David Hilliard at the Cultch
Friday night, I got to meet David Hilliard who was in town for an event Wayde’s group organized with Meegan Maultsaid for the Vancouver East Cultural Centre. So inspiring. Last night, he joked that everybody was an activist these days; but we weren’t activists, he said (speaking of the Black Panther Party), we were organizers. He was talking about how change can begin with involvement at the local level, through civic politics. And one of the most inspiring things for me was that his politics was lived and that was apparent in his language. It wasn’t a theory that arches over. You could hear that he was used to speaking to people from many different communities and with many different histories and experiences. His language was nuanced, and his presence was, when he spoke to you, such that the world felt different. Listening to his practical knowledge of how to direct change was both ordinary and a revelation — ordinary, in that it was almost unbelievable that you hadn’t before seen how the world is changeable and how committed people can affect, at the local level and meaningfully, issues like poverty and access to education and criminalization.
Posted: February 25th, 2007 under Lately.