Eric Ward
The dizzying pace and heightened emotions of 2020 massed into a thunderhead in January of this year, and many of us found ourselves on the evening after the Inauguration in a wild mix of relief, cynicism, anxiety and optimism.
Artists like Amanda Gorman replenished our stores of hope, even while celebration was blackened at the edges by the sneering of the alt-right and the exasperating admonitions of the orthodox left.
The evening after the Inauguration, Outer Voice caught up with organizer, songwriter and friend Eric Ward to discuss the role of the artist in 2021. How do we keep our fires lit? How do we instigate and steward change? Where do we put our energies?
Ward is the Executive Director of the Western States Center, a senior fellow with the Southern Poverty Law Center, an old-school punk fanatic and a singer-songwriter. He’s a longtime voice for racial equity, a proponent of inclusive democracy and a watchdog against violent white nationalist groups.
Organizers and activists like Eric Ward provide valuable grounding voices for artists, and his voice will take center stage here today.
He offers that the work of the engaged artist of 2021 begins as chronicler and keeper of emotional memory.
“The first thing that artists can do that I think is essential, is we have to become the memories of this moment,” Ward says. “So much has happened over these last four years. It has been full of horror. It has been filled with loss. There are so many people who are not with us — didn’t make it out of this moment. And there is also hope, right? And that hope springs from the resilience and the resistance that occurred over the last four years. The hope actually springs from the fact that, somehow that's unfathomable to me, America figured out how to escape the clutches of authoritarianism. And that is nearly impossible to do with authoritarians actually in power. And that's what we had for four years.”
The perennial question of the engaged artist is, “What do I do with all this anger?” How do we use it without becoming disconnected from compassion and our own humanity?
“Part of the job of artists is to help us process what happened in a way that allows us to not be mired in it but to help inspire us to move forward,” he explains. “Dude, I am full of rage over what's happened over this last four years. And I decided as an artist, it is not my job to give that rage up. I actually don't have permission. That's rage that connects me to those who came before me. And those ancestors have still not received their due. However, I cannot allow that rage to consume me or the world. It has to be kind of tempered and stewarded in a way that provides a spark without consuming. And that happens through art. It is the voices of poets, it is the songs of singers it is the paintings and the etchings and the installation of others that help us process and temper that rage, that loss in this moment. So hope doesn't mean giving those things up. Hope means being able to manage it.”
“Reconciliation is not a tribunal. It's not like we get to sit there and say, ‘You tell us everything you all did wrong. We'll decide if we're gonna forgive you’. Reconciliation is about us being honest too.”
The past year has created the perfect environment for purity cults among the left and among artists — stringent, blinkered mindsets that define wokeness, egalitarianism and open-mindedness with strict conditions. One misstep and you are excommunicated. Ward is a leavening agent in the middle of this, and quick to remind us that we are all complicit in the making of today’s situations.
“Artists don't have to mimic the most militant aspects of our movements to be down,” he says. “I think one of the roles in this moment is for artists to practice heterodoxy a little bit, regardless of their background. It’s a time for artists to be honest enough to say to even racial justice and left folks, ‘we got here because of the unwillingness to take this movement seriously.’ No one — very few people — took the white nationalist movement seriously, and primarily folks on the racial justice side. And it left our community super vulnerable.”
“If we're truly talking about reconciliation, reconciliation is not a tribunal. It's not like we get to sit there and say, ‘You tell us everything you all did wrong. We'll decide if we're gonna forgive you’. Reconciliation is about us being honest too. And we failed for over two decades to take this seriously. And not only did we fail to take it seriously, we undercut people who did by telling other folks it wasn't important.”
“And we can’t put ourselves in a space where our only job is to convert people. If this is all just about conversion of folks, we have become a monster that he [Trump] was. I think we just have to be really, really careful of purity in this moment of orthodoxy and of fundamentalism. We may have removed that from from the White House. But it means now it is set loose in our country. And all of us are vulnerable to it.”
Ward reminds us that unity is not betrayal of principles, and reconciliation is not bowing to destructive forces. Artists can share that message and help us interrogate the origins of our present and visualize our future.
“What artists can do is to help people understand narrative — understand words and terms in ways that actually have real meaning because it's within narrative. So what is reconciliation? What does unity really mean? Why did we become so quick to be afraid of words like unity and reconciliation? Like, what is that fucking toxic masculinity that has seeped itself throughout our movements?”
Finally, embrace your power as an artist. Trust the change-making strength inherent within simply doing what you do.
“It's not that folks are opposed to political or social thought. It's that they don't need artists to be Malcolm X,” Ward says. “You want to hear a story. I think of the Steve Earle song, ‘Billy Austin.’ And it's about the death penalty … It’s a depressing song. It's a hard, brutal song. But the story of it is so powerful. I can't help but listen to it. I don't listen to it for the politics, right. I listen to it, because it is such an important story. The story is so visual to me when I hear it. Yet I can't help but think about the death penalty, and the implications of it.”
“The last thing is, keep people's spirits up,” Eric concludes. “It’s gonna be really hard. This will be hard. We got some hard fucking days ahead of us. I don't think we know how hard those days are. We need to be bolstered up. We don't we don't need just songs of anger. We need songs and we need art that shows people how to hold on.”
