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The possibility in his son's blue eyes I am a blue-eyed devil, peckawood and country cracker It was white male privilege disrobing and putting on a newer, simpler outfit: honesty, responsibility, and an eyes-open-to-history pride. I am also Myles Horton, Anne Braden and John Brown It was a gust and a breath of fresh air. It made me want to hug him (which I did). And interview him, which I did too, after enjoying more of his work on U-Tube and My Space. As an outsider in a black-dominated field, Ariel Luckey’s whiteness is in his face in a way most whitefolks never experience. Some white rappers deal with that predictably, as in these lines from underground rapper Brother Ali, They ask me if I’m black or white, I’m neither Neither? In our dreams, maybe. Either is the path Ariel Luckey has chosen, back to the immigrant roots, as his in-progress solo theatre piece Free Land puts it, “deep within the blood-stained soil of American history.” “I’m using Hip Hop to articulate a perspective or experience of privilege,” he said, speaking from his California home. “I’m an anomaly, because I go where most whites don’t go.” There is, Luckey explained, a void. And he feels a responsibility to fill it. To quote again from Free Land, which explores the legacy of white privilege and Native American genocide in the West, I need to color in the blank white faces View video excerpt from Free Land He has made art of this digging, and a career. The first attracts audiences, as it did me that day; the second can attract critical questions. Is this same-old same-old: appropriation and exploitation of black and native cultures? Leaning out of my stone house to lob this question, I sense it’s one Luckey has had to dodge more than a few times before. Only he doesn’t dodge it.
Luckey points to “Thangs Taken,” his annual alternative Thanksgiving celebration/performance, as evidence that’s he not about newly renovated expropriation. The piece uncovers the lamentable history WACAN members are well aware of while also spotlighting local Native American artists and events. After his most recent Thangs Taken Day performance, a Lakota woman rose to speak, praising his work but expressing sadness that Native people could not themselves fill the room, as Luckey had that day. But it was important, he reported her as saying, that he was doing it. “Yes, I have white privilege,” he says, “I can’t avoid that, but I can leverage it. I can bring in other voices.” But he sees his art as not only “bringing in other voices.” “I feel like my story [in Free Land] is as much about white people as about Native Americans. It’s about what whitefolks have done. . . . As I tap into my family history and ask what does this mean? I’m telling a piece of my own story as well.” One in three white Americans, Luckey points out, has at least one ancestor who homesteaded.
“It’s kinda heavy,” he says, this burden to fill the void left by silence and denial. Is it a burden that weighs down his creativity? “I try not to limit my voice,” he says, “to only be political. I don’t feel like any of my work is separate from politics, but it’s not only politics. I mean, part of what I’m working for is a fuller embodiment of all our humanity . . . our awe of life.” So wouldn’t he, I ask, sometimes rather be writing about, oh, vegetables coming up in the garden than people who “yelled for lynching then brought [their] children to watch it”? “There have been moments when I felt like I could write about vegetables,” he ponders, “but that’s very political too – who picks them, you know, how they get to us.” A man on message. An art with a mission. If I think it should be otherwise, there’s the chorus of “ID Check” to put things in perspective. It’s the part that compelled me to abandon the WACAN table once and for all and take one of the few empty seats in that chandelier-lit hall at the Sheraton: This is an ID check If it’s for your soul, I guess, you don’t have time to be penning pretty poems about the flowerets on a broccoli head. Our soul.
Free Land will premier in the Bay area this year and then go on the road. Luckey plans to make a DVD as well as a curriculum guide for classes studying The Homestead Act. For more information, email skylight@arielluckey.com. Luckey’s Myspace page is http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=134546493
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I was tethered to the WACAN table at the 9th Annual White Privilege Conference when a gust of a rap-poem blew through the open doors of the Sheraton Hotel’s auditorium and tore me lose. It was Oakland Hip Hop Artist Ariel Luckey doing his first ever performance of “ID Check.”
Standing in the back of a packed chandelier-lit hall, I watched a slim twenty-something white man pace the stage, flinging a list, a litany of “I am’s”
“A big piece,” he says, “is accountability. Am I giving back? Am I in relationship?” To keep this relationship vital, Luckey uses an open process technique that involves staging an in-progress work before a multicultural group and dialoguing after with the audience. The community then becomes his teacher. (He’s also worked formally with teachers such as African drummer Pope Flyne, master African dancer Akua Angel, and African American poet June Jordan.)
As for class identity, Luckey admits that being the underdog is a key element of rap. Eminem may be white but he has a trailer park and a gone dad on his resume. “Identity and being down is highly contested in the Hip Hop community,” he says. “In that sense of class trumps race, my work is really flippin’ it, trying to do something different.” It’s a tool, he continues, to explore the oppressor side, the “Pimping privilege from class, skin color and sex,” as “ID Check” phrases it.