Arts & healing story: By laurie marshall

Mission Blindness – Cowardice and Courage  Age-Friendly Novato Mural: By Laurie Marshall

The Backstory

When I was a teenager, I would go to sleep each night wondering if I would have stood up to the Nazi’s.  Would I have said no to the concentration camps? Would I have risked my life to hide people? How would I have conformed or not conformed to the Nazi’s?

These questions were re-kindled on the second day that I worked at a San Francisco Bed and Breakfast Peace Center for an elder, visionary peace entrepreneur.  On day two of my employment, she asked me to fire someone.  It felt wrong, like I was doing her dirty work.  I should have left the job immediately.  Instead I stayed on for a year and a half, working inside a warped dictatorial setting designed to please the founder and her impossible requests.  I was hired to be the Program Director and was able to put on some exciting and fulfilling Peace Programs.  Fundamentally, however, I turned into her personal assistant, setting up doctors’ appointments and chauffeuring her where ever she wanted to go.  I advocated for better treatment for the staff at every turn. However, I was party to the firing of the night staff member, who left without acknowledgement of the many hours of interrupted sleep and the violent guests she dealt with in the middle of the night.  The fear of letting go of the security of the job kept me small.

I have found an important and life-long ally in this struggle for integrity and strength in an art classroom in 2010 at the Arts and Ethics Academy in Santa Rosa, California.  Her name is Edelina Lili Lopez. I met her when she was 17.  I came in to replace an art teacher in the middle of the year to this school for students who were not thriving in the regular school system.  Many had been incarcerated and all of them had experienced trauma.  Lili had long dark hair, a symmetrical and beautiful face adorned with glasses, long graceful fingers and a tongue that would make a truck driver blush.  She fended off verbal attacks by her classmates by dishing out three times more curse words and wit than she had been served.  And her artwork was breathtaking.  She made drawings, sculptures and baskets with a depth of emotion and beauty that contrasted her rough exterior.

When I came in to the class, the students were at war with each other as they had been at war with their teacher.  I found a pile of 50 demerit slips – a system I immediately did away with.  We ended up creating powerful artwork together, as I focused on their unique creativity and basically ignored their bad behavior.

Over the next ten years, Lili has been my assistant, my colleague and my teacher. She has assisted in creating over 35 collaborative murals with me.  I draw upon her brilliant design ideas as we pull together many different images drawn by students into one master plan.  As a woman of color, she has educated me about the times when my white privilege, white exceptionalism and white saviorism have unconsciously shown up and hurt her and other people of color.  I have sat and listened for hours to her experience.  Sometimes we have walked the land in Marin and I listened.

Lili has had courage when I haven’t.  She has let me know when I am seeking sympathy and wanting to look good at her expense.  When I called out a young African-American boy for behavior that others were doing as well, she let me know. I cringe at the emotional hardship I have put her through and other people of color through.  Sometimes we joke about “Loving in Spite of Colonial Brainwashing”.

Our most painful experience came from a project that began with high hopes. Age Friendly Novato was a new organization in the town, begun by seniors, that commissioned me and Lili to create a mural for a city-owned Senior Center.  The city of Novato helped to fund the painting, as did a local Rotary. We took the portable 7’ x 12’ mural to schools, community centers, senior citizen centers and the high school Dreamers Club for undocumented students. 200 people participated in designing and painting on the mural, from ages 4 to 90.  It was a joyous, community building act of co-creation over a two-month period.

The Battle

Three days before the mural was to be completed the director sent me an email saying there weren’t enough white people in the painting. She said “I insist that you add more white people and that request be honored.  The mural will be going to a senior center that is mostly white and they will be insulted if they don’t see themselves represented.”

 It felt wrong. but I didn’t listen to my gut.  I glossed over it. I had bent over backwards and accommodated every other request the director had made. With a knee jerk reaction, my response was sickenly sweet and agreeable.   I quickly responded saying that the ideas that come to the project are sent by the angels.  Little did I know what a painful, complex, difficult and hard lessons the angels had in store.

Lili asked why we had to do it.  I said “Because our client, the one who is paying us, has demanded it.”  Lili said there maybe another way to handle it, but I didn’t listen.  I pressed on with mission blindness to complete the project in the time allotted.  Because of the tight deadline, it was difficult to add many more figures. We added three figures and lightened the skin of seven figures that others had made, including students from Novato High School’s Dreamers Club, a club for undocumented and Hispanic students.  I kept pushing down the feeling that that this was a very bad idea.  I didn’t think through how harmful painting over the skin to make them appear lighter would be to the young people who had given their time and effort to contribute to a community mural professing to be inclusive. I painted over a figure created by Lili’s sister, someone who is very dear to me and with whom I have spent many hours.  When she found out what I had done, she wept, feeling betrayed by one of the few white people that she felt safe with.  Oh my God, I trashed that trust and reinforced that the request for inclusion was fake.  I acted out of self-interest and self-involvement.  I was aghast.  Looking into the mirror and facing the ways that I had acted with the privilege of being white was painful. And essential to be in alignment with my values.

