engagement. Tisidra's life, education, and professional experiences encompass rural communities, law, the arts, sociology, community engagement and multidisciplinary education. She has a B.A. in Music with a minor in the Sociology of Difference from George Mason University. She acquired her J.D. from the University of St. Thomas School of Law and is licensed to practice law in New York and Minnesota.

Tisidra has worked with nonprofits in the arts or those serving communities of color primarily when new programs were being launched or designed. On the public-sector side, she has worked with local, state, federal and international government entities. She acquired expertise as it relates to small, minority-owned, and women-owned business inclusion policies and programs. Whether working for the government or a nonprofit, every position Tisidra has held required project management, program design, infrastructure creation and community engagement.

Finding connections across sectors has been integral to the work that Tisidra has done. As a result, she has served on over 30 boards, advisory councils and community engagement committees across sectors. She has also curated cross-sector advisory committees for major initiatives. 

Notable Mentions

Strong and Starlight Consulting:

INNOVATION | We are a company of creative individuals. Innovative ideas are at the core of who we are. So, we love having the opportunity to work with you as thought partners and a sounding board as you generate ideas.

INFRASTRUCTURE | To get from idea to implementation, you cannot get there without crossing the sturdy bridge of infrastructure. We help you design the infrastructure needed to ensure that your ideas, once implemented, have the support, tools, policies, procedures, and capacity to be sustained. 

IMPLEMENTATION | Once the infrastructure is completed, we leave you with the tools and recommendations to take you through a pilot period and beyond. We can also continue working with you through the pilot period and equipping the next team that will carry you beyond your launch.

Creative Community Leadership Institute (CCLI) Established in 2002 CCLI was a community arts leadership development training program developed by Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, MN. Over its 22 year history the program supported a network of creative change agents who continue to use arts and culture to help build caring, capable, and sustainable communities. When Intermedia closed its doors in 2017 the program was suspended. The program re-emerged in 2021 under the auspices of Springboard for the Arts in St. Paul Minnesota, and Racing Magpie in Rapid City, South Dakota. The program supports the development of strong leaders capable of challenging and disrupting oppressive systems in their communities by approaching their work with a critical lens and commitment to recognizing systems of oppression and normalizing conversations about race and colonialism. CCLI serves Minnesota, South Dakota and North Dakota artists.

Dred Scott Decision: Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) In this ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court stated that enslaved people were not citizens of the United States and, therefore, could not expect any protection from the federal government or the courts. The opinion also stated that Congress had no authority to ban slavery from a Federal territory.

Dred Scott: Born in Southampton, Virginia, in his youth, Dred Scott was known as “Sam.” He later changed his name to Dred Scott. He moved with his master to Huntsville, Alabama and later to St. Louis, Missouri. In 1831 his owner, Peter Blow, died and John Emerson, a surgeon in the U.S. Army, bought him. He accompanied his new master to Illinois (a free state) and Wisconsin (a territory). While in what is now Minnesota, around 1836 he met and married Harriett Robinson. In 1843 Emerson died and left his estate to his widow Irene Emerson, who refused Scott’s demand for his freedom. He then obtained the assistance of two attorneys who helped him to sue for his freedom in court.

Harriet Scott: Harriet Robinson Scott was an enslaved person who is best remembered for being the second wife of Dred Scott. Harriet was born a slave on a Virginia plantation around 1820. From a young age she was a servant to Lawrence Taliaferro, a US Indian Agent. In 1834 Taliaferro left his home in Pennsylvania for a post as agent to the Sioux Nation at St. Peter’s Agency in the Wisconsin Territory. He took Harriet with him to his new post. In theory, slavery was prohibited in Wisconsin Territory under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 and the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Yet many US Army officers stationed in the territory continued to buy, sell, and own slaves. While at St. Peter’s Agency, Harriet met her future husband, Dred Scott, who had come to nearby Fort Snelling in 1836 as a valet to the fort’s new doctor, John Emerson. The couple was married in either 1836 or 1837 in a ceremony performed by Taliaferro.

