Interview with arts educator Karen M. Clark-Keys

Karen M. Clark-Keys is a Ph.D. candidate. She’s a policy wonk, and her doctoral work in Art Education focuses on the fit – or not – between the mission, goals, and objectives of the various players that come together in out-of-school arts education programs. She came to Cleveland last year to take a position in the art education department of one of the largest school districts in the state. Lyz Bly met up with this East Cleveland resident and self-ascribed gadfly to discuss voting issues among African Americans, the East Cleveland community, and her theory that you can get a read on the current political climate in this country by checking out car bumper stickers.

Cool Cleveland: You mentioned that this Sat 10/2, just two days before the voter registration deadline, you are going to stage a “street corner action” and set up a table at the intersection of Hayden and Eddy Roads in East Cleveland to get as many people registered to vote as possible. Are you looking for people to come out and assist you in this effort?

Karen Clark-Keys: I’ve asked many of my friends to join me, but what I think would be even better would be for people all over the city to get copies of the registration forms [online or at the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections ] and camp out in one of the city’s urban neighborhoods to help people get registered. This means having them fill out the forms, quickly going over them to make sure that they are filled out properly, collecting them, and then delivering them to the Board of Elections office on Monday. We need to make people realize that their vote could change the outcome of the election.

Organizations such as MoveOnPAC and NARAL organized huge voter registration drives in hopes of getting unregistered and unlikely voters to the polls on November 2. One of NARAL’s efforts was a film (sent via email) titled Just Another Day. It focused on a harried 46-year-old white professional woman, an urbane-looking 28-year-old Latina woman, and a stressed 37-year old African-American clerical worker. The women of color not only displayed a lack of engagement with the voting process, they also demonstrated distrust in it. The Latina woman says something like, “Yeah, I’m pro-choice, but Bush, Kerry, they’re all the same.” On many levels, there is so much truth to her statement. But we’ve also seen an unprecedented erosion of women’s rights and access to information about birth control, health issues, and gender equality under the Bush regime. If you had been in charge of getting women – or people in general – from Cleveland’s African-American community to the polls, how would you have gone about it?
One thing’s for sure, I would not have placed nearly as much emphasis on the Internet video bit. I’ve sent in more than two or three donations to MoveOn and other organizations like it because I think they are highly valuable in the work they do. But typical me, I’m noticing the difference between the claim of wanting to affect change versus the actual movement toward that “claimed” change because of what is embedded in the culture, the methods, and the protocols of the organizations involved. In other words, MoveOn and many other contemporary GOTV organizations were started by and for the Internet environment. And they haven’t done a reality check to compare their culture and environment against their claimed mission, goals, and objective. Not everybody is wired to the Internet. So if your mission, goals, and objectives are bound up in the Internet culture, how are you going to meet the needs of non-Internet-reliant people? The demographics of those of the techno strata – despite their ethnicity/race – tend to be of a particular socio-economic stratum. And I would hazard a guess that they are probably already pretty much in the loop, registered, and knowledgeable in general about politics and the election. They’re not the people in my community who need to be brought on board. The people who need to be brought on board to even register, much less, get them to actually vote, are not typically tapped into the Internet on a daily basis. Contrary to the myopic geek view, the majority of US citizens still do NOT have computers at home.

I think the work of ACT (Americans Coming Together) is much more the model of being real about getting to people of color, as opposed to the safe behind computer screen “doors” armchair liberalism of MoveOn. And that, I suspect, probably has to do with the people who make up ACT’s ground level workers and their front-line and middle level managers; namely grass roots local social activists with a good number of people of color.

