Diversity is not new as a conversation topic to Bay Area arts institutions; the pressure to diversify has existed for quite a while.  In the Bay Area, this pressure manifests most strongly in the form of foundations, trustees, patrons and employees at Bay Area theatre organizations either implicitly or explicitly letting these organizations know that the diversification is increasingly a requirement, and the lack of it is increasingly untenable.

There are many difficulties in being in that position.  Diversity is a tremendously complicated issue, even as tackling it is crucial to the field’s continued relevance.  In order to make a conversation about diversity meaningful and actionable, the conversation conversation must be:

• Informed by data.
• Backed by research from both inside and outside the arts field.
• Bounded by standardized benchmarks and goals.
• Inclusive of the idiosyncrasies of each organization while also understanding that those idiosyncrasies do not constitute an exit from the conversation.
• Understanding of the short-, mid- and long-term potential consequences, positive and negative, of an arts organization or an arts community trying to truly expand the diversity of their leadership, staff, art, artists and audiences.

The Arts Diversity Index is a response to the dual simplicity and complexity of diversification in the arts.  Conducted from November 2012 to April 2013, The Arts Diversity Index provides an in-depth analysis of over 500,000 attendance records of theatergoers in the San Francisco Bay Area from 2006 to 2012.  These attendance records, drawn from the Bay Area Arts and Culture Census, were appended with a variety of demographic information, and were pulled from 25 theatre companies ranging in size, geography, age, board size, annual budget, etc, and representing, as much as possible, a breadth of diversity in what is admittedly a single narrow part of the larger arts sector.  Those 25 companies were also then examined using data provided by the California Cultural Data Project to understand whether certain company characteristics might relate to fluctuations in diversity.

BASIC DIVERSITY PROFILES

All told, this research project examined seven different types of diversity in theatre going audiences, and compared those diversity scores to the same diversities in the general population as drawn from the United States Census data for the five Bay Area counties in which those theatre companies performed.  The types of diversity examined were: race/ethnicity, age, household income, gender, educational attainment, marital status, and political affiliation.

• In aggregate, the “average” theatergoer in this sample had a 9-in-10 chance of being white, a 6-in-10 chance of being male.  He was likely a registered Democrat, age 59.3 years and with 65% likelihood of having a college degree.  He also had a 1-in-3 likelihood of also having a graduate degree.  His household income was $109,167.
• In comparison, in aggregate, the “average” member of the general population in the five counties sampled had a better chance of being non-white than white, and was equally likely to be male or female.  He or she had a 1-in-2 chance of being a registered Democrat, age 48.1 years and with a 60% likelihood of having a college degree.  He or she had a 1-in-5 likelihood of also having a graduate degree.  His or her household income was $75,080.

Using the Arts Diversity Index, a new mathemathical equation that takes a particular type of diversity in a population, for example age, and converts it into a score between 0 and 1, index profiles for each company and county were created for all seven types of diversity.  In the case of this study, the goal was to understand not how a company might diversify as much as possible (i.e. total parity), but instead to understand how a company might mirror the larger population in which it existed (i.e. the company’s home county).  The population profiles from county to county were examined, comparing the general population of the theatre company’s home county with the theatre’s patron population.  The disparities between these populations, while consistent in direction throughout the Bay Area, are markedly different from county to county.  Most of that disparity, however, has to do with differences in the general population not the theatergoing sample—the theatergoing sample is remarkably consistent in profile regardless of county, while the county populations themselves are variable.

While certain Arts Diversity Index scores for theatregoers were very far from the similar scores in the general population, others were comparatively close.  In order of disparity, theatregoers were farthest from reflecting the general population in terms of: race/ethnicity, then household income, political affiliation, age, marital status, gender, and, finally, educational attainment.

In terms of race/ethnicity, theatergoing audiences are nearly 90% white, which is more than double the prevalence of whites in the general population of the Bay Area counties studied.

The average household income for the theatergoers in the sample was $40,000 higher than the average household income for the overall population in the counties studied.

Politically, the majority of both the theatergoing population and the general public in the five counties studied were Democrats, although that majority was much larger within the theatergoing population than in the general population.

The average age for a theatergoing patron is more than 11 years older than the average age of the general population in the five counties studied.

Seventeen percent more of the theatregoing audience was married than the general population in the five counties studied.

