Broken Glass, Art and Social Justice
Someone smashed my car window. Broken glass was everywhere!
My car was parked in a public lot, and someone decided to break my window after I parked it. I don't know who did this. I was only away from my car for a few hours. It happened in a public car lot. Now, I had to spend the rest of my day addressing this problem. I had to clean up the mess to make the car drivable, and then I had to drive somewhere where I could vacuum the rest of the glass out of the vehicle.
Breaking something can be easy; repairing it will take work.
I cleaned the shards of glass in my car by thoroughly vacuuming all the broken glass I could see. At first, I thought I was doing an excellent job of cleaning up, but then I'd look back only to find more shards that needed to be vacuumed. Then I moved around to the other side of the car, only to see that even more shards and damage needed to be cleaned. When I sat in the car seat, there were tiny shards in the seat, still there. Some of them cut me. The shards of glass we're still in the crevices, the less obvious places. When I held the door handle inside the car, I felt even more glass hidden deep in the crevices. I couldn't always see it. However, I could feel the rough edges of the shards with my bare hands.
This broken glass made me think of the work I've been doing as an Arts and Social Justice Fellow at Emory University. For the past semester at Emory, it has been my job to co-teach a class as an artist, in my case, as a clown, that addresses the social justice issues in our society. I see these social justice issues as pieces of broken glass, and my work as an Arts and Social Justice artist is to see this fractured glass in our society better and find ways to clean it up wherever it may be. I was working with medical students from Emory School of Medicine. I co-taught a class with Dr. Khaalisha Ajala that addressed issues people of color have getting quality medical care.
The Emory Arts and Social Justice Fellows program began after the George Floyd protests of 2020. That movement brought to light the social justice issues in our society. Many social justice issues remain with us, like the broken glass in my car. The damage done by social injustices like the broken glass is still around. If we care to look honestly and openly, we can see these injustices in our society. They are like shards of glass some of us can easily avoid, while others of us must navigate the world where we are constantly being cut and injured.
As artists in the world of social justice, we are not perfect. We are no more perfect than the society and legal system that too often neglects these issues. That said, it is our task as artists to address these issues and to acknowledge them so that we and others can see our world with better eyes.
I'm grateful for this opportunity given to me by the Emory Arts and Social Justice Fellowship program to address social justice issues. The arts hold a special place in our lives and our society. The arts can lead us to new ways of seeing and being. For some, having a clown address social justice in a medical school may seem odd. That said, I believe that we can re-examine how we share space together through clowning. Through clowning, we can explore what makes us smile and what makes us break out in laughter and joy.
