SCRIPT:

My fellow Americans...... those who live here, work here, create here. Those who shaped this country and are shaped by it. My fellow Americans, however you came to be part of this varied and far-flung body we call the United States, it's my privilege to speak to you today.

Over the last few years, traveling from Miami to Alaska and everywhere in between, I have asked myself the same couple of questions over and over again.

Who gets to speak for such a diverse body? 

And how?

The United States is huge. Each corner is so unique, each community’s needs vary wildly, and each place’s history is rich and lengthy beyond telling. It’s almost illogical that we’re all one country, when any one of us will always look and sound and think differently than the next.

And yet. 

And yet we are part of one country—in all our varieties, diversities, and complexities.

To speak honestly about the United States means speaking to this country’s complexities: to the beauty of the notion behind it, to how it has failed far, far more people than it has elevated, and to the incremental shifts and boundless progress it makes nonetheless.

Here in 2020, we are still reckoning with our changing relationship to history. Understanding the biases and omissions earlier generations chose and imposed. Learning the sheer scope of what’s ahead if we want to build a country worthy of its people, in all our complications and contradictions.

This is all, quite simply, why art exists. Why we have things like film, music, and poetry as a language to connect us.

As we find our leaders woefully unprepared to deal with the complexity of the United States—and as all our power structures seem up for grabs—I find myself looking more than ever toward creative communities for answers. 

Toward finding the language to sit with and process discomfort, to learn empathy, to put words to concepts and emotions that we are too often only beginning to comprehend.

Art does that. It’s a language we build together, whose power endures precisely because it’s collaborative. It has to be—because the people who surround us, the cultures we participate in, the history that makes each of us all shape it.

Right now, our country is at a moment where we’re making a new language. The old modes of communication no longer work, and we see their worst consequences play out in our streets and on our screens. 

But again, this is why art exists—why we are compelled towards art.

Artists have always been on the frontlines of creating new language—testing it, reconsidering it, pushing it to its limits. They are the ones telling and depicting stories, representing untold and innumerable lives. In the long run, it’s art that survives—the language of creativity, of collaboration, creates history, beyond any individual or power structure. I stand in awe of the life-affirming, century-old practice of jazz, of global basket weaving traditions across dozens of generations, of vogue from the club to the big screen, of the written stories and literature that bind us to one another.

Artists have always told us about ourselves—their work an attempt to help us forge our identities; to connect to our humanity.

And in this strange and uniquely American moment,we’re seeing that happen in real timewith hundreds of thousands of people marching for their lives, for our planet, fora collective future. Across our nation today, there is a chorus offering a love song for Black life, prose of gratitude for the Indigenous among us, a liberation anthem for our disabled kin, our trans family, and every other gorgeous and beloved member ofthis country who has withstood too much for too long.

If we’re lucky, if we’re proactive, if we’re brave enough—we can each be part of that collaboration, part of that call for justice and freedom, for joy and abundance. If we move together, in solidarity with, and in interdependence to one another, we can free everyone. Ourselves included. Together.

Even now, addressing you today, I’m not the only one speaking. I am here alongside artist Constance Hockaday, who inspired this project, photographer Reece T. Williams who captured my image, and speechwriter Allison Eric Burn-Steen who quite literally gave shape to these words—which in turn come from the infinite artists and thinkers who have gifted me with their language over the course of my life.

This speech, in and of itself, is an exercise in the creation of language, in the making of meaning, in speaking with and speaking for.

So if the question is, who gets to speak for all of us?

The answer may well be, the artists, the people versed in both the creative and the collaborative.

Because it’s only through art—through song and dance; film and theater; painting and poetry—that we can truly process the complexity of our collective existence. To honor the humanity in one another. And it’s never lonely. The living, breathing organism of this language exists to connect us, to shape us, to evolve as we evolve and change as the world changes.

So as we reckon with the United States as it is, as it was, and as it could be, we need this collaboration, this synthesis. We need language to express it, written or visual or otherwise. We need each other to process it, to understand what the future can be—and how to get there. This is the power of a liberated imagination.

That is what art does.It moves and teaches.It happens all around us, and it belongs to all of us. It brings empathy and color, humanity and meaning. It takes risks and makes necessary trouble.

In its best version of self, that’s what the United States could do, too.