Gender diversity of the theatergoing population was almost at parity, on average, with the gender diversity of the general population.

In terms of education, fifteen percent more of the theatregoing audience had a graduate degree than the general population in the five counties studied.

To view a county-by-county comparison of the theatregoing audience and the general population, please see the infographics here.

In general, given the baseline diversity characteristics of the theatregoing audience, getting theatregoers’ Arts Diversity Index scores to more closely align with the scores of the general population meant:

• Race/ethnicity: an increase in non-white attendees.
• Age: an increase in younger attendees.
• Household income: an increase in less affluent attendees.
• Gender: an increase in female attendees.
• Educational attainment: a decrease in attendees with graduate degrees.
• Marital status: an increase in single attendees.
• Political affiliation: an increase in non-Democrat attendees.

INTERCONNECTED AND ADJACENT DIVERSITIES

The relationship between theatregoer Arts Diversity Index scores for different types of diversity were examined to understand correlations between types of diversity.  Statistically significant correlations of various strengths exist between 15 of the 21 possible combinations of diversity, most of them positive (i.e. an increase in one type of diversity correlates with an increase in the other type). Some significant correlations include:

• Increased household income diversity is correlated with increased age, gender, race, educational attainment and marital status diversity (i.e. economically diverse audiences are also likely to be younger, more female, more racially/ethnically diverse, less educated and include more single people).
• In addition to being correlated with increased household income diversity, increased racial/ethnic diversity was also correlated with increased age and marital status diversity (i.e. racially/ethnically diverse audiences are also likely to be younger and include more single people).
• Increased political affiliation diversity was correlated with decreases in household income, marital status and gender diversity (i.e. less Democratic audiences are also likely to be wealthier, more married and more male).

In the above graphic, white lines indicate a positive correlation (when one type of diversity increases, so does the other), while black lines indicate a negative correlation (when one type of diversity increases, the other decreases).  These correlated outcomes illustrate a highly interrelated reality of diversification, and point to the possibility of tackling issues of diversity through multiple channels at once.  Because some of the Arts Diversity Indices for audiences are farther from the index scores of the general population than others, some issues of diversity might be viewed as more actionable.  Index scores provide baselines and benchmarks for such action.

INTERCONNECTED AND ADJACENT COMPANY CHARACTERISTICS

In this study, in order to test out the ability of the Arts Diversity Index scores to be used as guideposts for providing possible strategies forward, California Cultural Data Project from the twenty-five companies was cross-referenced with the diversity data.  The purpose was to see if those characteristics were correlated with changes in diversity index scores.  Company characteristics examined include: age of company, company home county, total annual budget, total number of board members, percent of revenue that was earned, percent of expense spent on marketing and communications, and average adult ticket price.  Statistically significant correlations of various strengths exist between 9 of the 21 possible combinations of company characteristics. Significant correlations include:

• The age of a company is positively correlated with the total annual budget of the company, the number of board members at that company, and the average adult ticket price.
• The season year of the data (i.e. “the 2005/2006 season”) was not significantly correlated with any of the other company characteristics (or, incidentally, with any variation in diversity).
• Percent spent on marketing and communications was not significantly correlated with any of the other company characteristics.

CORRELATIONS BETWEEN COMPANY CHARACTERISTICS AND ARTS DIVERSITY INDEX SCORES

In an attempt to understand whether there are particular company characteristics that potentially have impacts on diversity (or at least with which statistically significant differences occur), statistical tests were conducted, and 22 out of 49 possible correlations were determined to be statistically significant.  Significant findings include:

• The age of the company correlated with fluctuations in all types of diversity except for educational attainment.  Companies under 10 years of age and companies over 50 years of age were likely to have more men, more wealthy people and more Republicans in their audiences than companies in the middle age range.
• Very young companies (under 10 years), along with companies in “middle age” (20-50 years), were found to have more age diversity (i.e. more young people) in their audiences than their other counterparts.
• The very oldest companies–which also, given inter-characteristic correlations, means the largest companies–were the ones that demonstrated the most racial/ethnic diversity. 
• Companies with larger budgets had more racial and age diversity than their other counterparts.
• Companies that had an average adult ticket price of under $10 or over $60 had higher rates of racial/ethnic diversity than other companies.
• There were a variety of diversities where the home county of the company correlated with differences in diversity.  Age, gender, marital status, political affiliation and racial diversity all varied in statistically significant ways based on home county, in some cases mirroring the variations among the general populations of those counties and in some cases not.  Audience age diversity, for example, varied based on county, but generally followed the trends of those counties—so the oldest audiences, by and large, were found embedded in the oldest general populations.  Similarly, counties with more political diversity in their general populations were the home to the theatre companies whose audiences also had the most political diversity.
• Except in Marin County, which had both the least diverse total population and the least diverse audience population in the study, theatergoing audiences did not mirror the relative diversities of the home counties of the companies.  All of the county-level audience numbers were much less racially diverse than the general populations of the counties, but they varied unpredictably.  Alameda county, for example, had the most general population diversity (66% non-white) and the second-least audience diversity (11% non-white).