Dred and Harriet Scott Days at Historic Fort Snelling: Historic Fort Snelling will honored Dred and Harriet Scott with a free program on Sunday, December 4, 2016.  Dred Scott, a slave who was brought to Fort Snelling in 1830 by Army surgeon John Emerson, met and married Harriet there. The couple lived in Minnesota for only a few years, but their time in a free territory at Fort Snelling was key to the lawsuit they later filed for their freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected their claim in 1857, stating that as slaves they were not citizens and had no standing to sue — a ruling that helped precipitate the Civil War.

The International Leadership Institute, The International Leadership Institute directs the efforts of professionals and others who share a commitment to social justice, representative democracy, and nurturing community leadership. The professionals who work through the Institute to improve their communities are widely experienced in international travel, providing technical assistance in diverse forms, from teaching to business consulting. The Institute relies upon the expertise of skilled professionals and upon cooperation with other organizations to identify and fill gaps in existing community service.

Judge Lejeune Lange: he Honorable Judge LaJune Thomas Lange is a senior fellow with the Roy Wilkins Center for Human Relations and Social Justice. A retired State of Minnesota trial court judge, Lange is an expert on legal and constitutional standards for discrimination in state and federal courts. She began her career with the Hennepin County Public Defender's Office as a trial lawyer until appointed to the Hennepin County Municipal Court in 1985. She became a district judge when the Municipal Court was merged with the District Court in 1986 and served on the District Court Bench until her recent retirement.

Prison Abolition Movement: The prison-abolition movement is a collection of people and groups who are calling for deep, structural reforms to how we handle and even think about crime in our country. Leaders include Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and organizations (such as Critical Resistance, INCITE!, the Movement for Black Lives, the National Lawyers Guild, and Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee—all of which, if not explicitly abolitionist, at least engage in abolitionist ethics), and there are converging or at least overlapping political ideologies (anarchist, socialist, libertarian).

Karen Rosenblum is Associate Professor Emerita of Sociology. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Colorado, Boulder. During her thirty-five-year tenure at George Mason, she served as the founding Director of the Women’s Studies Program and as the university’s first Vice President of University Life. She has been the recipient of two Fulbright Lecturer awards: 2006 in Japan (the University of Tokyo and Japan Women's University) and 2012 in South Korea (Ewha Woman's University). She was awarded a University Teaching award in 1996 and the David King Teaching Award in 2015. Prof. Rosenblum was an instructional faculty member in the 2014 inaugural year of George Mason University’s campus in Songdo, South Korea. Since 2016, she has taught Contemporary Social Problems at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The Meaning of Difference: By Karen Rosenblum is a collection of readings that offers an integrated and comparative examination of contemporary American constructions of race, sex, social class and sexual orientation. Instead of focusing on victimization and oppression, the book covers the positive aspects of being a member of a particular group. 

Philip George Zimbardo (/zɪmˈbɑːrdoʊ/; born March 23, 1933) is an American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University.[1] He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment, which was later severely criticized for both ethical and scientific reasons. He has authored various introductory psychology textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox, and The Time Cure. He is also the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project.[2]

The Stanford prison experiment (SPE) was a psychological experiment conducted in August 1971. It was a two-week simulation of a prison environment that examined the effects of situational variables on participants' reactions and behaviors. Stanford University psychology professor Philip Zimbardo led the research team who administered the study.[1]

At the Center we talk endlessly about cross-sector programs, and community collaborations. We also go on and on about hybrid leadership and skill sets. But what, you may be asking, does all that mean. Well, put simply, it means that we live in a world that that increasingly operates across what were once considered fairly rigid boundaries. In that old world, the land of silo's, community sectors, like public safety, healthcare, education, social services, and the arts were perceived as discrete realms that only really intersected when they were competing for resources in the city, or state, or Federal budgets.

