{"id":250,"date":"2013-03-26T05:30:54","date_gmt":"2013-03-26T12:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=250"},"modified":"2013-03-26T06:01:39","modified_gmt":"2013-03-26T13:01:39","slug":"yesand-tackling-racial-diversity-by-looking-to-the-things-adjacent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2013\/03\/yesand-tackling-racial-diversity-by-looking-to-the-things-adjacent.html","title":{"rendered":"Yes\/And — tackling racial diversity by looking to the things adjacent"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Richman\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Today, in DC, people are sporting red shirts and red scarves, red hats and pants, socks, one assumes underwear–and many of them are wandering toward the Supreme Court, where today there is hope that nine people dressed in black will carry forward a message of equality. \u00a0There’s a buzz here, and it has encouraged me to think about diversity more broadly, to understand that tackling the issue of whiteness that has disseminated so widely through the blogosphere (and been discussed so eloquently just recently by Diane Ragsdale<\/a>) is more difficult if we allow ourselves to only discuss the most obvious part of the problem.<\/p>\n

Having a conversation about the diversity of the arts that centers so strongly and specifically around \u201cwhiteness\u201d and, from there, on race and ethnicity as the benchmarks for diversity, as extraordinary and truly inspiring as that conversation has been, is, I fear, problematic for making true progress on diversification in the arts field.\u00a0 As much as I strongly believe in the racial diversification of the arts field (and, you know, everything), I have begun to fear that we’re inadvertently offering an out by focusing so specifically on one characteristic.<\/p>\n

Discussing whiteness in a vacuum that seals it off from other types of diversity can allow people to feel like we\u2019re ripping the cover off of something dark and hidden, something that makes\u00a0them feel uncomfortable, to have a difficult<\/i> and necessary<\/i> conversation.\u00a0 People can wrestle<\/i> with the demons of our generational past.\u00a0 They can speak to their internal selves, check their barometers, and assuage liberal guilt for the moments of casual racism they see by airing them.\u00a0 They can lament the reality, see the numbers, and express disbelief at our homogeneity.\u00a0 And then they can feel the full weight of 240-plus years of racial intractability and injustice, interwoven so seamlessly into our whole social fabric, and they can throw up their hands and say the problem is too big<\/i>, the weight of the whiteness too great<\/i>. And then they can continue on as they have, feeling better for having bared their souls, fought their demons, publicly voiced their accidental racism, and having changed very little.<\/p>\n

This is my fear.<\/p>\n

There is value in conversation.\u00a0 But there is more value in change.<\/p>\n

The truth is, there\u2019s an obvious and pervasive racial disparity both inside and outside the arts.\u00a0 But, whereas inside the arts we seem to be mostly having a conversation about it through a tiny microscope, diving deep into the perplexities of racial disparity as though it exists alone, in the larger world the conversation almost immediately rolls out large, expansive, complex.\u00a0 In focusing so specifically on race\u2014on whiteness as a racial or ethnic construct\u2014I worry that we are both laying a simplified screen over a terribly complex issue and setting up the field for a conversation about intractability instead of a conversation about manageable change.<\/p>\n

The diversity research I\u2019m doing, the racial results of which I outlined previously, isn\u2019t confined to race.\u00a0 We, in fact, looked at seven different types of diversity including race\/ethnicity, age, gender, household income, political affiliation, marital status and educational attainment.\u00a0 And while there are a lot of findings around how those various types of diversity are affected by things like company size, average ticket price, and percentage spent on marketing, in the context of this conversation about whiteness, the finding that seems most germane is that race is correlated highly with some other types of diversity.\u00a0 In fact, at statistically significant rates, the racial\/ethnic diversity of an audience increases in tandem with the household income diversity, the age diversity and the marital status diversity of that audience.<\/p>\n

As baselines, audiences vs. general population statistics from the study were as follows:<\/p>\n