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

This pilot study provides a first step towards a variety of potentially fruitful future conversations.  While deeper and more complete data would likely provide a richer picture, the calculation of the Arts Diversity Index and its pairing with various characteristics of arts organizations to see what affects change has the potential to truly augment the difficult conversation around diversification and the arts. The data reveal both a path forward and a set of caution signs along that path.  Diversification is as necessary as it is complicated.  The nature of our audiences, as homogenized and unrepresentative as they may be, is interwoven deeply into our structures, and such tangles must be taken into account.

By analyzing the relationship between types of diversity, we can begin to understand what manageable, incremental, least-disruptive changes and strategies can be implemented in order to begin to tackle the problem.  In so doing, we have the potential to both move from simply “valuing” diversity to actively “managing” it, and to do so with a pragmatism that will allow that management to happen at the expense of short-term stability.

ABOUT THIS REPORT

This report was commissioned by Theatre Bay Area, one of the largest regional arts services organizations in the United States, with funds provided by the California Arts Council and the California Cultural Data Project.  It was produced with data support from TRG Arts and the California Cultural Data Project.  Analyses were conducted by the author with assistance from Dr. Seth Miller of the University of California, Davis.  The identities of the twenty-five theatre companies examined in this report have been kept anonymous. The author and Theatre Bay Area greatly appreciate their participation in the research.

On Monday morning, I woke up and pulled up my news aggregator on my phone and noticed that there was no mention of the 19 people shot in New Orleans.  I went to the front page of the New York Times and couldn’t find a single mention of the shooting of 19 people in New Orleans.  I did a search and learned that they ran an AP-written story on the shooting of 19 people in New Orleans in Monday’s print edition on page A11, 200 words.  So far, except for an editorial by Frank Bruni, that seems to be the only article they’ve run.

The FBI spokesperson was very clear that this was “just” street violence.

“From all of our intelligence,” she said, “ we have no reason to believe it was an act of terror, just street violence.”

On Sunday, CNN and the New York Times had it running on their front pages for a while.  So did the Washington Post.  Monday, from some informal polling of friends, that coverage was mostly gone—in the case of the New York Times, the shooting was entirely absent from the front page of their website by midday Monday, and it has remained absent since.

In that same informal polling of Facebook friends (and friends of friends), 51 people told me how they had learned about the shootings in New Orleans.  Over a third of the people said they didn’t know it had happened, and had found out from me.

“I had no idea, and I watched the news last night.”

“I always check CNN and this is the first I heard of it.”

“It is so weird and silent that I assumed I was missing something…”

I don’t really know how to write about what I’m feeling here.  It is a mixture of outrage and profound sadness.

Another incident happened a while ago.  It was a public event, lots of people around, violence that interrupted joy.  It was terrifying.  It was labeled terror.  Twelve people died, 100 or more were injured.  A full-scale manhunt ensured in which a city was locked down, people forced to stay indoors.  A guy wrote a story about how he got stuck with a one-night-stand all day because of the lockdown.  James Taylor and Aerosmith participated in a fundraiser with New Kids on the Block.  Barack Obama went on television and, having learned what happens when you take too long to call something an act of terror, called it an act of terror.  At least one state senator called for the torture of the suspects (Quote: “So, scum bag #2 in custody. Who wouldn’t use torture on this punk to save more lives?”).  A whole lot of people got Chechnya and the Czech Republic mixed up.  The New York Post and Reddit, among others, were suddenly filled with vigilantes who started digitally hunting down a high schooler and a missing college kid who ended up dead.  The New York Times has over 151,000 results if you search for “Boston marathon bombing.”  And it deserved all the coverage it got and more.