While much of these traditional structures persist, smart folks all over have recognized that issues like unemployment, or homelessness, or economic development cannot be addressed without strategies and partnership that function across multiple community sectors, neighborhoods, and interests. So, despite predictable resistance, more and more, communities are building collaborative bridges and connecting their silo's. Interestingly, finding that common ground often involves making translations across organizational and community cultures. Not surprisingly, our work at the Center for the Study of Art & Community is focused on advancing human creativity as a powerfully effective catalyst for forging these kinds links and partnerships.

The reason I bring this up is that this show's guest is a poster child for this kind of cross-sector, hybrid creative community leadership. Trained in theater, and music, and as a lawyer, Tisidra Jones has built a company that makes maximum use of all of these assets in service to people and organizations working for change that need help navigating the confounding systems that often determine their success or failure.

Part 1: The Artist in Me

So Tisidra, when I met you you we were working on the Creative community Leadership Institute in Minnesota. Since then, you have built a business that has an interesting mission. Could you describe that?

And so, any of the projects that we take on, it has to have a component that focuses on increasing access for people to information and resources and the ability to have an impact. If you're going to create a new policy program or practice the people who have to navigate that system, and the people who have to maintain that system, should also be engaged in the development of that — helping people understand how to navigate systems.

TS: Yeah.

BC: Is it what you thought it would be?

And so we do… I've always enjoyed research and the more that I see and I come to know, I, I can geek out on a Census Bureau report because the artist in me, and the community person in me… I don't see the numbers. I see stories, I see people, I see, a lot more there. And so, being able to use those artistic skills to have more meaning making is really, something that I sometimes forget about because it's in there, but that's a big part of it

[00:04:11] TJ: Yeah. I think I’m… I'm a person with ever continuing intersecting identities that continue to come up. And hybrid, and interconnected, intersecting human… I used to think about compartmentalization, but it's just very intertwined. And the three foundational pieces from a career perspective would be; I'm an artist, I'm a lawyer, and an educator in terms of those ways that I see things.

And, they show up in everything I do. I try to turn off different parts of my brain in certain settings, but they don't seem to stop,… um, in terms of that. And so, I definitely, see things from a creative lens. And the data informed part of it will often come first. The education, I've always been curious about if I learned something, or I see something in a system, how can you help more people learn about it?

And how can you help them navigate those things? And I find that. there are lots of creative ways you can do that.

[00:05:10] TJ: I am. I am. I'm trained as a musician. Before I was a musician, I was acting, long before that… an actress, I was a playwright, producer. I did a lot of those things and piano was my primary instrument once I finished school.

[00:05:35] TJ: I think in some senses. I'll never forget, my first summer after law school, my first semester or first year of law school, we had to do these interviews, and I went to somebody to have them take a look at my resume and see like how can I have my best chances to, to get an opportunity.

And so I went home really, that night. Cause it was the night right before a day full of interviews, feeling a little discouraged. And then I was a little annoyed. Then I was very annoyed, and I decided not to do that.

And my first three interviews the next day were very interesting because the first person came in, they didn't say much, they had seen my resume. And the first question they asked me is how would you compare and contrast Bach's approach to writing a prelude and fugue to, how the framers and the founders (approached) the constitution. And I went to this place in my mind. That was awesome. And had this great answer. And the person said, that's amazing because I've always seen that people who are musical can also apply some of those skill sets in our legal profession and the way that we think about things, how we construct things, how we build it.

And I had two or three other interviews that morning with people who are also musicians and happened to be lawyers. And other kinds of artists and being able to say they are transferable. They do interconnect. We can't turn those parts off, and one can inform the other. And that was very refreshing and eyeopening for me about the importance of showing up as your whole self.

Background: J.S. Bach, Prelude and Fugue # 17 in A Flat

And people think about a city as one connected entity. How can you be responsive and… It's never going to be a one size fits all in my experience. The importance of community specific solutions are just that. What could be a win for one community, maybe a loss for another… and how to reconcile those things.

