On the night of August 23, 2020, the streets of Kenosha Wisconsin filled with an angry mob. Earlier that day, Jacob Blake, an African American, had been shot seven times by the white police officer who was trying to arrest him. Although he survived, he was paralyzed, and it was easy, so soon after George Floyd’s murder, to assume this was one more case of racially-motivated police brutality. Protests spiraled into violence and arson and refused to be dispersed with tear gas or rubber bullets. Then, two days later, a 17-year-old from out of state showed up with a semi-automatic rifle, and shot three protestors, killing two. In addition to the dealths, an estimated $502 million worth of property damage was done before the riots wound down, leaving the city divided and in disarray.
It was just a few months before the Kenosha rights that John Carroll started on the path that would lead him to become an unexpected part of the rebuilding.
Stuck at home, he started working on his vision. What he needed was a cause he could write about, something he cared about deeply enough to connect with an audience on a visceral level. And he cared about a lot of things. But he didn’t want to join his voice to any of the others that were shouting about injustice, freedom, or any of the isms. He’d had some recent, painful experiences with disagreement about beliefs that had left him alienated from many of the people who were near and dear to him. “Once you’ve seen how division works, once you see the trick, you can’t unsee the trick,” he says. “I understood the problem of division. I wanted to see people stop fighting.”
That was when he came across a songwriting contest sponsored by Braver Angels, a grassroots organization devoted to undoing division by building friendship and understanding across political divides. John was stunned. Here was his cause, the one he didn’t even know existed. Of course he entered the contest but he wasn’t going to wait on that to get involved. He reached out to the organization on every social media platform where he was active, saying “I’m a musician. I have no qualifications for this kind of work, but can you use somebody like me?”
Braver Angels had its beginnings in 2016, on the heels of what was then perhaps the most contentious election in living memory. Two friends, liberal David Blankenhorn and conservative David Lapp, were troubled by the relationships they saw breaking down during that election. They came up with the idea of gathering ten Trump voters and ten Clinton-voters into a post-election weekend retreat to see if they could figure out how to talk with each other instead of at each other. The mood at the time was so contentious that they wondered if what they were doing was even safe. But they had to try, so they called on the expertise of another friend, family therapist Bill Doherty who created some ground rules and mediated the retreat so that it had a chance of success.
That weekend was so powerful for all 22 people present that they resolved to launch a grassroots movement that would replace hatred and division with understanding and respect. By early 2020, they were holding weekend retreats, evening workshops, and acrimony-free debates all over the country, moderated by trained volunteers. But their reach was minimal, well short of the 1 million voters they figured they needed in order to spawn a movement. Then COVID-19 happened and everything changed. People were stuck at home, gatherings moved online, and a whole new world of possibilities opened up. Depolarizing workshops went online, which made them available to people living far away from population centers with Braver Angels volunteers, (including me, in Canada).
In May, they launched a song-writing contest, because every movement needs an anthem and musicians were struggling. Peter Yarrow, Steve Seskin, and Aaron Barker were celebrity judges. There were over 200 submissions, and the music arm of Braver Angels was born. Carrol joined up and helped with running a FaceBook page and newsletter, and categorizing the submitted songs according to topic so they could be played at the appropriate Braver Angels workshops and strategy meetings.
They believed they could do more. Arguing that music creation is a powerful metaphor for building bridges, team member Cameron Swallow persuaded Braver Angels leadership to try adding a song-writing element to a couple of their workshops: “De-polarizing Within” and “Common Ground”. Depolarizing Within involves learning to recognize your own biases and how they affect the way you talk about things. Common Ground involves an even number of red and blue-leaning participants. First, one group gathers in the middle of the room to talk about their beliefs and experiences with a contentious issue (like immigration, health care, or gun control). Their political opposites sit on the outside of the circle and just listen, then ask clarifying questions. Then they switch places. After both groups have learned about the perspectives and life experiences that drive the others’ positions, they work on identifying common ground. Swallow’s idea was that they would then turn their discoveries into a song.
They tried it first in Kenosha, Wisconsin, where in August 2020, Kyle Rittenhouse fatally shot two protesters and injured a third, during civil unrest over the shooting and paralyzing of Jacob Blake, an African-American, by police who were arresting him. The song-writing workshop was held two years later, but feelings were still high. There were city leaders, lawyers and people from off the street. One of the participants was very cynical about the riots and what caused them. Others had participated in the rioting. The anger and the trauma were palpable. Communication had broken down in the city in ways that leaders hadn’t even recognized. But as they listened to each other’s backstories, they started to understand.
“It was quite an amazing experience to watch some of the city leaders talk to one another,” Carrol recalls. He had never even been part of a group co-write, but he was helping to lead this one. “It was fascinating to try to come to terms and come to peace with these different viewpoints.”
What mattered was they were in the room together. “You get to hear backstories. That’s always the most powerful thing about it because it’s one thing to interface with the storyline that you think is happening on the other side, and it’s another to hear a personal storyline.” Generally, people aren’t mad at the person in the room with them, but at a bigger, more impersonal idea based on the masks we wear and our misunderstandings about what’s underneath. “The songwriting workshop is really good at taking off the mask and you see the whole personal history behind it…There’s a whole personal story leading up to it that helps you understand why the line was drawn where it was.”
The group wound up creating two songs. One co-write combined a poem, a ballad and a rap into “A Beautiful Space” about their shared longing to recognize each other’s dignity, become a family, feel and heal each other’s heartbreak, and create a beautiful space out of the ashes. The other collaboration was an uptempo call-and-response song, “Uptown” about leading the nation with trust as their foundation, building a bridge across the hate, and creating “a place that we all want to be.” Since then, songwriting workshops have become staple fare with Braver Angels, including at this year’s and last year’s conventions.
Wanting to draw more people into the tent, Carroll volunteered to lead up another song-writing contest, which led in 2023 to his becoming Braver Angels Music co-chair (red-leaning) alongside Ben Caron (blue-leaning). The two first met at the Kenosha workshop, which was Caron’s introduction to the organization.
Carroll’s and Caron’s vision is to use music to build strategic alliances and draw others into the movement, while also nourishing a vibrant community with a FaceBook group, and virtual meet-ups. SongSquare is a monthly virtual meet-up where musicians share what they’re working on for feedback and encouragement. SongFaire is a quarterly open-mic event where performers across the country share songs with a Braver Angels message. Both are available to attend at no charge with an optional donation. They’ve also partnered with Sons of Serendip, GangstaGrass, Music to Life, Music for Recovery and others.
Most exciting to Carroll is an artist training program that’s under development. They will train musicians to lead song-writing workshops in their communities, so that the magic that happened in Kenosha can happen all over the USA. And thanks to some fundraising, they now have enough of a budget to compensate these artists.
For Carroll, this is just the beginning of fulfilling a bigger dream to draw musicians into the work of transforming their communities and turn it into a career path. He longs to help create “an alternative counter narrative to how you, as a musician, make money; which is giving away music for free in order to get attention online in order to sell T-shirts.”
It’s a bold dream with beautiful potential and one I share. If you are or know a songwriter interested in building bridges, check out Braver Angels Music. Maybe I’ll see you at a SongSquare one of these months.
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