As the project neared completion, when I agreed to add more white people to the mural and I decided to paint over some of the brown people, one of the members of the City council said afterwards, “Oh, you are a people pleaser.”  That hurt with its accuracy.  My fluid and flexible response to the racist request betrayed my morals.  When students who worked on the mural found out what happened, they planned to protest the unveiling.  The ceremony was cancelled.  ABC news came and interviewed me.  I acknowledged the harm I had done.  The interviewer said I was the most ethical person he had run into for a long time.  That is not how I felt.

                                                       The Revelation

The director of the project from Age Friendly Novato spoke to the newspapers and TV news cameras and said that this terrible decision was all my fault.  In addition to my throwing myself under the bus for not standing up to her request, she threw me under the bus as well, placing all the blame for the damage on my shoulders.

 Put in the center of a media storm, a publicity advisor told me I should tell the story that I had felt terrible from the beginning.  Even though I had glossed over my feelings, I told the public that I had carried out these instructions under duress. That didn’t feel right, but I was confused and afraid that my work as a social justice artist would be tarnished.  I had never experienced negative public acclaim and I didn’t like it.  “You don’t want to be known as a racist, Mom,” my son told me.  However, I was racist and I had to face that and admit it to myself.

Lili told me about Layla F. Saad’s Me and White Supremacy Workbook, which I slowly and painfully worked my way through over a two-month period. By writing answers to difficult and important questions,  I faced the way that I have practiced “White Exceptionalism.”  Since I had see Martin Luther King when I was five, since I had experiences beginning at the age 14 of being the only white person in a room full of people of color, since I had many dear friends who are people of color, I thought I was exempt from acting out of white privilege.  As Lili says, there are many actions I just don’t perceive as racist because I don’t have the filters that people of color have.

Through that journaling process, I also faced the way I have practiced “White Saviorism.”  I looked back at being an art teacher and doing art projects with black and Hispanic children, I saw the place of adoration I put myself in.  Looking deeper, I saw a need to be needed that I hadn’t faced. As a teacher, there is a power imbalance already.  Adding in the racial dynamics of our society, the fact that I have taught in under-served minority neighborhoods for most of my life had a whole new light.  The deep dive reflection into the unconscious white filter of my life’s work was painful. On a whole new level, I did not take for granted the air of privilege and structural racism that I breathe, that you breathe, that we all breathe.

                                                                 The Equilibrium

There has been no resolution to this project. The mural sits in the home of one of the Age Friendly Mural homes.  At first, the project was put on the back burner until a new City Council was elected.  Once they were elected, I reached out to two of them to discuss possibilities. I never heard back.  I proposed that the mural be hung as is with the following text beside it.

Age Friendly Novato Mural

The purpose of the Age Friendly Novato Mural was to create a vision of a Novato where all people feel welcome.  Over 200 people in 20 sessions helped to create it. The painting is filled with play and imagination.

An early name for Novato was “Valley of the Pleasant Breezes.”  That is the inspiration for the sense of wind in the mural.

The central image of water flowing from the fireman’s hose and Stafford Lake into baskets represent the wisdom and connection that goes between unique individuals.

Transforming apples, which then become baseballs, which turn into bocci balls, then into soccer balls, which become tomatoes as part of all-inclusive community feast symbolizing a place where all are welcome… to play together and eat together.

When the mural was almost complete, the project director said there needed to be more white people in the mural.  The lead artist complied by adding some white people and making some of the people of color lighter. These actions hurt the community and the spirit of the mural. The challenges made by these last-minute changes are leading to a more profound awareness of exclusion and unconscious privilege. We seek to have this experience help our community grow to be more inclusive and respectful.

I submitted this idea to the Age Friendly Novato committee.  They did not respond.

The students in the Dreamers Club have moved on.  They don’t want anything to do with the mural. They were promised by a city council woman that they could make their own mural to express their experience.  This has never happened.  The Covid-19 pandemic came.  The students have no more school for the rest of the year. It is not time to pursue this issue with City Council.

There was joy in the creation of this mural.  There was heartbreak, too.  I have not given up on our community experiencing a healing from this experience.