How Art Saves Lives
The beauty of Sing Sing (2023).
Reader Note: Starting this month, two of my four monthly Monday posts will be available exclusively for paid subscribers. These pieces will be deeply researched and centered on challenging my own priors, with the goal of normalizing intellectual growth, curiosity, and the ongoing work of identifying our blind spots. This space is about engaging with complexity—not to 'win' an argument, but to pursue genuine understanding.
Next week, I’ll be exploring where the conversation on race in America may have taken a wrong turn. As crude demagoguery becomes hypernormalized and young Black Americans feel increasingly disconnected from the solidarity that defined the 20th-century Black experience, what happens to the frameworks that once shaped racial discourse?
Have they evolved, or have they stalled?
That’s where I’ll begin next Monday—I hope you’ll join me.
This will not be a post that allows reactionaries to run away with it and claim race doesn't matter or is a distraction from Democrats reaching unattainable voters.
One of the best films of the year was Sing Sing (2023). Directed by Greg Kwedar, this film is a beautiful and haunting story about rediscovering our humanity in the face of systemic oppression, legal maneuvering, and environmental degradation. Inspired by true events, the film uses real members of Sing Sing’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts (RTA) program at Sing Sing Maximum Security Prison in New York. Professional actors Colman Domingo, Paul Raci, and Sean San José also star in this powerful narrative.
The Rehabilitation Through the Arts program was founded in 1996 with the goal of using the creative arts as a tool for education, personal transformation, and reducing recidivism. RTA offers a structured environment where incarcerated men and women engage in theater, music, dance, and visual arts. By participating in these artistic projects, individuals are given the opportunity to express themselves, build skills, and gain a sense of self-worth that is often stripped away by the dehumanizing nature of the prison system.
I cried through most of the movie because I saw men, whom society may have forgotten, change and evolve. The depiction of this inspiring and humanizing experience for those not experiencing their everyday horrors is the chef’s kiss. The film also reminds me of themes that I have been thinking about lately, particularly the power of art and humanities education in our collective ability to interpret events and connect with the larger human condition:
The Power of Daydreams
Reader Note: Starting this month, two of my Monday posts will be for paid subscribers only. These pieces will be deeply researched, where I challenge my own priors in an effort to normalize intellectual growth, curiosity, and the necessary work of identifying our blind spots. My goal is to foster a space where we engage with complexity—not for the sake …
Throughout the film, you can see how the activity of becoming a new person on stage has the potential to liberate people who otherwise would be ground down by a brutal carceral state. Art can save lives and open our minds to wider possibilities, both spiritually and emotionally.
The U.S. carceral state, which now houses over two million people—the highest incarceration rate in the world—is not only a symbol of punitive justice but also of systemic neglect and moral failure. Black and Brown people are disproportionately policed and incarcerated in this system, reflecting deep-rooted racial and economic inequities that persist through legal and cultural frameworks. Recidivism is also a significant issue, as formerly incarcerated individuals struggle to adapt to life beyond prison walls due to societal stigmatization and lack of support.
Michelle Alexander discusses mass incarceration:
Colman Domingo delivers an excellent performance as John “Divine G” Whitfield, a fictionalized character based on the real-life experiences of those who found creativity and community within the prison walls. As he leads this group of theater enthusiasts, his personal transformation throughout the film forces him to reckon with his illusions while coming to recognize something he overlooked: his impact on his fellow program participants.
Like Colman’s character, writers inspire people through their stories and enthusiasm for building worlds through prose and speech. A writer’s ability to create language around something someone is feeling but can’t necessarily articulate is special in itself.
Films like Sing Sing are deeply personal yet tell a larger story, even if they set out to highlight a specific example of humanistic endeavors within a larger draconian landscape. They force us to reckon with how much American society thrives on a punitive approach to justice rather than rehabilitation and redemption. As America continues to debate criminal justice reform, this film serves as a critical reminder of the importance of art and education within that fight.
That’s why I appreciated this film.
You come for a film about the development of a theater performance as imprisoned men have a chance to escape from their daily existence inside a system of concrete spiritual death, but you stay for the larger impression the story and direction have on our understanding of prison, “criminals,” and the way people evolve and learn. Sing Sing is not just about a theatrical performance—it’s about humanity reclaiming itself under the most brutal of conditions.
I think everyone in America should watch this film. But one can dream.
How Hip-Hop Saved My Life: A Story of Mental Health and Music
I found the movie,, Dish, On Demand, it is downloading as I type.
I have a hard time digesting the meme that America is or was Great. It is, has been, great for some, but not all.
It is a tragedy that we have the greatest incarceration rate of any nation in the world.
