Guest Blog. MLK Day: Peace Circle vs. Hip-Hop

At Valparaiso University we make a really big deal of celebrating Martin Luther King Jr Day.  Everyone gets the day off school, most upperclassmen sleep in and freshmen are required to go to one of the many focus sessions offered to stimulate conversation.

This year the theme of MLK Day was "Building Bridges: Dream. Dialogue. Service."  Now while I, as a civil engineering senior, would have preferred a session called "Building Bridges: Out of Steel and Concrete", I was not so lucky.  I had to pick a focus session to go to which focused on some more abstract concept of bridges.

After spending a fair amount of time looking at the brochure for the event I decided to go to an event called, "Creating Safe Spaces for Hard Conversations: An Introduction to Peace Circles".  This event promised to discuss the merits of peace circles and how they can be used to promote change and create a safe environment to share stories.  All this while actually sitting in a circle.


When I got to the event, I found the peace circle:

Unfortunately, five minutes before the session was scheduled to start, this was literally all that was there.

Since I did not want to be the only person at a focus session, I decided to bail on this one and go to my second choice.

The second session that I decided to go to (and this one I actually stayed for) was called "Hip-Hop and Political Change in West Africa".  Hip-Hop.  Nice.  The only reason that this was choice number two and not choice number one was that I thought sitting in a peace circle would be pretty cool, while sitting in a dark ballroom watching slides might not have been.

When I got to the ballroom for this session the room was packed.  I was there probably three minutes before the session was scheduled to start and this is what it looked like:

Sure, there are a few empty chairs, but overall this is a pretty packed room.  The empty peace circle had nothing on Hip-Hop.

Based on the attendance at these two events, I began to consider the usefulness of both Hip-Hop and peace circles in promoting societal change.

The speaker at Hip-Hop discussed how a group of Hip-Hop artist and rappers who call themselves "Yen a Marre" (which in french means "I'm fed up") got more people to get out and vote in the last election in Senegal.  Their goal was to remove from power a president who was not governing by their constitution.  These artists were able to get hundreds of voters educated and out to the polls on election day.

I wonder, if those artists had decided to sit in peace circles around the city instead of organizing rallies and informing people about how to vote, if the results would have been different.  I speculate that it would have been quite different.  I don't believe that their campaign would have been as effective with peace circles as it was with main stream music.

Thanks for reading,
Justine