aka Ken Smith: Art and conscience

According to @MonaEltahowy, Nina Simone said that two kinds of consciousness were raised through her music:#

During the civil rights movement, the evening news might show video of sheriffs loosing their dogs on protestors or on people lined up to register to vote. In those cases, the first of Simone's two kinds of consciousness were evoked in many places across the nation, historians tell us.#

And evoking the second kind? I'm not sure. It seems likely that talk of white privilege and structural racism is meant to do that work, but things like that provoke huge resistance.#

In the first case, people seem prepared to say, "Yes, we see you and the circumstances of your life. Those are not acceptable. Our society should do something to change those circumstances." In the second case, people do not always seem prepared to say, "Yes, I am implicated, I help to create or maintain those unacceptable circumstances, I do nothing to prevent them, I share responsibility and I have to change."#

You hear stories about people who are transformed by an experience of witness. People who refuse to pay a portion of their taxes, the part they estimate, for example, that goes to arming the nation's armies and fleets for warfare in small, distant countries. But it's not nearly as easy for me to see the second part of Simone's theory in action as the first.#