But what it got me thinking about was why one incident, a massive violent attack, would get tremendous and sustained media attention while another similar attack would not.  In a country where 78% of Americans go online and 46% of Americans have smartphones, within 24 hours of the bombing I swear I read, though cannot now find, an article that indicated that about 75% of the entire adult US population knew it had happened.  And now, here, a third of my highly-connected, social-media and traditional-media-savvy friends didn’t know that 19 people got shot in broad daylight.

So what are the similarities and differences here?  Both were mass attacks, though the Boston one (1) took place on a weekday, (2) was a bombing instead of a shooting, (3) had fatalities, (4) occurred at a famous event, (5) took place in a major northern city, (6) injured/killed predominantly white people, (7) was perpetuated by two foreign-born brothers who were Muslim.  The New Orleans attack occurred on a weekend, no one was killed (though two children were among the injured), and was perpetuated by three black men against a bunch of black people in a southern city.

The New Orleans story wasn’t sexy.  No one died.  There weren’t photographers there to capture heartbreaking images of men with their legs blown off being saved by good Samaritans.  For a while, there wasn’t even video, though they’ve found some now.  But also, and crucially, it wasn’t “terrorism.”  It was “street violence.”  Which means it happened down there, to those people, the way it has been happening for so long.  Nevermind that 19 people getting shot at should always be classified as a type of terrorism.  And so the story, after less than 24 hours, was subsumed by discussions of the IRS going after Tea Party groups and various Republicans trying to come up with enough about Benghazi to pin it on Obama.  Joyce Brothers died.  Angelina Jolie got a preventative double mastectomy.

The media, increasingly, follows what people latch on to.  It attempts to secure its survival by measuring readership and impact and choosing this story over that story based on what people are most likely to read.  The New York Times, precariously balanced on the precipice of insolvency, moves on to something else that its loyal readers will read, that will draw the attention of those inside that demographic that is most precious to the advertisers that keep the company going now.  Some of this may sound familiar to us in the arts.  It should; this is sometimes (often?) how things seem to work now.

We must constantly fight against the impulse to only tell the stories that our current fans want us to tell.

My naïve frustration at the disparity in coverage between these two incidents leaves some of my friends and colleagues of color frustrated in turn that I can be so surprised that such disparity might still exist.

“Clayton,” one says, “black people got shot by a black person and nobody died.  Why would you expect that to be news? Why do white people always think that black folk are joking when we say that THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT US!!  Are you starting to believe me?!”

That breaks my heart.  And it makes it hard for me to discuss the need for us to create a safe space in which we can be clumsy, in which we can navigate stumbling towards a better understanding of the world, because as another black colleague put it during a panel session I moderated (paraphrased from memory), “I am so angry that we are still having this conversation.  You keep saying we need to offer up a safe space for this conversation.  It is hard to feel unsafe, isn’t it? I know I am tired of feeling unsafe as a woman.  I am tired of feeling unsafe as a black woman. And now you white people want to feel safe to talk about it?”

And yet, yes, I am frustrated, and perhaps that frustration emerges from a naïve and narrow understanding of the realities of the world.  And yes, it must be exhausting to have been shouting at the top of your lungs that inequality exists everywhere for decades and to now, now, have to graciously nod as a few white people emerge groping and begin, just begin, to understand.  It must be strange to feel ragged and tired of feeling unsafe much of the time, and then to be asked by those who sometimes make you feel unsafe for safety, time to process, the patience to make mistakes.

I am ashamed to have to ask, but I will anyway: my anger is genuine, as is my hope that we can start, haltingly, to make it better.  I don’t deserve your patience, and you don’t deserve to have to wait to see a day when 19 people being shot would last 24 hours of a news cycle regardless of circumstance.  I know my belief that change is possible grates against your hard-set and long-learned belief that we can’t really change.

There are places in the world where New Orleans made instant and front-page news.  Friends in New Zealand and the Netherlands let me know that they knew instantly, that it was blared on the radio, that it was covered and covered and covered.  In some places, “street violence” is still shocking enough to warrant air.  In some places, the nuance of north and south, of black and white, of dead and wounded, of bombs and guns, is still lost amidst the general grief that such bad things can happen to people.