Now, the lovely part of that is, it's a choice. And, a jurisdiction, a town, a city, a geography, doesn't have that choice often. It's one police department. And the reconciliation often requires the skill of noticing where the notes can mesh and connect so that other people can recognize it in a way that it doesn't feel like, the consultant came in and just said we have to cooperate and that's just the way it is, right?

There actually is mutual self interest In this piece of music, being coherent is a useful thing, does that make sense?

I think that's the part of the work that, a lot of times people underestimate… is the depth of work it takes to really dig in with people, continue to ask the questions, figure out where is this connection? (I’m) not going to completely geek out in music, but, how can we modulate, how can we move from one key to another seamlessly in a way that ties it together?

And that requires listening. Again, if we have two communities that have what feel like very competing interest, and they can't connect. I also find that with the human condition and experience, there's far more that connects us than divides us. And that's the deeper work to really dig and poke into that. And when you can find those dots of what connects humans on that deeper level.

Certain things; people want their kids to get a good education, they want to be safe, these things are kind of these basic needs. I think that digging to find out what can connect what can seem like disconnected groups is sometimes a part of the work that it requires more than folks sometimes invest fully into.

[00:10:53] TJ: I don't know if they really do the more than I think about it now. One of my colleagues who's very wise, has [00:11:00] commented that we give a lot once we get in there, And I don't know if they fully get it,

Our goal from day one is we're thinking about when we're gone… And I say, “I don't want, I don't want to come back after I've worked with you once. I don't want to work with you again on the exact same project. We're not going to do that. so you can learn step by step with us what we're learning about your community, what we're learning about your system, and what you need to change.”

And we provide very comprehensive, tools for people, recommendations. At the end, they get all the materials. And we've worked together maybe six on the short end, but usually nine months, and you have all of the tools. “Now we have given you a step by step guide on how to do this. Now it's up to you to do it. And so if in a year you call us back to do the same thing, it means you didn't read this. It means you really didn't read it. It means you really didn't listen. And we're not coming back.”

Part Two: Living History

[00:12:04] TJ: Yeah. I'll work backwards from that in the sense of, I increasingly feel like everything that we're doing does involve a creative process. In terms of how I look at things, even drafting a policy for a government entity is pulling from all these different pieces and researching to build something brand new.

That's a very interesting process for me. I have one example. This was before, before my company, but informs the way that I show up as a whole person. I was working through a program, a non profit that, worked with young men who had either been in gangs, or incarcerated, and, they were coming out and wanting… they were looking to change their lives, get jobs, put their past behind them and do something new.

And, part of the work that I was doing was looking at the role of storytelling, and music, and art to help them tell their stories. And so we ended up working with them on a series of monologues… of. speaking their peace. But the end goal was…each of them had targeted something in their stories, whether it was mental health, mentorship, employment, business, entrepreneurship, that were aspirations in there in their collective finished product.

We did a production that wove in their monologues, as well as research and data. And (they) performed them for, lawyers and people who led different agencies to then, raise their awareness about this and humanize people. Like these aren't just numbers on a page. These are real people's stories. And one of the outcomes from that work … an institution actually did change one of their policies in terms of how they were addressing, some of the young men that were there as a result of one of the young men's stories pertaining to mental health and how they were treating him, but not treating the real issue.

And so those are things where I was inter folding arts and folding in data and research to be able to change a policy. And that came before the company. But that mindset, that strategy, that approach is still woven into how I approach work that we do.

[00:14:07] TJ: No, it's a bunch of lawyers.

[00:14:13] TJ: Yeah, one of the folks is a mentor to me, and she was really just poking, “Find a way to pull these things together. I think it could be powerful.” And so she encouraged me to do that. And they, it was very well received, in the broader legal community. There were a couple who were like, “Really, art to tell stories.”

