Episode 3 - Blackspace The Space of Justice

In this epsiode Shelvis Ponds sits down with Pierce Freelon, founder of Blackspace and Northstar Church of the Arts, to discuss how to read who space is for and how he came to create Blackspace in Durham, NC. Sponsored by the Division of Student Affairs at Duke University.
Beginning of Transcript:
Afronaut, and that is ‘Afronaut’ like an African astronaut, you know. I think of what we do here as a breathing space we create like an atmosphere, literally, figuratively, we burn sage, we burn palo santo, we make sure that when kids walk into the space it feels like they can exhale, they can take a deep breath. A lot of these structures out here, we’ve learned from Black feminists that there exists not just racism and patriarchy and sexism, but that they’re interlocked and oppression is intersectional and so when we want to dream about creating like a breathing space, you need to put your creative lense on to be able to envision that, in order tomanifest that, in order to experience that in slivers, because out there if you’re black on a predominantly white campus and dealing with microaggressions, if you’re a woman trying to go jogging at night, if you’re queer in a space where homophobic lyricsare popping on the radio, those things can be very literally asphyxiating, it can take the breath out your lungs and it can be depressing or it can be assaulting or distressing and so we hope to create a space where we don’t have to deal with any of that and so when we start from that point, what does it look like to feel, and to engage and to create amongst each other as Black folks doing our best to keep those things at bay in this space and to me the metaphor of a mask and a suit, a protective environment and atmosphere for liberation to be tasted and experimented on and experienced -that’s the source from which we are going to spring forward and say, “We’re not going to deal with this, we know what the alternative situation can be like. The alternativelearning environment can be like, we’ve dreamed up better situations than this one”. And I feel like there isn’t an ancestor out there, name one that wasn’t a dreamer for their time and the obvious cliche would be Martin Luther King Jr. “I Had a Dream”, we hear that every Black History Month, that’s in the McDonald’s commercial “I Have a Dream”, but take it back like Ella Baker -what type of world was she dreaming, what type of alternate reality was Pauli Murray talking about, Episcopal preacher queer Black? What planet are you living on, Harriet Tubman? You are on some other sh--as we need to be if we want to see through what we
the Durham native who played pro-football and then quit the sport to be a painter and ended up painting “The Sugar Shack” painting, which was based in the Durham Armory. That was the setting for that beautiful painting, which was the cover of Marvin Gaye’s I Want You album that was on the beginning of “Good Times” --iconic painting from this football player from Durham who was a celebrity and an icon in his own right as an athlete, but was also an artist and a creative. And Ryan Coogler, in my mind, steps into that tradition of the Jim Browns and others that havestepped out of the sports arena to do not just creative work, but important, political creative work. So in grad school he had this short film called “Locks”, it was about a brother -spoiler alert –brothers, like, walking around basically being raciallyprofiled and he cuts his hair and as he walks out there’s all these dreads like looking at him like, “Man, like I get it, but damn man this is rough”. And then when he gets home, he takes his bag of hair and he throws it at his sister and she looks at himand starts crying and she takes her wig off and come to find out that he was shaving his head to be in solidarity with her because she had cancer, not because of the stereotypes, which do exist. It’s a silent film, there’s no dialogu