Maybe it is because we have more policing than any the world, and what is considered a crime here, is only a shrug there.
Most of our crimes are drug related, and drug related activies elsewhere's are every day.
But there is no doubt that our incarceration rate is tied to the 13th Amendment, and classism.
Racism is a subset of classism, Bernie Sanders knows this but failed to express or explain it, because those that have suffered from racism, see the world through the prism of their own experience and eyes, which is myopia.
Every since some thug realized that he could dominate others, there has been classism.
Through history it has been the upper class and the lower class. Senate and plebes in Rome, over time their developed and intermediate class, the equitus or equestrian in Rome. And always at the bottom, the helot (Greek, the slave.
The Slave was indistinguishable from the plebe, if you washed, dressed, shaved, cut the beard, and until he opened his mouth he could and did pass for a plebe, even an equitus if properly attired.
Things changed when Europeans needed cheap labor (labor is never free, because is needs to be tended to, and that costs money). Even slaves who worked until they died in the Rio Tinto mine in Iberia, needed gruel and oversight, which costs money.
At first, until 1661 when Slavery was made law, the ruling class depended on indentured servants, European, native and even black, as in the 20 Africans sold on the quay at Elizabeth City in 1619.
What was sold was their indenture which they worked off, and were provided with a sack of seed, a mule and a musket and sent on their way (See for example: Fiddler on Pantico Run, an African warrior and his white desendants) .
Thestory of Edward Mozingo, his white, indentured servant wife. some of his descendants are proud members of the KKK, others are a black community in NC and include a retired Alabama Judge, Tony Mozingo.
In Virginia, then the south and throughout America classism evolved. The lowly white, the plow boy, the share cropper, the hard scrabble farmer at the bottom of the social pyramid could stand a little taller knowing that beneath him were savages and non humans.
As LBJ said: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket."
This is a sad statement about the human condition, but it seems that there always has to be an underclass,someone on who one can stand.
We know about the Rwanda genocide, but we aren't told about it's cause. Two peoples he Huti's and the Turtsi. The Huti were taller had thinner noses, and were more gracile, the tutsi's were shorter and more robust.
The Tutsi's dominated society and the government, had he best jobs, the positions in government. The slaughter had two components, one economic and the other racial, the racial component fueled the economic. (Sound familiar)
It is worse in India, with five castes, and each caste subdivied into sub castes, originally thousands of years ago, the caste system was based on skin color, modernized it is based on occupation. The sexual proclivities of men (and I mean males) eliminated categorization by skin color.
Years ago I read a book, The Revolution in Santo Domingo, as the aisle of Haiti and Dominican Republic was called then.
It spun of from the French Revolution of 1789, but here it took on a racial component. The ruling class were whites, and those that weren't slaughtered ran off to what became Alabama and settled in what became Marengo County, where they tried to grow, but failed, grapes for wine.
Once the whites were disposed of, they turned on the quadroons and once they were disposed of, they turned on the mulattoes.
And I venture to say that if you were to visit Haiti today, you would find, essentially, the same situation
I am a non believer, so I don't believe in the concept of sin, never the less, I would say this mankind's original sin. Classism, and so many artifices to build upon it.
Many of my ancestors were Irish, some, I am sure, were indentured servants, maybe even Irish slaves, for there were such, Oliver Cromwell shipped 50,000 of them to the colonies, when he subdued Ireland, slaughtering hundreds of thousands.
I have in my possession, a tax document for a Richad Farrar (2nd Cousin, 4 times removed) who was taxed for the ownership of a white male between the age of 21 and 50, and this was circa 1860 in Perry Co,AL
My point is, for restatement, that when one scrapes everything away, and reduce social ills or society to it's core, at the root and rot of it is dominance.
The husband has a bad day at work, comes home abuses the wife, she in turn abuses the child, the child in turn abuses the dog, the dog abuses the cat and the cat kills the mouse.
There is always a scapegoat, a relatively defensive minority, upon which rage can be used as an outlet.
For the longest time, is was blacks, then natives, then Asians, even Germans, Italians, Irish, until they assimilated, people with non white skin, melanin deficient never had the opportunity to really assimilate they had to carve out their own subculture.
And the saddest thing is that within subcultures, there are subcultures and persons upon him discrimination and opprobrium is visited. One particular case is the gays, and the gays discriminate against the trans.. There is always someone at the bottom, but when the various classes and subclasses unite.is when they can find an acceptable sub class upon which they can all jump.
For awhile it was gays, until they came into their own, with Obergefell, JD Vance and Peter Thiel, not it is trans,, but the other sub classes haven't been forgot,black and brown folk who don't speak English that well
As my friend Curtis from Oakland use to say, When the world stops I am getting off.