“While most community arts programs for underserved youth were planned by caring, well-intentioned organizers, they are doing serious harm. They are designed to mitigate risk — to treat participants not as creative talent full of ideas and possibility, but as disadvantaged youth or, worse, cautionary tales in the making. Their target outcomes are preventing violence or pregnancy, lowering obesity rates or other deficits attached to their community’s identity — not to prepare our country for a future of innovation and economic participation. This must change.”