A "Little Beacon of Light" in Arkansas
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| Amanda Harris Photo by Melissa Hoskins |
Amanda Harris was born and raised in a small town near Little Rock, Arkansas, that now boasts its second stoplight due to the recent arrival of a Walmart. In her rural farming community, Amanda said, “There were no out people, but there were always rumors. My family used to say ‘He has a little sugar in his tank,’ these great Southern colloquialisms, and there was talk. But nobody was out. Being out in my high school would have been an absolute nightmare.” Fortunately, in college Amanda found Astraea grantee partner, Center for Artistic Revolution (CAR), a queer organization based in Little Rock that combines arts-based activism with policy work. When she came across the group’s booth at an event, she was drawn in by “the way CAR was utilizing art to tell a story.” She became a member immediately. Now she has been on the board for five years. “It just breaks my heart for rural queer people who have nowhere to go. That’s why little beacons of light like CAR are so crucial.”
“Young people are in these tiny schools with no outlets,” Amanda explained. School prayer is prevalent, and there is a strict prohibition on any mention of sex. Queer and gender-nonconforming youth are harassed constantly, slurs are hurled and queer couples are barred from prom. To combat this, CAR does much of its organizing with youth, who make up a third of the board. “I had never been part of a multigenerational organization where everyone’s input mattered,” Amanda said. “That left a profound feeling with me that young people have to be the driving force behind organizing that affects them.”
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Funded by Astraea’s Multi-Year Movement-Building Initiative, CAR is making an impact in Arkansas. The arts-based activism that attracted Amanda is used to move hearts, open minds and influence policy change. Because of CAR’s involvement, the Citizen’s First Congress, a statewide group of progressive organizations, agreed to incorporate queer issues into its policy goals. At the annual meeting, “CAR showed a film about the Bible and queer folks, which is the primary obstacle with many of the groups,” Amanda said. After the film, one elderly woman was so moved that she told CAR she was going to call her lesbian daughter, whom she had not spoken to in years.
With a successful campaign to retire an American Indian mascot, the fighting of the 2008 gay-adoption ban in Arkansas and the collaborative work with people of color groups on immigration, CAR’s “Nobody gets left behind” model has forever affected Amanda. “It’s amazing that this little organization in this very conservative state is doing really radical work through an arts-based intersectional model. Our executive director, Randi, always says ‘race, class, gender sexual orientation—all these things are connected, and we have to see that.’ Utilizing arts to do intersectional work is really powerful. I’d hope that people could use art in their own work, because it resonates with people. It is a really good stepping stone to getting folks to see that the issues are not siloed and identity isn’t siloed.”
