University of Michigan students, faculty and community members gathered in the Ford School of Public Policy Thursday morning for “Reimagining The Narrative,” a conversation focused on the panelists’ work challenging narratives surrounding race, power and place in their respective fields.
The event was hosted by the Public Policy School’s Center for Racial Justice and featured the 2025-2026 Visiting Fellows cohort: award-winning artist Holly Bass; Ayesha Bell Hardaway, professor of law at Case Western Reserve University; and L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, New York University associate sociology professor.
Bass’ range of artistic experience includes collaborating with governmental agencies, choreographing dances for cultural institutions and educating art instructors in academic communities. Bell has worked with the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, The National Gallery of Art and Jewish Voice for Peace. Bell said she aims to foster connections between strangers and encourage public policy students to bring a creative perspective into their work.
“If you have a creative practice, I would really encourage you to think about how you can bring that into the work that you are doing and into the learning you are engaging in,” Bell said. “Change has to start with imagination, but I believe that durable change happens when we change policy first. Hearts and minds follow from there, and eventually, the culture begins to normalize those progressive changes.”
Hardaway then discussed racial injustice, focusing on her upcoming book, which analyzes how police unions were created alongside demands for Black equality and accountability in major urban cities from the late 1950s through the late 1960s. She said police unions were built on the foundation of anti-Black racism and white mob influence.
“The transformation of police unions happened first and fastest in cities with the most acute racial conflict, and this is not by coincidence,” Hardaway said. “My project seeks to elucidate that it’s a pattern, and that patterns demand explanation.”
Lewis-McCoy added onto Hardaway’s message by addressing racial prejudices in suburban areas. He asked the audience to analyze Norman Rockwell’s “Moving Day” 1967 artwork, which depicts Black and white children curiously facing each other following desegregation in Chicago.
Lewis-McCoy led a conversation challenging the traditional image of a 1960s American family in the suburbs, often characterized as white and affluent. He discussed the history of red-lining within the United States, noting the impact that discriminatory federal programs and racial covenants had on building segregated suburbs.
“Suburbs are spaces born out of federal investment, born out of support of private development and born out of racial covenants and exclusion,” Lewis-McCoy said. “The suburbs themselves were built out via processes of segregation. The suburbs were built out unequally and we can use this fragmentation to actually start to theorize more complexly.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, Public Policy senior Emma Macaluso said she resonated with Lewis-McCoy’s discussion about the history of U.S. suburbs after campaigning in the suburbs for Sen. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich during the 2024 elections.
“In the campaigns I work on, we often target the suburb as a homogenous group, and I think that figuring out where the diversity and conflict in the suburbs comes in is something we haven’t tapped into enough,” Macaluso said. “A lot of the times we do campaign work, we aren’t very intentional about who we are targeting regarding who is living where.”
At the end of the panel, the visiting fellows took questions from the audience. One audience member asked the panelists to comment on the division in Black America between those who are educated and engaged with the arts, and those who have not had similar opportunities, citing his own struggles connecting with Black community members across the academic divide.
Bass said her experience training educators to teach the arts in Title 1 schools with the Kennedy Center at Turnaround Arts showed her that combating the divide starts with training educators in the arts.
“Part of what we did was helping Title I schools infuse arts resources and training for teachers,” Bass said. “Then we found out that the current generation of teachers did not grow (up with) and did not have arts in their schooling. … So we had to actually infuse the teachers with arts experience so they could see the value, so that they could then help their students access and embrace the arts.”
Daily Staff Reporter Jonah Feldman can be reached at jonahfel@umich.edu.
