{"id":226,"date":"2013-02-12T21:26:03","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T05:26:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=226"},"modified":"2013-02-12T22:33:56","modified_gmt":"2013-02-13T06:33:56","slug":"all-the-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/02\/all-the-people.html","title":{"rendered":"All the People"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"galaxy\"<\/a>Over on Facebook<\/a>, my co-worker Sam Hurwitt reports an audition listing in San Francisco that requests \u201cNo obvious ethnicity\u201d for a role.\u00a0 His friends, when asked, guessed that statement meant everything from \u201cmixed\u201d to \u201cwhite\u201d to my favorite: \u201c\u2018whitable\u2019 or \u2018passable\u2019 or \u2018non-threatening ethnic looking person\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Bank of Canada recently released a new $100 bill as part of an overhaul of their currency.<\/p>\n

Per this article<\/a>:<\/p>\n

An earlier, uncirculated version of the $100 note, illustrating the theme of medical innovations, showed a female medical researcher with distinctly Asian features. But later focus groups raised questions about her ethnicity, prompting the bank to erase the Asian features in favour of a Caucasian-looking woman.<\/p>\n

When The Canadian Press<\/i> broke the story about the erasure last August, spokesman Jeremy Harrison said the Bank of Canada was striving for \u2018neutral ethnicity\u2019 in its depictions of people on bank notes.<\/p>\n

Harrison referred to \u2018the Bank\u2019s long-held principles for bank note design, one of which is to avoid depicting any particular ethnic group when including people as representative images of a theme on a bank note.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Is it truly possible to \u201cavoid depicting any particular ethnic group?\u201d<\/p>\n

In July 2011, I wrote a post<\/a> on how we make meaning in the world through experiencing art which I later refined into this section from my essay \u201cSowing New Beans\u201d that appeared in Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art<\/i>:<\/p>\n

Noam Chomsky, a linguist and political theorist now known more for the second appellation than the first, outlined a concept in the late 1960\u2019s that he called \u201cuniversal grammar.\u201d He was investigating how languages are created and acquired, and he settled on this idea that all of us, from the moment we\u2019re born, carry in us common, innate, fundamental rules of grammar and we use that inherent understanding to gradually build up our language comprehension and production.<\/p>\n

I often think of art in this way\u2014as the manifestation of something fundamental and internal, built from blocks we all carry with us even if we don\u2019t know it.\u00a0 The experience is held within us and activated when we attend a performance or see a painting, and it transforms us into something we were not before.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m having trouble with the idea that art is universal lately.<\/p>\n

The goal of the Bank of Canada, as evidenced by the spokesman\u2019s statement, was to move from depicting a singular ethnicity to depicting something larger\u2014in other words, to move from an attitude of multiculturalism (the celebration of difference) to an attitude of universalism (the celebration of our commonality).\u00a0 All of this in an effort to celebrate Canada as a diverse, open and tolerant society.\u00a0 They had to decide whether to celebrate the inclusive homogeneity of the \u201call\u201d or the multivariate heterogeneity of the \u201ceveryone,\u201d and they chose the former.<\/p>\n

\u201cUniversalism\u201d in its theoretical form is about celebrating the essential humanness of all of us, the idealized harmony in which we could all function if we recognized how close we are to each other, really, and not how far.\u00a0 The issue, of course, then becomes whether, as a practical matter, universalism simply disintegrates into something much more minor, which is the representation of the dominant culture as the universal culture\u2014which is to say the deracination of an Asian scientist into something that looks suspiciously like a white scientist.\u00a0 And yet, we are all so very similar when you look at the science.<\/p>\n

In her essay \u201cRelations,\u201d Eula Biss writes:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we were young, my sister and I had two baby dolls that were exactly alike in every way except that one was white and one was black.\u00a0 The precise sameness of these dolls\u2026convinced me that they were, like us, sisters.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no biological basis for what we call race\u2026Race is a social function.\u00a0 But it is also, for now at least, a social fact.\u00a0 We may be remarkably genetically similar, but we are not all, culturally speaking, the same\u2026\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She goes on to quote Albert Murray, who called American culture \u201cincontestably mulatto,\u201d and then tells a story of a segregated restaurant in the South where \u201ca sign on one side of the room advertised \u2018Home Cooking\u2019 and a sign on the other side advertised \u2018Soul Food\u2019 and the customers on both sides were eating the same biscuits and gravy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cFor all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences,\u201d she quotes Murray, \u201cthe so-called black and so-called white people of the United States resemble nobody else in the world so much as they resemble each other.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In response to my<\/a> recent<\/a> posts<\/a>, Ian David Moss (along with Diane Ragsdale<\/a> and Barry Hessenius<\/a>\u2014thanks to all!) made a comment and then filled out his thinking in a post on Createquity<\/a>.\u00a0 Ian makes an interesting argument that my earlier comments about considering requirements that arts organizations in diverse communities cultivate more diverse audiences are \u201cweirdly paternalistic.\u201d\u00a0 He points out that \u201ceducated white people in the United States\u201d is a cultural group, and asks what efforts to \u201cchange patterns of cultural participation\u201d really accomplish except to attempt to sustain specific institutions.\u00a0 He goes on:<\/p>\n

