Theme 81: Justice

A lot of people look at jazz and they think it's just kind of unfettered randomness, when actually there's a process going on. Each one of these musicians is both a leader and a follower.

Justice is a process, it's not necessarily an outcome...becoming sensitive of things we don't know about and we haven't experienced.

Go where the music takes you.

Learn to play with others and not just people who think like you.

Miles Davis said that it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself.

The instrument is you. Developing your own voice, developing your own sense of the world, interrogating what you experienced and what you think.

Going to the dictionary for words is a little like getting nutrition advice from the FDA... Words come from the community, they come from experience, they come from emotion.

Words...is not just language. This is part of being conscious, human, and whole.

Words are like these little ecosystems.

Jazz is the legacy of the African-American community.

Jazz is a process

When you watch [Muhammed] Ali you learn more than just boxing...you learn about America.

It’s about standing up and fighting for what’s right and making this place better for your neighbor.

Justice to me means that we take a step outside of ourselves and try to have some empathy for one another, and not just rely on the systems all the time.

We have to check our privilege. We have to look in the mirror and be like, how am I contributing to all these problems? Because all of us are.

We have to check ourselves. We have to check our privilege. We have to look in the mirror: How am I contributing to all of these problems? Because all of us are.

Justice is a hard topic, in my opinion, because it means that we have to check ourselves. We have to check our privilege. We have to look in the mirror and ask, how am I contributing to all these problems.

Justice, to me, means that we live up to who we really say we are.

We can create through feminism, it isn't something we can talk about or write about but it's actually something we can use to our advantage

Law is something we should all be thinking about and thinking about how I could be better

You can't dismantle the master's house using the master's tools, we wanted to use other tools, other than law to try to undermine this idea of impotence and centrality of law

it's about a different way of seeing, and art is about a different way of seeing and more

Law is not a sausage making machine, it's not a machine where you feed in the facts of a particular dispute and out pops the right answer.

Graffiti introduced me to typography. Typography introduced me to design.

We have to be willing to let people enter our space that are not normally in our ecosystem.

It’s really hard to create change when you’re just talking about it.

To live a life of justice, we have to be willing to live a life that’s interrupted.

I stepped from beyond my desk and went into the street.

Likes without works is dead.

Art controls culture. Culture controls people.

Art is powerful.

"Meet people with respect, always. That could be the starting point"

And I said, 'Now that 's what I want to do. I want to learn more about solutions. I want to know how to get people to come together to talk about solutions, not just a problem.'

Now I am learning about solutions instead of just constantly saying what the issue is.

If you don't have a great support system, the Halfway House is going to send you back to jail.

One of the coolest things I've done in Philly was--I returned home. To me, that was pretty cool.

We are talking about being able to be respected on your own terms without having to conform to someone else's ideal of what it means to be you.

Our values dictate what could be justice.

Justice is radical imagination.

How do I turn this into reality? Well, you gotta just try some shit.

And we can actually be part of the events that are actually changing and reshaping our concept of what it means to belong.

The only reason why it’s not going to happen, is because you’re here. And you’re going to do something about it.

We only do this to people when they're aliens. That is, when they're different. Right? . . . But once you're different, once you're "the other," these rules are really easy to apply.

Stories are messy, complicated people exist.

It matters who's telling your stories.

Stories are about people.

We have this really strong desire to tell stories from the past that can help us and other people make better sense of things going on in the world.

We had something to contribute and we could give voice to stories that maybe weren't being voiced.

We knew that it [our work] needed to happen. As consumers of news, we felt that this kind of content needed to be out there in the world.

Yes, we were kind of imposters in ways, but we just knew we could make something good.

We kept going because we were obsessed with making this thing - even if it embarrassed us or it was difficult.

Finding my own voice was important for us to find the voice of the show.

Your vulnerability is important to acknowledge and then get ahead of...

If you're not sure of your self first and foremost, as a creator, then it's hard for other people to feel that confidence in talking to you.

There's unlimited possibilities at the beginning and then you're slowly zero-ing in on what you want to sound like.

Forgiveness is for you; it is not for the other person. We all are only responsible for our own actions.

Over and over again, I said, ‘I can’t.’ ‘I can’t make change.’ ‘I’m not good enough.’ But then I changed the ‘can’t’ to ‘I can’t not do something.’ I have to do it. I have to do something.

You have some kind of power, some kind of ability to change the world. You just have to figure out how to go about it...and ask for help.

Being angry and being scared is a total waste of energy and human potential.

The work for justice is not easy. But it can get easier if we all work towards it together.

If you think you're doing enough, you're doing the minimum. If you're doing too much, you're doing barely enough.

We have to grow daily to work against injustice.

It is incredible what natural lighting can do for a person. Our jail currently has almost no natural lighting. Almost none. And if you're a person struggling with depression or anxiety, no natural light can really exacerbate that, let alone being in a jail cell.

I think we have some really awesome people... and they have very good intentions, and I think we are going to see some really good changes because of our Jail Trust.

The topic of justice reform is important here in Oklahoma.

Think back to your manifesto... every person is creative, and every person has the ability to contribute to the world.

Sometimes we forget that the people we incarcerate are just that; they're people. They are our friends, our neighbors, and our family members. When we lock them up, we take away their ability to contribute to the world.

Poetic Justice is a program here in Oklahoma, started by a woman named Ellen Stackable, and she goes into jails and prisons, and works with women, and teaches them how to write . . . poetry.

I'm sure that everyone in this room has engaged in some type of activity that could have gotten you thrown in jail, and we just happened to not get caught.

My goal today is to humanize the people involved in our justice system. They are just like you and me.

The ingenuity of the young people were that they were able to create a new reality out of their impoverished environment of where they were at.

Hip-hop was created out of nothing in an impoverished environment in New York.

When we think about justice, we rarely think about empathy and we rarely think about love.

Find your passion and don’t lose sight of it. And always speak out.

The best way we can use our voice is to vote. If we don’t do that, everything that we stand for doesn’t matter.

We are at a point in which free expression is the only thing we have to really fight injustice.

"Take care of yourself - go for a run, have some me time and work hard at whatever your doing and invest yourself fully in whatever your doing into those things - but then also take the time to help others when you can because that will always lead to a happier more fulfilled life, where you bump into friends and different people who have taken different paths - but the one thing we all have in common is one another, where we can build those friendships that last forever."