This all became deeply uncomfortable.  In the beginning, I simply avoided responding with pronouns, weary at the reality of coming out in the back of a cab, dreading the widening of his eyes, just for a second, when he connected what I was saying with who I therefore was.  And then, as the conversation continued, because I couldn’t not respond for fear of being rude, my casual omission had to transform into active deception, and I said “she,” and I felt a tremendous pain at my cowardice.

I am proud of who I am, and I am infinitely proud of my husband, who is a wonderful man, strong and intelligent, braver, I think, than I was in that moment.  I, as evidenced by many of the posts on this blog, am not generally opaque about who I am—I gave that up when I discovered how damaging it was to me, how much pain it meant I had to carry in me, and how much more freeing it was for me to simply allow everyone to know me for who I am.  And yet there I was, sitting in this cab with a stranger—a man my age, university-educated and from northern California, back in Chicago having been laid off from a Silicon Valley marketing job—there I was, sitting there and lying about something so fundamental about myself.

That bothered me so much.  It made me feel like I had regressed ten years, back into a closet I mostly feel I have permanently left behind me.  It made me feel bad for me, and bad for my husband who wasn’t there, and even bad for the cabbie for the assumptions I had made about his attitudes and prospective reactions.  I felt ashamed not of who I was, but of the fact that I was not being clear about who I was, a gay man in a cab letting another man assume I was straight.

This stuck with me, a nagging feeling, through that Chicago trip and into the next week, and into the conference that I just finished up attending, the Association of Performing Arts Service Organizations conference (APASO) in Philadelphia.  While at that conference, I saw a show called Permanent Collection, a play from about 10 years ago based on the strange story of the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.  The collection, put together privately by one Dr. Barnes, is simultaneously one of the largest troves of Impressionist art in the world and a well-known collection of African art.  Barnes, in arranging the collection, grouped many pieces together, ten and twelve to a wall, interspersing African art with European Impressionist masterpieces, the pieces unlabeled and left for people to view without interpretation, one piece singing to another through common colors and layouts, styles, subjects.

When Barnes died, he dictated in his will that the stewardship of the museum be placed in the hands of a small African-American university—a move that surprised a whole lot of people.  The university, in turn, installed an African-American director of the museum, and it is the complex and charged relationship between the white long-time education director of the museum and this new black director that is the subject of the play.  It is morally ambiguous and founded on the premise that sometimes we just don’t know how to talk to each other.  The white education director says something unknowingly insensitive to the black director, and the black director responds by calling the white education director racist.  The white guy sues the black guy for libel, and prompts a series of protests from folks concerned about the future of the museum and its direction, and which prompts the black director to hyperbolically label the white protestors the Ku Klux Klan.  Small mistakes are met not with simply conversations about misapprehensions, but with silence or anger, imperfections met not with tolerance but with frustration, and the system breaks down.

In watching Permanent Collection, I was able to crystallize both why I refused to correct the cabbie and why that made me so angry at myself.  In not speaking up—especially at the beginning, when speaking up would have simply been to insert the right pronoun where he had inserted the wrong one—I chose the path that ultimately leads to us speaking different languages.  Rather than bridge to him, I had declined to participate, and then, trapped in what became an awkward and exhausting word game, eventually just gave in to lying.  I had assumed his intolerance just as he had assumed my heterosexuality, and we were both wrong, and we did nothing to become right.

The next day, talking with a colleague and friend about the show, I started telling her about how for me, the only way that I could even partially understand the weight of inequality was through my gayness, and she very enthusiastically (and supportively) said something like, “Oh my god, I know!”  And I, equally quickly and to the surprise of both of us, said “No, you don’t.”

I did not mean that to be as blunt or confrontational as the words that came out of my mouth—it was meant not as a confrontation but as a statement, a truth.  But it put her off, saying that to my friend.  She was taken aback, and I could see in her eyes that she was confused, and then that she was concerned that she had offended me, and then that she was sorry.  Her comment had come from a place of support, of solidarity, and I had responded exclusionarily, and she was upset.

On the scale of coming outs, mine was pretty easy.  My parents were surprised, and initially upset, but they relatively quickly came around and have been wholly supportive ever since.  I came out attached to a boyfriend, a boyfriend who is now, eleven years later, my husband, having already come out to my friends, who by and large were supportive.  But in coming out I felt sure that I had closed doors to normalcy that I craved—to family and to children, to the anonymity of being basically like most everyone else.  That has been proven wrong, but in that six months when I went public with who I was, I was confronted with a fear of the new reality, a nausea that emerged every time I told anyone. It was a fear of their reactions, of their judgment, of the possibility of the violence and negativity that sometimes lurked there on the other side of knowing.

