The school to prison pipeline effects millions of young people each year and is one of the driving factors behind the epidemic of mass incarceration. From a young age, inner city youth are given little to no chance to fulfill their potentials.
Fong Tran was one of these youth. The child of Vietnamese immigrants, Tran grew up in a working class neighborhood in South Sacramento. Attending an underfunded school, his future, like those of his classmates, was a promise of either death, prison, or at best, a low wage job.
However, with the help of Restorative Justice, he was able to find a way to focus his energies towards the arts. Instead of criminalizing mistakes in the classroom, he found a space for expression. Eventually, Tran was able to graduate college and now works to bring what he learned back to his community in the form of spoken word poetry that touches on subjects such as identity, racism, and imperialism.
“World history is just American propaganda/Last year’s communist is this year’s terrorist/The blatant bastardizing of brothers of color just to beat them down/So maybe history doesn’t repeat itself but it sure does rhyme a lot.”
Lines such as these were among the many performed for a packed crowd at the Sol Collective in an event that displayed the impact of combining arts and activism. Between performances, Fong Tran shared a quote from a fellow artist and activist: “Art is a form of resistance to the imperfection of reality as well as an attempt to create an alternative reality.” He followed this with the statement, “Art is where activism becomes real.”
The act of expression is one that is stifled by the profit driven environment created by capitalism. The common ability of all people, if given a chance, to express themselves is both what brings us together as well as what sets each person apart. Every story is important and deserves to be heard, and art is an important tool to make sure this happens. But art alone does not create the space necessary for this to occur. That is why activism is necessary. Only through the struggle to counter the dehumanizing effects of capitalism can the human spirit flourish. On this night, activism provided the space, and art filled that space, transforming it into an example of a new way forward.
