Illustration: Sam Rodriguez
A quote by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas shadows my work as an arts manager: “We is not the plural of I.” This quote is grounded in the secular we of “we the people,” as opposed to the we of “me and my friends” asserted by the powers of privatization. It is the we that includes people you don’t know — city folks, sports fans, shoppers, school children, opera lovers, the public.
I think often of the pronoun we in the context of my work as Oakland’s cultural affairs manager. In 2018, we released Oakland’s cultural plan, Belonging in Oakland. I see its development and emergence as a prompt that enlivens civic life, place, and belonging. The tagline for the plan, “equity is the driving force, culture is the frame, and belonging is the goal,” guided the way we developed the plan and designed programmatic responses to animate the civic we.
Oakland’s Cultural Affairs Division works to operationalize belonging through its programs and policies. It asks that Oaklanders be mindful and engage with the sociological, and not just the psychological, meaning of “belonging.” It asks how culture, policy, and planning can impact the social systems and conditions that create belonging.
As a policy wonk, I think about how policy aims to fix problems via management, guidelines, rules, and regulations. Culture, meanwhile, is fluid, developing new knowledge and bringing to life our possibilities, our belonging. Oakland’s cultural plan revealed that what gives deep meaning to Oaklanders is being able to live in an equitable society. Living in an ethically just, aesthetically rich, and racially diverse city became the plan’s democratic charge. To that end, the plan’s orientation to equity and culture fed an action agenda to embrace the connectedness and intersectionality that animates Oakland and that is key to realizing belonging.
Oakland has a rich and deep history as an arts community that addresses the racial and social justice intentions of a fully realized democracy. For decades, community members have created wonderful artworks that prompt the social imagination of how we live together: our democracy, our understanding of place, of beauty. And for decades, Oakland artists have also addressed the subject of trauma: racial trauma, sexual trauma, police trauma. The pronoun I often appears in these works: “I’ve been traumatized...here’s my story.” To truly move from I to we raises the question: How are institutions holding the we of civic trauma? As a public servant, I ask myself this question: How are we addressing our responsibilities to look at social systems and find the agency we have within them to address dis-belonging and civic trauma, to bear witness, to offer remedies, to be grounded in the ethos of care and belonging through planning and policy?
I assert that a city should have a belonging strategy that operates alongside its workforce development strategy, its housing strategy, its transportation strategy, and its safety strategy. The government charge to facilitate social cohesion among residents needs to be framed as a municipal goal. And cities need to invest in this goal as our social networks are changing, collapsing, and being reimagined in the wake of the civic trauma created by COVID-19. Civic trauma is about the loss of publicness, the loss of the we in civic life that enliven locales. In this post-pandemic and racial reckoning moment, how can a cultural plan be useful in addressing our social conditions, our municipal stresses, our civic belonging?
On the basis of the Oakland cultural plan, we reframed the Cultural Affairs Division’s grant opportunities for artists around activities that strengthen social networks and social cohesion, creating the Neighborhood Voices grant program. This program builds belonging within Oakland neighborhoods by supporting the expression, recognition, and understanding of the diverse communities that make Oakland unique and resilient. It supports culturally engaging efforts to bring community members together to foster cohesion, offer visions for our collective future as Oaklanders, and build neighborhoods as we move through and cope with the epidemic of loneliness in our society.
We also launched the Cultural Strategists in Government (CSIG) program, which places cultural workers in city hall departments that address civic needs. Cultural strategists are individuals working in the realm of culture, art making, and aesthetic practices who bring unique skill sets and perspectives to bear on challenging civic problems. They are artists, creative entrepreneurs, traditional culture bearers, community historians, or others who are interested in serving the public. As thought partners to government departments, CSIG program fellows do not exclusively make art objects. Instead, they make policy arguments for cultural shifts crucial to the work of realizing a just city and civic belonging. The CSIG pro- gram is an investment in creative thinkers who imagine and test new ways of working from a position inside government to advance how dialogue, deliberation, risk, and innovation can impact systems as we work to build trust in government — which is key to opera- tionalizing civic belonging.
To practice belonging in Oakland is to affirm that this city is a home of narrative shifts that define and refine us. Moving beyond the ROI of return on economic investment to the ROI of return on impact, return on influence, and return on imagination is a narrative shift that reflects the aesthetic speech of the city. It is our “shine” as we move through the political and civic uncertainties that shape city life. ✹