That nausea and fear still sits in me, smaller but there, firm, activated even now a little every time I walk outside with my husband and daughter, her affection for both of us, her blessed dismissiveness of our special status a bullhorn constantly announcing “GAY DADS COMING” to everyone we pass.  Having Cici has, in a way, taken something that was personal and internal–something that was invisible until I wanted it to be made visible–and made it public.  I have been blessed, by geography and the time we live in, to have mostly not had to deal with the negativity that I fear in those situations, although I still fear it, assume it is coming, have prepared myself the best I can for the first time someone says something terrible to me in front of my daughter, and I have to explain to her this world.  The fear sometimes ebbs away so far that I don’t think it’s there anymore, and then I’ll hear someone dismissively say that something is “so gay.”  I will remember driving with my husband up the California coast on a romantic weekend, a wedding planning guide haphazardly thrown in the back of our car, and going into a convenience store together only to emerge to a menacing man peeking in our car window, turning around with a look of disgust, and throwing some slur our way that I have chosen to forget.  I will notice the guy who rides the bus with me, and has for five years, and who one day three years ago got annoyed because he thought I stepped in front of him in line and shoved me out of the way and called me a “fucking faggot.” I will hear about husbands being denied access to their husbands in hospitals, and see pictures of people getting beaten up, and hear stories of intolerance so outrageous and sudden that it makes me fear that I am getting comfortable, that I have it too good, that there is a cliff in front of me that I don’t see.  I will reach out to rest my hand on my husband’s leg somewhere in public, and then pull my hand back, remembering a random echo of someone saying once, “You know, I don’t mind gay people, as long as they don’t wave it in my face,” and it comes back, because that’s the world, and there is a reality of difference there that is just there.

It was all of that stuff that kept me from telling the truth to the anonymous cabbie, and it was all that stuff that made me blurt out what I did to my friend at the conference.  And it is also all that stuff that makes a conversation so hard.

This, this un-communication, the fear both of saying the wrong thing and hearing the wrong thing, from both parties, impedes progress.  When I assume someone will react poorly, I rob them of the opportunity to react well.  When I react quickly to profess my difference, I rob the other person of the opportunity to explore how we are the same.  I am different, and there is fear—but if we are to carry forward in bridging between who we are and who we are not, that difference and that fear must be set aside in favor of the bravery to have a conversation, the equally bravery to have it clumsily and with the understanding that there will be landmines to be navigated along the way, and the ultimate bravery of knowing that sometimes a reconciliation of ideas isn’t possible, and an outreached hand will be slapped away, and that the trying is the important part.

As we carry forward in a conversation about diversity, it will be a conversation that is had, by necessity, by a whole bunch of people who are oppressed and biased and privileged in different ways.  We will make mistakes—accidental ignorances, too-quick repudiations.  We will, as we must, react from our personal experiences in the only way we can.

What I encourage—what, I believe, is required in order for us to get where we need to go—is that we allow ourselves to go forward clumsily, imperfectly, with the knowledge that we will make mistakes, and that we know that when those accidental insensitivities are directed at us, at our particular oppressions, at our privileges, we respect the other person enough to not let it go, to air the issue, but to do so with kindness, sensitivity, and the understanding that we are all carrying forward toward the same goal, groping about in the dark together, dressed in the inherent biases of our experience.

I wish I had corrected that pronoun, and I wonder what the conversation would have been then.  I did not have the luxury of that, but I did have the ability to apologize to my friend, which I did.

When you learn to dance with a partner, a good dance teacher tells you to start by spending a few minutes stomping on each others’ toes and saying you’re sorry.  “That’s going to keep happening,” she’ll say, “and you can apologize if you want, but that’s the reality of learning, and it is better if you just get over it and keep dancing.  That’s the only way you’ll get good enough to step clear.”

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.  There’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) is more difficult if we allow ourselves to only discuss the most obvious part of the problem.

Having a conversation about the diversity of the arts that centers so strongly and specifically around “whiteness” 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.  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.

