Systems Change - The Lewis Prize for Music's 2020 Definition
The Lewis Prize for Music recognizes that inequities in the United States are rooted in systems that devalue, exploit, and exclude people. Such systems have been in place since Europeans first arrived in the Americas and displaced indigenous peoples. Concurrently, Europeans initiated the transatlantic slave trade that brought African peoples to North America to be enslaved. The systems of chattel slavery and jim crow have been overturned by the efforts of people working toward systems change. However, remnants remain in the beliefs, attitudes, cultures, practices, and policies that continue to marginalize African, Latinx, Asian, Arab and Native American, religious, and gender groups in the United States. Additionally, poor and working class white people, especially, but not exclusively, located in contemporary rural contexts, experience hardships due to unjust systems and ever increasing income inequality.
Disenfranchisement based on race, gender, socio-economic status, immigrant status, and other markers of difference from the dominant culture have developed over centuries to codify macro systems of oppression. Examples of ongoing macro system injustices include racism, gender discrimination, economic and civic exclusion, health disparities, and environmental degredation among others. Correspondingly, these macro systems dictate the shape of civic systems that marginalize and under resource people from targeted communities and backgrounds. Civic systems with this effect include education, redlining, policing, incarceration, and foster care, among many others.
Achieving a just, fair, and humane society for all requires transforming and replacing discriminatory systems, especially those that continue to undermine historically marginalized and under-resourced communities.