But then once we learned the impact of it, it was a program that continued for years after I was gone. And so, for me that's really great to hear that and see that,… that it was valued by, again, people in the legal profession where there are those who are spouting this narrative that, “Art and law, these are very serious people, we don't need this, blah, blah, blah.” I'm grateful to have had the opportunity to be in that space and be mentored by people who saw value in that, who have the rippling effects.

I went on to continue creating using legal research and policy research to humanize cases like the Dred Scott case, which was instrumental and thinking historically about black folks in America and segregation. And so, the story that doesn't get as much airtime was the story of Harriet Scott, Dred Scott's wife.

What I did is I... I did the legal research. I did the, qualitative and quantitative research in terms of what we could find, and then read through all the information, of the documents that she actually filed when she filed her initial case.

And then I wrote a piece from a perspective of a mother during this time. And it was interesting to do the research on what is it like to be a woman in slavery? What is it like to be a mother? What does motherhood look like? What does community look like? So doing that additional research of what people were able to pull, and then stepping back and asking myself, “How do I humanize this person?”

How do I take this and… imagine you were in a 11 year fight to try to be free. You were a slave for X amount of years before you filed. What changed? Her children. She had children when I read those pleadings it was very clear in the pleadings that they had said this person had beat my children. One was like a under five most certainly three or five year old and to see those things and have no recourse.

I mean, as someone who's a mother now And so to imagine; What is the perspective of a mother to have their family go through freedom cases, as they were called back then, 11 years fighting, and hiding your family, torn apart. That was the thing where I look at merging art, and law, and storytelling as a perspective so that people can see the people behind the numbers.

People can see the people behind the case. And, that work is something I've loved doing. And again, have done that with lawyers in the room, and they found it meaningful, and they brought their children, and they found it insightful. Like, how does this happen?

[00:16:50] TJ:… a different way to talk about history.

BC: Yes, and a different way to talk about and experience the impact of the law. Which in this case was an infamous Supreme Court decision that denied citizenship to enslaved people, living in free states. not only continuing the enslavement of Dred Scott his wife Harriet, and their children, Eliza and Lizie, but also upending the Missouri Compromise, and some would say, sparking the Civil War four years later.

A big story with the kind of big headline that often obscures the real human tragedy at its center. A story which you brought back to life in the monologue you created for a commemorative event at Fort Snelling, Minnesota. A piece our are going to share.

So, the time at Fort Snelling was critical because in America you had slave state, free state, slave state, free state. And so they had passed through free territory. And so the question was, because they were there, are they now free? The research that I did looked at all of the pleadings, as well as articles that looked at what it was like to be an enslaved woman during that time.

I wanted this piece to embody what could have been going through her head the night that she would have heard the decision from Washington, D. C. A decision in their freedom after 11 years.

A Lesson in Perseverance:

Thank you, Reverend Anderson for the food. Now, Liza. Make sure you look after your sister. And Lizzie, listen to your older sister. And both you, my Reverend and his wife.

But soon, Eliza. This'll all be done soon and we'll be able to be together again. I know. I know you miss your father. And I'll let him know you love him.

Now get in that carriage, y'all go. Hurry up now before them slave patrol come out here. Y'all know they ain't like seeing us gathering together and ain't no one getting them twenty lashes tonight.

God, help them get out to the house safely tonight. I know I shouldn't have had them come but, I just had to see them. It's been weeks since I've been able to see my children.

And we've been fighting about eleven years. This was supposed to take this long. Rachel done had her freedom about a year after she filed her case. These ain't that different. I don't understand. It wasn't supposed to be like this. Mr. Toddifer didn't want this for me. He done freed 21 of the rest of his slaves.

He just, he couldn't have wanted this for me. We don't have more masses than our care to count. Mr. Robinson, Mr. Tolliver, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Blow, Mrs. Emerson, Mr. Sanford. The worst of them was Mr. Sanford. That man done beat my little girls right in front of me. They so small, I couldn't do nothing. Dre couldn't do nothing unless he get himself killed.

