{"id":237,"date":"2013-03-05T05:51:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-05T13:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=237"},"modified":"2013-03-05T05:51:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-05T13:51:00","slug":"giving-shape-to-whiteness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/03\/giving-shape-to-whiteness.html","title":{"rendered":"Giving Shape to Whiteness"},"content":{"rendered":"

Roberto Bedoya has asked<\/a> some amazing questions lately, all designed to interrogate the concept of whiteness in the arts.\u00a0 He\u2019s asked a few bloggers to think about the questions he has raised and write back (so watch for posts in the coming weeks on Jumper<\/a>, Createquity<\/a>, Barry\u2019s Blog<\/a>, Engaging Matters<\/a>, Museum 2.0<\/a>, etc), and this is mine.\u00a0 Or at least my first attempt.<\/p>\n

Before going into it though, I think it\u2019s important to say that I feel a little like a lamb in the woods on this diversity stuff, not so much because I am innocent to the effects (or causes)\u00a0of casual racism as because I was na\u00efve about the extent of the issue.\u00a0 As I continue to delve into this data, much of which (at least in relation to race\u2014other forms of diversity, which I\u2019m also looking at, are not really touched on here) paints a picture where whiteness, this giant mass that surrounds almost all institutional arts presenting in the US today, should be excruciatingly obvious, and is instead so large and ever-present as to become invisible, like air.<\/p>\n

I am afraid that I find myself, as I work through some of this information, losing my words at both the monumentality of the problem and at the systemic nature of the disparity.\u00a0 It has me asking all sorts of questions about will and form\u2014are we really so stubborn as to not change? What does \u201cchange\u201d mean, and would it actually make our art more appealing to these large swaths of people who aren\u2019t coming?\u2014and about time, and energy, and coordination, and money.\u00a0 Like all clarity, or partial clarity, seeing the true weight of the whiteness in the arts, illustrated in numbers and graphs, analyzed and parsed, is both exciting for its inherent opportunity and terrifying for the scope it reveals.\u00a0 Where the air is cold and thin, and the wind pushes the clouds away, you can suddenly see all the other mountains you aren\u2019t climbing, and you can fall or you can fly.<\/p>\n

Weighing Whiteness<\/b><\/p>\n

The weight of whiteness in the arts is about 15 percentage points.\u00a0 It only weighed about 10 percentage points in the early 80\u2019s, but now, well:<\/p>\n

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This is a comparison of the percentage of non-whites in the general US population (wide-dotted red line), the general Bay Area population (narrow-dotted red line) and the US theatergoing population (black line) comparing 1980 to 2010.\u00a0 That black line is weighed down, depressed below the general population, slowly diverging from it further over time, by the weight of the whiteness of our theatres.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a stark picture, I think.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s another:<\/p>\n

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This is a comparison of aggregated demographic data on 532,000 theatre attendance records in the San Francisco Bay area spanning 2006 to 2012.\u00a0 This data comes from 25 theatre companies, 137 total seasons.\u00a0 The theatre companies range from LORT houses to under $150,000 per year annual budget, present all types of work, and are distributed among 5 Bay Area counties.<\/p>\n

The table shows, in red, the average racial demographics of the half-million audience records, and in black, the average demographics for those 5 Bay Area counties per the 2010 US Census.<\/p>\n

In this case, the weight of whiteness is 46 percentage points.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve got to say, going into all of this analysis, I didn\u2019t think it would be quite this bad.<\/p>\n

One more:<\/p>\n

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This one does away with percentage points and converts it to something I\u2019ve developed called the Arts Diversity Index.\u00a0 It takes the relative diversity (in this case, race\/ethnicity diversity) and converts it into a standardized score where 1.0 is as diverse as possible (which is to say, complete parity) and 0.0 is as homogeneous as possible (which is to say, only one race).\u00a0 The green bars are the average ADI scores for each county\u2019s theatres in the study, with variance indicated by the boxes and lines.\u00a0 The red dots are the ADI scores for the general populations of each county using US Census figures.\u00a0 The only place we\u2019re coming close is in Marin County, and then only because it\u2019s so relatively racially homogeneous.<\/p>\n

Giving Whiteness Context<\/b><\/p>\n

As a corollary to this data analysis that forms the core of the report I\u2019m writing, we also surveyed our theatre company members in the Bay Area to understand what the diversity of their boards, staffs and artists were like.\u00a0 To date, 54 companies have provided data on their boards, staffs and artists for the season ending in 2012, with the following results:<\/p>\n

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While it is difficult to make any definitive conclusions because the audience data is drawn from a different sample of companies than the rest of the data, this information is encouraging and discouraging at the same time.\u00a0 On the encouraging hand, the percentage of white people serving on the boards, staffs and shows of the survey respondents is actually below<\/i> the percentage of whites in the overall US population and, in most categories, close to on-par or below Bay Area percentages.\u00a0 On the discouraging hand, despite these great numbers, audience data indicates we\u2019re still seeing an absolutely staggering lack of diversity all the same.<\/p>\n

Interesting, and apropos of Diane Ragsdale\u2019s post on coercive philanthropy<\/a>, we asked these companies whether they had received direct or indirect pressure from funders via program officers or granting guidelines to diversify.\u00a0 When filtered to reflect those that had versus had not gotten pressure, here\u2019s what the table looks like:<\/p>\n

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What strikes me about this table is how close the percentages are.\u00a0 The pressure, when it exists, exists in companies where more of the board, staff and artists are white (generally).\u00a0\u00a0 Regardless, and with a caveat that further study is really, really necessary here, the diversity of the people making the art doesn\u2019t seem to really get reflected out into the seats.<\/p>\n

What Affects Whiteness?<\/b><\/p>\n

So what does affect whiteness?\u00a0 As part of this research, we cross-referenced the audience numbers with the California Cultural Data Project (as well as with the other types of diversity we were looking at), and found some interesting correlations.<\/p>\n

(For the sake of this blog post\u2019s legibility, I\u2019m going to spare you the p-values, but all of these relationships were determined to be statistically significant.\u00a0 It\u2019s also important to note here that correlation and causation aren\u2019t the same thing\u2014we can\u2019t say that more differently-aged people caused<\/i> there to be more racial diversity\u2014but what this basically means is that where one was high, the other was high, too.)<\/p>\n

–\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Racial\/ethnic diversity was positively correlated with:<\/p>\n