“Burn It All Down:” Skepticism around diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in arts organizations
Arts organizations have undoubtedly been struggling to stay afloat financially during this shutdown, but perhaps struggling even more-so with reconciling their racist and oppressive anatomy. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion boards (DEI) have been steadily on the rise since the establishment of the widely circulated document “We See You White American Theater”.
But as we’ve seen most recently with blatant union-busting of The Flea Theater (as detailed in the open letter from @thefledtheater on Instagram) and many other arts organizations both big and small, such initiatives have done little to address the specified needs BIPOC activists have been calling for.
This brings to mind the age-old question: can change come from within the system or only from burning it all down? or both? or will the system destroy itself?
The very public promises of change and solidarity that many arts and educational institutions touted this summer following the June Black Lives Matter protests were received by many BIPOC artists with skepticism considering the extraordinarily presentational yet minimally impactful changes these promises often bring (focusing on diversity hiring in low-paying, public-facing positions such as performers or front of house positions as opposed to much needed structural change, for example.)
“Anytime I hear a white institution ‘doing the right thing’ I always question it immediately, even though it’s what I would like to believe, but history tells a different tale” confesses Elmer Martinez (he/him,) a Puerto Rican Dominican-American hip hop artist and lighting designer who has experienced such spaces as a performer, designer, and technician.
Martinez adds: “Do these institutions really care or are they trying to put a Band-Aid on the problem? What is the true intention of the people on that board? Who are the people on that board? What do they look like? What are their backgrounds? That kind of stuff goes un-marketed because a lot of the time it’s people who had an ‘in’ somehow. Or are you a token? Because there’re plenty of blackboard members who have no power. You don’t want to become a tool even if it looks like on the outside like they’re including you.”
Martinez’s experience comes specifically from the notoriously exploitative practice of internships and apprenticeships, programs that gate-keep so-called “experience” through low wages and sometimes illegal stipends.
“I don’t look to DEI to solve anything” Martinez clarifies. “I look to it to be a resource and part of a bigger infrastructure that has to be considered on all fronts. It can’t just be the board, it has to be the teachers, the officers on campus, anyone who works in the office, it has to be the student body first and foremost.”
“I'm torn because I think Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is something that institutions must grapple with, so there's sort of no way to avoid the work that has to be done in that area,” says Temar France (they/them,) an interdisciplinary artist, Black studies scholar, and current grad student at Brooklyn College. “But at the same time, I do see the efforts being done as insufficient. I consider most of the reform I'm seeing to just be more in line with the same of what we've seen in the past 20 years of neo-liberal reform work. I feel very conflicted. I feel like as an identity that needs a space like that in an institution, I feel like I should be in support of it. But at the same time, I'm also very much trying to be critical of what these spaces are actually offering to institutions and to the people and to the students and the faculty they're supposed to be serving and to the theater practitioners and the audiences that are coming. I just don't know that I trust the work that’s being done.”
France has and is currently attending liberal educational institutions such as Smith College and Brooklyn College that, according to France, continue to fail their students of color and uphold the white supremacy that built these institutions.
On whether DEI has accomplished any tangible benefits within the industry, France asserts that “if I have to quantify my success as an artist, as a performer, based on crumbs that the institution has given me for an education that I think should have been for free anyway, then no. I think I'm too caught up on the institutional crumbs that we should have”
Ni’Ja Whitson (they/them,) a gender-nonconforming/astral transmogrifier, interdisciplinary artist, and writer, has been a facilitator “in some way or another for forever.”
“In the last maybe 10 years, I have been more precise about trying to develop practices and language, really accepting the calling in a way that means I have to say it to other people. There's a field of people that do that like there's a market of this thing, and really for me wanting to resist that. I am not prescribing to this as some kind of trend. Again, that has been practiced for a long time for me. So there's an importance for me, a balancing, what is public about that and what is beyond private, really just being in it. It’s quiet enough that it’s really just in the work that it's not about trying to market the thing, but just doing it as being in the practice.”
They defined their reaction to the recent uptick in DEI boards as “skepticism.”
“When I see things framed around diversity and inclusion, that just reflects to me more of the same, it reflects to me a lack of seriousness with regard to understanding the ways that white supremacy operates and has operated and what actually is being called forth right now,” remarks Whitson.
“It isn't diversity. It is not inclusion. And it actually has never been those things. Institutions are moving through layers of comfort and attention. At this moment, it’s cute to say a statement of support, cute to put the thing on the website, to hire the peppers and the salt for season, to have your cute Brown season or moment. It's a whole other thing for folks to give up, burn down, dismantle the table, and stop trying to pull up more chairs to it. So my skepticism comes from looking at how folks aren't really on fundamental levels shifting and dismantling their institutions. Not only do I think that there's a lack of seriousness, I question the sustainability of those initiatives.”