Mm mm, I can't see my children beat like that ever again. Is it too much for us, God, to want to be our own masses? Virginia, Missouri, Louisiana, Fort Snelling, so many homes, so many trips, I even had, had to have Liza on that damn ship. God, is it too much to want to pick our own home and when we come and when we go?

I, I remember when I was a kid and playing in that hotel with my momma, I sure miss my momma. That'd been about 13 the last time I saw my momma. When I was with Mr. Toliver at the fort, it wasn't. So bad. I had a Eliza. She was like a mama and a sister to me. I even named my little Eliza [after her. She looked out for me.

Made sure I didn't mess up. Especially with that dead cooking. When she had her daughter Susan, I treated her like she's my own kin. I sure they free now. Mr. Taufel promised he'd free them.

God, is it too much to her? Want to know if my mama's dead or alive? Or where my kin is? It's so hard missing my family like this. I think about Eliza and Lizzie. They not past that age when I last saw my mama. I worry about them so much. I think about that, uh, that pretty little girl at the fort. That poor girl all them, them soldiers touched.

God, am I a bad mama for praying when my girls was little that they ain't get that pretty? Just so them mountain men don't force themselves upon them? I just couldn't watch them go through that. And see them sold down south like that pretty little girl. I remember when we was in Louisiana. We done seen some things down there.

I couldn't let my daughters go through that. Mm mm. I ain't gonna let my daughters go through that. Down there, I remember seeing so many young boys working. Made me remember my two sons. I loved them so much. Dre was so happy to be a father. The first one, he had his nose. And that second one, he had his eyes.

When they died little, I cried so much. It pained me so bad. God, am I a bad mama? I was also happy when they died. Happy they was free and wouldn't have to live the rest of their lives being called bored. Or have to see their wives sold like Dred did before. He ain't talk about that much, but I know that still pains him.

For them to be in a position where they can't, they can't protect their family like a man should. I miss my sons, but I thank God they ain't going through this. When we done started this fight, I was about 28. I was stronger then. My hands, they ain't paying me so much. So many years working like this, cooking, cleaning, sewing, serving.

Lord, I ain't want my allies and little hands to get like this. I want, I want their hands to write. I want them to turn pages in all them books they gonna read one day. I want their hands to hold children, their children, that they ain't have to worry. Why not? They free in church. The reverend say run that race and don't get tired.

Been 11 years gone. My bad mom and wife put my family through this. My daughter's been hiding for so long. All of us fearing for our safety. Me tearing us apart just so we could be together. God, I'm tired, but I know I can't give up. Trial after trial, court after court. Is they resident? Is they citizen? Hmm, they property?

Is they people? They keep telling us, 11 years ago, this case should have been easy, but things done changed and that they're Negro matter and slavery. They say it's just politics. It's just about property. Hmm, politics? Maybe for them it's politics, but for us, it's our lives. It's my daughter's lives. I can't take it no more.

It is our lives when my husband can't work for wages. It is our lives when we fear that not one of us gonna get sold and our family be torn apart forever. It is our lives when Mr. Sanford beat us. In property, we birth their children. We care for them when they're sick. We raise their children. Would you trust all that to just property?

It may be politics and money for them, but it is our lives. We as people. I was one Negro woman with one Negro husband, and two Negro children. Dred about 60, 62. How about 39? 40's old for a slave. Ain't gonna get much more years outta us. We done offered them more money than we's worth.

Oh God, I could die tomorrow, but God let my girls be free today.

Who done knockin’ up my door this time of night? You have news from Washington? Yes, sir. I’s alone. You ain't think it's safe for me to be alone tonight? Yes, sir. Let me grab some things.

So you can look and say, Oh, this was a big case. It decided whether or not blacks were citizens or had rights. But for me, the way that I think about Law, the way I think about research is that there are people on the other side of this. And to actually what happened was when they began this journey, and things continue to get more contentious, and the case went on for longer and longer, the family did go in and out of hiding. Their girls had to be in hiding for a significant portion of their childhood.