You and I were recently talking about the political mood in Cleveland and you said that lately you’ve been taking note of people’s satisfaction/dissatisfaction through the proliferation of bumper stickers that carry messages of dissent. Will you share this insightfully humorous theory with Cool Cleveland readers?
Truth be told, I hadn’t really paid much attention to [bumper stickers] until [recently]. But BLAM – there it was, and I kept watching and noticing, and counting and noticing. Rather, I’ve become aware of a phenomenon and it struck me by comparison to what we have – or rather haven’t -- seen in several decades. It’s very unscientific, but here’s Old Karen's "survey” -- the bumper sticker survey. Back in the '70s and '80s when I was young and cute – now I'm just cute – bumper stickers were a MAJOR form of communication. Very few cars didn’t have at least one bumper sticker. People were “talking,” even “yelling,” at each other with this proliferation of stickers. Well, over time they were devalued as simply tacky, but also they were no longer needed as the populous came to tire of all the bumper sticker wars. And there was no super major crisis that galvanized the entire populous, regardless of what side of the issue one stood. Thus we all became settled into a kind of complacency and let the bumper stickers die out; they pretty much disappeared. But now they are back. Granted I still don't see them at the same levels that I did in the 70s and 80s but I am seeing them – a lot! And the vast majority of what I'm seeing is either a Kerry-Edwards campaign sticker, or something that is trashing and cracking on Bush, et al. Each day I notice more and more of them, even on new, Middle American cars with white males driving them on their way to work. Not like [two decades ago] on an old beater with me and some of my former pothead buddies in it on the way to a Sly and the Family Stones concert. (Of course that white guy in the late model car was probably at the same concert I was; I just don’t know him now that he has put on a suit, cut his hair, and shaved off the beard.)

Anyway, I’ve made the conclusion based on this unscientific survey that Bush is TOAST!!! The bumper stickers are saying it loud and clear; bumper stickers don't lie! There is something hitting the overall psyche of the populous that it almost an emotional need to cry out, to vent, to let out the rage, and it’s coming out in on the back ends of cars. But just because the majority of the stickers are not pro-Bush doesn’t mean we can let up on our efforts to get people registered and out to vote November 2.

In the year or so since you moved to East Cleveland, have you noticed any changes in the community given all that has happened recently with Mayor Onunwor and with the overall economic situation? When I see or read news reports on East Cleveland, I always think, “How much worse can it get for the people of that community?” But then one of the local news programs was interviewing residents and one young woman said, “Politicians are all corrupt; they prosecuted our mayor because of who he is, where he’s from,” and I wondered if she wasn’t right… What do you think?
As far as East Cleveland is concerned, there is one major change I “feel,” and I do mean that in the intuitive sense. That is East Cleveland is far less of a scary place. It’s less about crime and more of a place with a lot of poor people. Like I told you, in our house the warm weather pastime is “porch time.” We have a large wonderful, accommodating porch on a major thoroughfare, and we see it all. That’s our entertainment. We love it! Coming back and forth to Cleveland/East Cleveland – and sometimes getting away and coming back with a fresh pair of eyes – is a clearer way to “see” things. But East Cleveland doesn’t frighten me. It’s just a place with a lot of poor people. It is also a place where there are a lot of middle class working folks as well, and some of them are starting to move back in bits and pieces.

As to Onunwor, I don’t know enough about the facts to know what is true. But what I suspect is pretty much in the vein of a “give ‘em enough rope, and they will hang themselves” kind of a deal. My question isn’t so much about whether Onunwor really did or didn’t. He probably did. My question is WHY are the powers-that-be concerned enough about the East Clevelands of the world to intervene in our political process? Like the kid in the commercial says, “SOME’ST UP.” You cannot get me to believe that the regional, state, or federal law enforcement and policing agencies are that concerned about truth, justice, and the “American” way to give a crap about communities like East Cleveland. They are more than happy for us to self-destruct and wallow in our own mess. My mind keeps wondering if there aren’t some other bigger reasons at play. What, I don’t know, but I’m real suspicious.

The bottom line is that Onunwor is probably just a bad imitation of what he has seen as political leadership both in his own country, and now his adopted homeland. And because citizens of the East Clevelands of the world do not know, see, or believe that the political process works for them, they don’t vote. This allows a vacuum for the few who do vote. And mostly for the same rehashed, recycled, and rotated lousy politicians to constantly remain connected in various guises within the city halls of the world. It becomes a never-ending, self-fulfilling prophecy. But I also don’t see how it’s any different from what goes on in Cleveland’s city government. It too is a place filled with the same old re-worked, rotated from elected to non-elected and back again faces, so there is, at best, no new ideas and thus no forward motion. Probably true in Parma too, for all I know.

Thanks for chatting with me, Karen. And good luck registering East Cleveland voters on Saturday.
from Cool Cleveland columnist Lyz Bly

 (:divend:)