Inside Belmont High School’s Black Box Theater on Friday, Feb. 27, music and poetry will take on a subject some communities might believe they have already solved: racism.
But for organizers and performers behind the upcoming Black History Month concert, the issue is not the loud, obvious version of racism most Americans picture. It’s the quieter kind. The kind marbled within misguided intentions and policies out of step with stated values.
“This is not about yelling about racism at people,” musician Alastair Moock said. “But if nobody in the room feels challenged, we haven’t succeeded.”
The Friday concert, featuring folk musicians Moock, Reggie Harris and Massachusetts Poet Laureate Regie Gibson, is part of Voices Rising, a new joint series by Passim’s Folk Collective and the Boston-based arts organization The Opening Doors Project. The series pairs curated music with candid conversations about race and identity across New England.
In Belmont, the conversation carries weight.
Belmont Against Racism, the local volunteer organization co-sponsoring the concert, was founded in 1992 after Los Angeles police officers were videotaped beating motorist Rodney King and the unrest that followed their acquittal. Residents formed the group out of concern that racial tensions seen nationally could surface locally.
More than 30 years later, President Didier Moise says the work is far from finished.
“I almost laugh when people say, ‘Well, racism is over,’” Moise said. “The effects of racism are still around us.”
Moise, a Haitian American who has led the organization for more than two years, said Belmont’s efforts focus less on overt hostility and more on structural and institutional patterns that can be harder to see.
“One of our missions is to encourage dialogue and awareness of institutional racism,” he said. “It’s very subtle.”
That nuance is exactly what Moock says the concert aims to explore.
“There are very different versions of racism,” said Moock. “There’s the loud, angry ‘I don’t like you because you don’t look like me’ version. But the version we are more focused on is what I would call liberal racism.”
He describes it as “learning the vocabulary, saying the right things, and then being hypocritical about that with your actions.”
An example, he said, is people who put Black Lives Matter signs in their yard and then fight affordable housing in their neighborhood.
Moock, who co-founded The Opening Doors Project in 2021 with Stacey Babb, said the organization centers around “amplifying voices of color and advancing interracial conversations about race.” He believes those conversations are especially necessary in predominantly white suburban towns.
“Black and brown communities are very aware of issues of racism and bias,” he said. “Conversations need to happen in white spaces more than they need to happen in any other spaces.”
Black people make up 1.6% of Belmont’s population, according to the 2024 census. A reality Moock said can create both a challenge and an opportunity for change.
“We get a pretty self-selecting crowd,” Moock said of past performances in communities with similar demographics. “Particularly in wealthy, predominantly white suburbs.”
The goal is not to shame audiences, he added, but to invite reflection.
“By virtue of showing up, they’re showing intention,” he said. “They want to learn. They’re meeting us halfway.”
Still, he says comfort alone is not success, the organizers hope is to help the community reflect, and music makes that possible.
“Using music as a way of digging into these conversations is an important piece of it,” Moock said. “Music brings people’s guard down and brings them together.”
Gibson, who uses his African American lens to write poetry that often explores citizenship, democracy and public life, says the concert provides another avenue for civic engagement.
“The rise of racism … it’s a social malaise that we have not solved,” Gibson said. “These things are just below the surface.”
Gibson, who lived in Belmont from 2001 to 2006 and whose wife served on the board of Belmont Against Racism, said racial bias does not always present itself as open hostility. In some cases, he said, it surfaces in policy debates and in resistance to change.
“When I was on the Human Rights Commission in Belmont,” he said, “there were folks who were expressly on the committee to make sure nothing changed.”
He cited an incident years ago when flyers opposing interracial relationships circulated in town, an episode that prompted residents to launch a “Hate Has No Home Here” campaign in response.
Gibson says art offers a way to ask difficult questions without closing doors.
“My aim,” he said, “is to create a space that makes better citizenship possible.”
That mission runs through the broader Voices Rising series, a program that includes an Indigenous Peoples’ Day concert, a Martin Luther King Jr. Day concert, two Black History Month concerts and other events. Each performance blends music with moderated dialogue, allowing artists to respond to one another and to audience questions.
The Folk Collective at Passim, an artist-led initiative dedicated to expanding the narrative of folk music, partnered with The Opening Doors Project to bring the series to communities across New England throughout 2025 and 2026.
Moock, who has spent three decades as a performer and teacher, said his own understanding of race has evolved through that work.
“One of the privileges of whiteness in America is not having to think about your skin color,” he said. “White Americans often don’t think of themselves as having a race.”
He said part of his role in interracial conversations with Harris is to acknowledge that privilege openly and honestly.
“The single most important thing we’re doing in these spaces is modeling what healthy conversations and friendship can look like,” he said.
Moise hopes the Belmont concert will build on that model locally. The organization has previously hosted film screenings, discussions and cultural events during Black History Month and Indigenous Peoples’ Day, often in response to students and families who felt certain histories were not fully acknowledged.
“If you cannot even acknowledge a segment of society’s culture,” Moise said, “how could you say that you see these groups through a compassionate lens?”
The concert, he said, is less about performance and more about presence.
“We’re trying to build an inclusive and inviting community,” he said. “It has to be based on dignity and mutual respect.”
Kallejhay Terrelong is a journalism student in Boston University’s Newsroom program, a partnership between the university, The Belmont Voice and other news organizations in the Boston area.
