Week 2 Response - Kimia Preston

Artmaking as a form of social activism is crucial because it makes information and messages much more accessible and ties emotional aspects into the piece. Maylei Blackwell’s piece discusses the life of Chicana women entering college for the first time and the struggles they had to face with both studies and activism. Through political discourse within groups of Chicana women facing similar struggles, “Women activists learned to name the structures of exclusion and inequality they faced and how to negotiate complex relationships of power within and outside their community” (61). Women could find a community in the college setting to promote activism and share a common experience through producing cultural mediums such as rap or protest. Artmaking promotes a general spirit of visibility and hope as people can allow their voices to be heard in nontraditional ways. Seeing the atrocities that groups face, and the human experience of trauma make it much harder to ignore the injustice that permeates society. Alice Bag reflects on her firsthand experience witnessing Chicano people fight for justice and action being quashed by the police as she describes: “That day, I saw my knights like the other people in my life: their capacity for good was matched by their capacity for evil” (70).  Alice Bag’s video illustrates the power of imagery in conveying what “white justice” means and how people in her community and around the world are harmed by this concept.