Very recently, we’ve seen this sustainability fail in smaller artistic organizations (those that have attracted more progressive audiences and have been home to what some would call innovative art) as they retaliate against their BIPOC artists and employees who have been working to hold these organizations accountable. An anonymous recipient of this retaliation (in the form of union-busting) expressed that during their union organizing said:
“We were trying to implement training and trying to get a consultant for the organization which did include forming a DEI board. In general, I am pretty critical of these boards. In my specific experience at this institution, the DEI board was going to be composed of staff and management and board members and I personally didn’t have faith in anyone that was in our board or the management level of staff to proceed with this board in good faith. I found my organization to be pretty self-protective and in spite of a lot of the language that they used in talking about this initiative with us, it didn’t seem genuine and it seemed like an effort to protect the organization against litigation.”
“We all questioned whether this would be another feather in [their] hat to say that they engaged with our critiques even though it would ultimately be at a very surface level,” they continue. “Even looking at consultants to offer, some of the organization that really spoke to me, even look at their curriculum [the arts organization] was never going to agree to hire this group because they were too radical or too leftist. It started to feel self-defeating. Even from the beginning of the conversation, we wondered ‘was looking for a DEI initiative going to genuinely improve our material working conditions, or was this organization never going to improve until we asked the board and the executive directors to step down?’ Which I think was a truth that was frightening for us to pursue.”
Photo by James Eades on Unsplash
If history has shown that DEI initiatives are unsuccessful or unsustainable, and more radical action carries the threat of retaliation in the forms of union-busting and job loss, the existence of artistic institutions presents itself as a hostile system to artists looking to make revolutionary art, especially since these institutions dominate and gate-keep NEA funding, space, audience, and many other necessities for art-making.
“Places like [this organization,] or institutions as they’re currently set up, are not equipped to support revolutionary art or their aims” continues the anonymous arts worker. “There’s often just a tension between organizations and the artists that they support ideologically. Even internally, there’s a great difference between what organizations say they do and how they actually support their workers and their community. I don’t think institutions as they are currently set up as a hierarchical model beholden to wealthy donors will ever be able to support revolutionary art.”
“Institutions by nature are part of something that is bigger than they are” adds Martinez. “In America, institutions are like the jailers consistently teaching everyone who’s jailed how to continue to jail themselves. What you do with what comes out of an institution existing is more important to liberation and the revolution than the inherent nature of an institution.”
“I think if anything, the institution has become really good at deceptively working through us to sanitize our art and make it more digestible for the mainstream” adds France “and I think that's the work of the institution, to make it so that we can commodify what we do. Make it sellable, buyable. I think as long as the demands and desires of capitalism are functioning within the institutions, they will always be at odds and we'll never truly have a space for the poor, for the people who need this revolutionary work the most.”
“I don't even think it's revolutionary art” adds Whitson, “I think art in general and institutions don't necessarily have converging needs. Institutions don't always operate in an artist-centered way and recognizing that they need artists in order to function.”
Now we’re at a moment where both artists and artistic institutions are experiencing catastrophic barriers to creating and moving forward. The roles of both artist and institution in our current climate and potential revolution remain shifting and unclear.
“Once you name a thing it’s already late, it’s already failed, because language is always behind an embodied experience” adds Whitson. “What is revolutionary for this moment? I think about it in terms like ‘avant-garde' and ‘experimental’ and ‘radical.’ Once we say the thing and relate that to something, hopefully, it escapes that language immediately.”
“I think a piece [of what makes art revolutionary,] or maybe where that manifests for me is like a real resistance to parameters and genre alliances” continues Whitson, “and that can be really difficult for a field and for institutions that like to be able to label in order to market and to assess which box that artist's work is going to check for the season. And I don't make that easy and I'm glad I don't, I'm not here for it. It's not my job or interest.”
“I do think there's something to the work we can do in institutions that feels like it could create something and create this revolutionary potential, but because capitalism's demands dominate, even our own interpersonal desires, I feel like it gets derailed,” adds France. “I like to think that we can imagine the institution in any way we want to and that we could imagine a world where we successfully abolished the institution as we know it and its debt producing logic. I believe people can do whatever they want and I think they can imagine greater things than we've ever built. So I definitely believe we can in a post abolition world create something that can serve everyone in a useful way. I don't know if I know what that looks like, but I know that we know what it feels like to see it done wrong I think we would know what it feels like to do it right.”
“Perhaps it's not about equity and unity” ponders France. “Maybe there's something to rethinking that. These offices ultimately have to define equity, diversity, and unity for every person in the institution, which is impossible. There's no way for us to have true equity considering the disparity. There is something towards being inequitable and what that means, and not in a sense of how we've known it (that those who have never had will continue to never have) but in bringing those people in and bringing in the disabled and bringing in the poor, that would actually mean inequity for those who have and for those who have more. So maybe we need to change the conversation to consider difference discord as things, ideas, spaces that generate something versus causing harm, otherwise where do we go from mediation if we can’t argue?”
In imagining the role of artist and institution moving, “I think it's important to also always redirect ourselves to after abolition there can and will be something more because I think it's so easy to get caught up in destruction and post-apocalyptic ideas” adds France. “I don't know how it will be, but I think there's more possibility for the world we want. I think so.”