On Tuesday, March 14, a small crowd filled the seats of UTCC chanting in unison, “Night cannot drive out the night, only light. Hate cannot end the hate, only love.”
A crowd deriving from different experiences, realities, colors and ethnicities came to UTCC to listen. In partnership with the Center for Student Reconciliation and Diversity and Azusa Pacific Seminary, Listen Los Angeles brought an opportunity for APU students to listen and watch artists express their reality of being black in America.
The group of five individuals that led the event are Fuller Seminary graduates who have joined together to create their third Listen event in hopes of expanding their performances to bigger audiences. The night consisted of interactive song, dance, spoken word, video compilations and a Q&A panel to close.
One of the first performers and organizers of the event, Mackenzie Edwards, set the stage with a repeated statement that captured the essence of the event’s purpose.
“Listen. You may hear silence, but that silence is really my voice, that has been silenced,” Edwards said.
Edwards is a Fuller graduate who loves to “tell people’s stories through the arts.” While this is Listen’s third official event, Edward has both danced and performed spoken word for nine other live art events.
Another performer, Andre Henry, used the stage to illustrate the difference between empathy and sympathy, talking about the #AllLivesMatter movement. Henry explained how many of his white friends try to argue for “sameness” between the two races.
To this sentiment, Henry replies, “You say we’re the same, but it costs you nothing. We are the same, yet you still refer to us as the ‘black community.’”
Henry also touched on the burden of white people to fix the problem, not black people.
In the panel segment, an audience member asked, “What do you suggest we do to fix this problem?”
“It’s unfair to ask me how to fix it. You don’t ask us how to fix the race problem, ask a white person. The burden is not on the brutalized,” Henry said.
While the audience turnout was intimate, the impact was extremely interactive among the APU students who attended.
Senior Social Work major Rebecca Bekele expressed her sentiments from participating in the event.
“It’s a weird dichotomy how this event was so beautiful yet so sobering. It feels like they shouldn’t be in the same sentence, but they are,” Bekele said. “Tonight, they brought together art and social justice and it was done really well. I wish they made this type of event a chapel requirement. People need to hear this.”
During the panel, event coordinators and audience members advised and discussed practical ways white people could get involved in the Black Lives Matter movement as well as continue to educate themselves by listening.
Edwards and other organizers ended the event by challenging the audience with the question.
“Now what are you going to do about it? For those of you that think coming [to] this event is the end goal. This isn’t the end, it’s the beginning,” Edwards said.