What would it be like if you were a mom and you saw your toddler beat by a grown man who was just angry? What would, what would it take for you to push to file a case? Because they were enslaved for a while before this. And so, the first thing that was inside of their initial pleadings highlighted that he had beat their children. And that to me, in looking through all this, must've been a really strong catalyst for them to say, “It's time to get out of this.”

And so I, I will highlight every paragraph, every sentence that was included has behind it. A ton of different documents that were reviewed everything is factual in history; in terms of talking about the girl at the fort who was raped, they lost their first two kids, they had two boys first, and they, they died. Like, all of those things are pieces of that history.

TJ: I like that.

[00:27:11] TJ: Yeah so, that work,… I ended up, it was the Historical Society that brought me in to do that. And I had, a wonderful, a mentor again, which I would, certainly give her a shout out and thank her to, Judge Lejeune Thomas Lang. So she was, the one who made that connection for me in the beginning. And I had an opportunity to do it one year. And then they kept bringing me back for several years, to do it in the summertime, to do it as a series.

And there's a lot happening in our society right now, as we want to talk about situations in history and race, slavery, and what goes into our history books, I'm of the position that. we should be digging into these honest, deep conversations, And it doesn't have to be something that is, going to the extremes of, you're evil, and you're evil, and we're just not going to say anything.

The first time I performed this piece was actually a weekend when they had descendants of Justice Taney, who came down with the, Dred Scott decision, and the Dred Scott family descendants. And so, as a panel, they were connecting that week, and it was a series of what was happening building up around that case. And being able to have these open conversations can allow for us to take the veil off of it, and allow for some reconciliation and allow for some acknowledgement.

I've been to other countries where atrocities have happened and they've been able to…put a light… shine a light on it. And so, for me, seeing the outcome of this kind of work is seeing the lights which go off for people at a young age ,and parents having this conversation with their kids in an environment where we're not here to ridicule, it's just to educate. And that's been impactful for me.

It reminds me of Octavia Butler, and her approach basically saying, “You're not going to get this until you get inside it, You're going to meet these characters. You're going to internalize it. You're going to go beyond the stupid conversations that we fall into with this.” It reminds me there are so many professions where there's a wall between the people and the good intention of people trying to do good work, in medicine, trying to do good work in law, for sure.

In the justice system itself, many lawyers that I've met who basically say, “I came into this because of this. And now I feel like I'm almost the devil. as a lawyer, in this system.”

I tend to believe I, I would rather spend my life trying to do what I can to change it, do what I can to help people navigate it, which is its own conversation. I had a conversation with a woman a while back where we were, proposing to do something that helped people navigate these systems. And this person had a lot of money.

They worked for a foundation and said, “I think that defeats the purpose. We should be trying to break down and get rid of these systems. And so we don't think there's room for something like this now.” And my team, we sat back and we laughed. We're like;

“She's not wrong. We agree. The intention is to build better systems, get rid of these systems. But what happens between that gap of when a new system was built and today? There are millions of people, there are billions of dollars, and lots of people who are missing out on economic opportunity while you all are trying to build something new, and having the same conversations at the same table where people don't have access to it.”

[00:31:07] TJ: And so that's, it's just a very interesting tension.

[00:32:04] TJ: It is. as you alluded to early, I am a musician. I majored in music, and I minored in sociology, focusing on, The sociology of difference.

And so there's this brilliant professor at the school, that I attended, Karen Rosenblum. and she focused on, creation of difference. And while you were talking, what popped into my mind, were studies like the Zimbardo experiment and looking at how we other people and how we, looking at, how we can. Dehumanize people, actually, and what that looks like,

BC: Here’s Democracy Now’s amy Goodman describing what transpired.

Actually, in the psychology building. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By day two, the guards were going far beyond keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The guards had become dangerously sadistic, and the prisoners were breaking down emotionally.