To make the value judgment that the current picture of theater attendance is \u2018wrong\u2019 inadvertently calls into question, I fear, the validity of the existing aesthetic choices and preferences of people of color\u2026I worry that strong funder incentives to racially diversify audiences inadvertently encourages institutions to value people of color for their skin rather than for what\u2019s underneath, and to reinforce visible markers of diversity\u2026In my more subversive moments, I sometimes wonder if some of the motivation behind the drive to diversify audiences for traditional European art forms comes from a place of wanting to assimilate people of color so that we can all be one, big, happy family\u2014on white people\u2019s terms.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I fear Ian is being more cynical here than he may have need to be.\u00a0 Wouldn\u2019t it follow that encouraging institutions to value people of color \u201cfor their skin\u201d (though I think that\u2019s entirely too simplified) requires those institutions to also value what those people, you know, want to see.\u00a0 I\u2019m not, for example, advocating herding people unwillingly into a room and forcing them to watch Tartuffe<\/i>.\u00a0 If they don\u2019t want what\u2019s on offer, then they won\u2019t come, right?\u00a0 The shift that Ian advocates–the interpolation of forms and stories that people of more diverse groups (of all types, including but not limited to different ethnicities)–would happen by necessity.\u00a0 Currently, I would argue, we spend almost no time functionally thinking about diversification\u2014we instead simultaneously assume (1) our work is<\/i> universal and (2) they just don\u2019t know it.\u00a0 In that mode, I\u2019d suggest that getting people to think about it, even for so functional a reason as continued relevance and sustainability (i.e. \u201cmy organization doesn\u2019t die\u201d) is perfectly acceptable as an outcome, and ultimately does<\/i> encourage shifts in work.\u00a0 If we start from zero, and step one is utilitarian, then ultimately mightn\u2019t we get to someplace that is more inclusive and truly universal?\u00a0 Like the old therapy of smiling until you feel happy, relying on muscle memory to jumpstart the emotion.\u00a0 This sounds, perhaps, sort of tawdry, but we must start in order to get anywhere.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, I also think that part of what Ian is saying here centers on a difference between true universalism and the sort of lip-service “white” universalism that most arts organizations have been operating under for a long while now.\u00a0 True universalism, interestingly, seems to cycle through its seeming opposite–multiculturalism–recognizing our commonality by first recognizing our difference.\u00a0 In his essay<\/a> “Reflections on Art, Culture and Universalism,” Eugene Kamenka puts it this way:<\/p>\n

Multiculturalism, to be serious, involves the recognition that different cultural traditions highlight and examine with more knowledge and sensitivity particular aspects of human capacity and human experience.\u00a0 They broaden our knowledge, our sensitivity, our imagination.\u00a0 They help to make us better people\u2026The ideal we work toward is that of making all human beings multicultural, of having them appreciate and respect for its virtues more than one nation, one language, history and tradition\u2014more than one \u2018culture.\u2019\u00a0 This assumes that behind the \u2018cultures\u2019 of the anthropologist, there lies a universal culture.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In America today, we like to recognize difference, for better or worse.\u00a0 Liberals, especially, currently revel in the heterogeneity of their base, and the strong social movements of the day are to protect and expand the rights of two minorities\u2014gays and mostly-Hispanic immigrants.\u00a0 Republicans, wandering through the last election cycle with blinders on, used fearmongering largely based on the \u201cotherness\u201d of people who weren\u2019t white and straight to turn out that narrow constituency, and are only now understanding that that might have been a great idea a decade or more ago, but isn\u2019t so much a good idea now.\u00a0 As more voices have shouted more loudly to be heard, we have set aside the melting pot, brought out the mixing bowl, and increasingly allowed ourselves to all just be who we are and bump up against each other as such.\u00a0 At least that\u2019s what we like to believe.\u00a0 When our government talks about diversity now, it talks about accommodating the differences among peoples, not about assimilating those peoples into one common America.<\/p>\n

The reality, of course, isn\u2019t as tidy or true as that.\u00a0 This is especially the case in our cultural institutions, where the idea of universalism has had, for a long, long time, a strong foothold.\u00a0 We present the individual story on stage as artifice in order to talk about the universal story.\u00a0 And for the most part, the fact that those individual stories have largely been performed by a certain type of folks for a similar certain type of folks hasn\u2019t been a hugely addressed issue.\u00a0 In part, I think, because of our strong philanthropic base, relatively weak governmental funding base and the inherent, longstanding inequalities in the whole social fabric of America (and our ability to pay lip service to them without really addressing the underlying disparities), American arts and cultural institutions are only now feeling some of the pressure that has been felt by similar institutions in England and Australia for more than a decade.\u00a0 Like endorphins temporarily masking an injury, our lack of reliance on funding sources that actually foot to public opinion (be that public funding or public ticket sales) has allowed us to feel fine until it wears off, and now we\u2019re stuck with a broken bone that we\u2019ve been damaging more by believing it was all fine.<\/p>\n

We have not been truly seeking universalism–the universal truth for all–anymore than we have been truly seeking multiculturalism.\u00a0 What might have once been telling the truth of our world has somehow turned into something less than that.\u00a0 We have responded to the pressures of this world by making our circle smaller, clustering our planets close around our sun and assuming that that meant we were warming all the bodies in the galaxy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over on Facebook, my co-worker Sam Hurwitt reports an audition listing in San Francisco that requests \u201cNo obvious ethnicity\u201d for a role.\u00a0 His friends, when asked, guessed that statement meant everything from \u201cmixed\u201d to \u201cwhite\u201d to my favorite: \u201c\u2018whitable\u2019 or \u2018passable\u2019 or \u2018non-threatening ethnic looking person\u2019.\u201d The Bank of Canada recently released a new $100 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":227,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-226","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-main","8":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/227"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}