Race and Gender: A TCG Manifesto

I was asked by Theatre Communications Group to present a five-minute manifesto on race and gender. This "manifesto" was one of 16 presented at the 2010 Theatre Communications Group annual conference. The manifestos were presented on each of the four main conference threads: artists and artistry, the arts education continuum, race
and gender and the creative ecology.

I must begin this conversation about race and gender by putting this message up front: Regardless of my intent or yours, regardless of whatever good will may exist between us or not, this much is true: how my remarks are perceived and received is colored by assumptions spoken and unspoken by both of us.

Let me put one assumption on the table, on the outside I’m seen as an African-American man in the United States.  It doesn’t matter that my ancestral lineage includes not only displaced Africans but Irish and Native American as well.

Despite that, my physical appearance means that for too many, every statement that flows from my lips is filtered by the reality that, when I enter a room, the knowledge or ignorance of the history of African descendants in America, whether accurate or not, precede my humanity.

I am also aware that my human experience is framed by the privileges that accrue by being male, and both perceived and real disadvantages of being born to “black” parents and living in the Deep South.

When I drive past a police car there is an innate fear that any encounter with them may result in my arrest or the loss of my life. That is not hyperbole; it is reality. I realize my understanding of the law is skewed from being born into second-tier citizenship. I have accepted as truth that I have to teach my son to survive in a world that in many cases sees him as human, second; but black, male, and potentially dangerous, first.

When I walk into a theater full of people that don’t necessarily look like me and sit for two hours and experience work with them, I often leave asking myself if we shared a similar experience? Don’t we all bring our history, our experiences, our world-view to that event, and therefore view the event through those various lenses? Each of us brings something with us; we each take something away.

When I create art, whether it is poetry, theater, or music, I can only create it from the perspective from which I live. I know the same is true for any other artists. No matter how open I am to the vastness of possibilities, flights of imagination, my experiences are the touchstone that ground the work. An experience that is particularly colored by the almost four hundred year history of white supremacy, of white skin privilege, that is the United States. I can no more divest myself of that history than I can divest myself of my complexion. Or the perceptions that come along with the skin I’m in. Or the presumptions of objectivity that accrue to white skin privilege in these difficult discussions about this most difficult topic. After all, How objective can I be? is something often heard.

Since I am speaking about racism, let me provide the following definition of what I think it is: Race + Discrimination x Institutional Power = Racism. In the age of Obama many people would have us believe that we are now a post-racial nation. But if we understand that on a day-to-day level for the average person of color, it is the dynamics of power that fuel and drive racism. It is the daily interactions with those in authority, positions of power, that pile it on, day after day. All too often blithely, unseeing, unthinking.

Trust me on this - my relationship to the police is vastly different than most of you. I promise you.  Maybe then you can begin to understand how it is that, because you are enlightened, it doesn’t mean that your actions, your decisions, do not promote and advance race and racism, in your corner of the world.

In the arts in general, and theater in particular, the dynamics of power rotate around an axis of decisions that impacts whose work gets support, or doesn’t. Which playwrights to produce, directors to hire, actors who will return for multiple roles, designers to work with. And ultimately whose stories receive an audience. These decisions are too often made in an echo chamber of our own design, peopled by the usual suspects we are familiar with, comfortable with, whose judgment we trust. The impact of those decisions on the wider stage, that contribute yet another drop in the deluge of images that reflect the status quo, can go unnoticed by us.

There was a benchmark study conducted in 1939 in which they asked black children to choose between black and white dolls. The dolls were exactly the same except for their skin color. They found that more often the children preferred to play with the white dolls over the black ones and gave the white doll attributes like good and pretty and the black dolls, bad and ugly. Even when they were given a blank picture and asked to color it in as a representation of themselves they colored with a lighter shade of brown than their actual skin. A very similar test was done again in 2005 with eerily similar results and again just a few months ago and broadcast on CNN, once again with the same results.

Now, some would say these children were just making an aesthetic choice.

I disagree. Their choices reflect the overwhelming success of D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and the images perpetuated in the media and entertainment industry down through the decades to the present. Images that persistently, insistently, inflict subliminal messages of what is good, what is beautiful, what is valuable. Coupled with a scarcity of counterpoint to offset and balance the status quo, these messages lead to children wanting to be someone, anyone, other than who they are. Let me state for the record, that the imagery of self-hatred that for decades has been populated by the lowest common denominator on BET, for profit, are as culpable as any other entity. The Bob Johnsons of the world don’t escape accountability.

Comedian Chris Rock recently produced a documentary about black hair called Good Hair. It is terribly painful to watch Chris go from beauty parlors to hair supply outlets, carrying a large plastic bag of “untreated” black hair, in its natural state. He tries to give the hair away to people on the street, to black women in a beauty shop, not one person wanted the hair. Not one. It was just hair. Something we are all born with.

So what is beauty and who gets to decide? What does Aesthetics mean if you’re Puerto Rican, or Dominican, or Nigerian, or Scottish? How can we have conversations in this arena without understanding the racial structures and gender roles that are built inherently into our understanding of what is beauty? How is our definition of beauty attached to a dominant culture and the inherent privileges that attend, while some folks try to deny they have privilege?

Media and the arts in the age of 24/7 inter-connectivity is powerful beyond measure. It influences national discussions around things both picayune such as the First Lady’s sleeveless dresses and vitally urgent like the oil spill in the Gulf.

Yet, in the American theatre, serious discussions about race, class, and gender, and the impact of our messages, our images that perpetuate the status quo go largely unexplored. Why is it that major theaters can produce plays about black issues, or women’s issues, but for theaters run by, for and about women, are somehow seen as less than? That theaters run by, for and about indigenous or Spanish speaking audiences is seen as a niche but is groundbreaking when a major theater tackles the work?

I know that in the world of professional theaters, and many others, the decision makers operate within a space of privilege. As decision makers, how often do you check your privilege?

What of ourselves are we giving up when we don’t challenge those privileges?

How often do you challenge your assumptions? How many theaters have really given the space and floor for women playwrights, directors, and producers?

In the racism equation I mentioned earlier, I suggest you can as easily substitute gender for race and the equation still holds true.

How many of you actually know the history of the ground on which your organization stands?

Who are the first people and where is their voice and story in your community? How do those stories live in your theater, in your plays? Who gets to tell those stories?

How are we engaging the constantly changing demographics in our communities in a way that meets their needs? How are we using our art to instigate this topic and challenge not just our audiences to shift, but our organizations and our communities? Art is not just history. It’s current events, and predictors of our future.