The two week experiment had to be cancelled after just six days.

TJ: Yeah. it was fascinating to me as both an artist and someone learning about sociology and societies. It's like this terrible formula, and part of it is removing the names, and the individuality of people, and isolating groups. And so, when you're saying that the prisoner is saying, don't forget about me, part of making someone invisible, making a group invisible, is hiding them behind a number, hiding them behind a slur, hiding them behind an “other….” that it doesn't matter. It's so far removed from me that…the more easily I can think of them as different, and removed and separate, the easier it is to forget about them, to create systems and structures and policies that don't care about them. And for me to not care about them as a human, that's what's a part of that formula.

And I think circling back to what you're saying about storytelling. I think there's great power in continuing to find ways to highlight the stories of the people, that you were saying not to forget about. I do wonder what it continues to look like to have their voices heard, have their stories because I believe, that people can change And to hold somebody to their worst moment can erase a whole life's potential.

That these are people who live cheek by jowl. They're with each other 24 7. It is the apex of dehumanization and, the shock, above and beyond, ideology and, “good people, bad people”, just the shock.“How is that possible?” Okay, so you're really dealing with the most commodified version of that twisted distortion that occurs so quickly in the human brain.

And the second version of this story takes place in the California State Legislature when we would bring the extraordinary artwork from those incarcerated artists into those venerable halls and committee rooms. And there would be legislators there who over the previous decades had been making the laws and appropriating the money that produced the largest prison system in the history of the world. And they're looking at the artwork and they're going… same thing!

“You're telling me? You're making this up. This can't be a true thing. This beautiful thing, this poignant thing, this thing that has touched my heart, came from there, those people.”

We're all way more susceptible to this than you think. Our brain will do this to us,… dehumanization is an everyday thing.

So if I could change channels here a bit. Could you talk about what you want as you build the story of your work, where you see it going, yeah, if there's a, unique, quality to your work. How does it, flower? what next chapter is there for it?

We have worked with amazing people. And so, I think I'd say that the shortest version of where I've been going on this rabbit hole is that for the leaders that we've seen who have a heart to have change. I want to see the supports for them to lead, and have the impact that they would like to, because they brought us in, I would like to see actual dollars into the communities.

I want to see where there's an enterprise, a company, an individual who has a desire for change and the capital to do it, whether it's development, whether it's building businesses, rebuilding a main street. That dollars get to the people who live in those communities.

I'm saying there are jobs, there are businesses, the red tape is minimized, removed, and accessible because, there… if we look at the future of our country it's increasingly diverse by, racial demographics, culturally, as well as age. And how can communities be more proactive about that and position (those) who will be a larger portion of our population to continue to drive our economy? There are brilliant people in every community, and sometimes they just don't know where to start.

[00:37:55] TJ: And and I'm thinking about these people, I'm thinking about those who are inside of these systems, trying to rebuild from within. They need support. They need assistance. when they've done all that they can do. Somebody's got to help them. Say yes or no. And so who are the gatekeepers to the gatekeepers who are trying to open the gate, figuring that out and reworking that, doing the professional development for that, changing the mindsets to do that and doing it.

And then on the other side, it's the people who are knocking at their door, the community members, the residents and the citizens in every community across our country. I'm talking about every single zip code, every census tract having equal representation and equal access and equal economic opportunity.

I'm talking about the people who are like, “I want to do this thing. I don't know who to call. I don't know where to go. I don't know how to start. Give me those tools and I can change the world.”

Get those people the money, get those people access, get them the information. And I want to see all of that. I want to see people see themselves in all the places and spaces where they dream.

[00:39:02] TJ: Thanks. I appreciate it. Very much

Change the Story / Change the World is a production of the Center for the Study of Art and Community. Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart, and hands of the maestro Judy Munsen. Our text editing is by Andre Nnebe. Our effects come from freesound.org, and our inspiration rises up from the ever present spirit of UKE 235.