Discussing whiteness in a vacuum that seals it off from other types of diversity can allow people to feel like we’re ripping the cover off of something dark and hidden, something that makes them feel uncomfortable, to have a difficult and necessary conversation.  People can wrestle with the demons of our generational past.  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.  They can lament the reality, see the numbers, and express disbelief at our homogeneity.  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, the weight of the whiteness too great. 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.

This is my fear.

There is value in conversation.  But there is more value in change.

The truth is, there’s an obvious and pervasive racial disparity both inside and outside the arts.  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.  In focusing so specifically on race—on whiteness as a racial or ethnic construct—I 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.

The diversity research I’m doing, the racial results of which I outlined previously, isn’t confined to race.  We, in fact, looked at seven different types of diversity including race/ethnicity, age, gender, household income, political affiliation, marital status and educational attainment.  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.  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.

As baselines, audiences vs. general population statistics from the study were as follows:

• Race: Audiences 88% white, general population 42% white
• Household income: Audiences $108,000, general population $65,000
• Average age: Audiences 59 years, general population 48 years**

As a practical matter, this means that “more diversity” in these areas means (1) fewer white people, (2) more people who make less money, and (3) younger people.

To connect the dots, then, before even looking at the variations in company characteristics, we can identify things that may change (or at least change in tandem with) racial diversity—more racial diversity occurs in groups that are more economically diverse and more age diverse.

Of course.  Right?

We live in a country where being white, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, means on average that you have an average household income that is 158% that of a black family and 135% that of a Latino family.  On top of the inherent disparity that immediately creates around ability to pay, household income, because of the strong pressures on monies allocated to the public school system in California, is strongly tied to the prevalence of arts education programs in schools—per the Irvine Foundation’s report An Unfinished Canvas, in all four genres (music, dance, drama and visual art), “students attending high poverty schools have less access to arts institutions than their peers in more affluent communities.”  Because this economic segregation also generally incurs racial segregation (echoing the correlations we see in our theatre diversity study), those “high poverty schools” have higher rates of non-white children.

We live in a country where white populations are declining and Latino, mixed race and black populations are on the rise.  Per the US Census Bureau, the average age of the white general population (all ages) is 37 years versus a black average age of 29 years and a Hispanic average age of 27 years.  Audiences that manage to attract younger people will, by virtue of the higher rates of non-white within those age brackets, attain some level of further racial diversity.

These diversities are, themselves, connected with each other, of course, and with the other type of diversity that shows a significant correlation to race: marital status.  Younger people are less likely to be married.  Older people are, by virtue of being around longer, more likely to have paired off and become married.  Married, older people are more likely to have more money.  The stone rolls down the hill.

Does this all just make a complex problem more complex?  I don’t think so.  I think that it actually gives us more traction to actually get something done.  We can stop (or at least stop only) asking ourselves “How do we get more people of color through the door?” and start asking more questions, none of which are necessarily easier but any of which might provide incremental change.

I once heard a managing director of a LORT level theatre say that she didn’t think we had a race issue in terms of theatre audiences, she thought we had a class issue.  Her argument was that American racial disparity is primarily a class disparity, and—and here’s where I stop agreeing—that our best course of action as a field might be to simply wait a generation or two until more people of the other races have moved up the economic and class ladders, and, having now perched higher, will then have the resources and inclination to patronize the arts.

While my mind sort of disintegrates in the face of that argument (my mind immediately jumps to that quote from The Birdcage, “I assure you, Mother is just following a train of thought to a logical, yet absurd conclusion…much in the same way Jonathan Swift did when he suggested the Irish feed their babies to the rich.), I do believe we all must grapple with the inherent truth at the start of it—race is a class issue in America, and we have a complex and multi-faceted class problem on our hands.  I grappled with what initially felt like a seeping of hope until I turned the conversation around for myself—knowing these interconnections is not a cause to freeze, overcome with the impossibility of the task, but is instead a grateful influx of more specifics, more details, which, when parsed, can lead us to experiments that may reveal how to get a little closer to point B from point A.

If we seek to diversify the arts—whether that’s because we think it’s right or because we’re worried about surviving or because we’re being forced to by funders or because of some other variation—we must do so with an understanding of the various parts of what that means.  The weight we have been discussing in the blogosphere these last months is of “whiteness” only if whiteness is defined as something larger than skin color–a truth that, while difficult to swallow, is so much more holistically true and actionable than the narrower conception with which we’ve mostly been concerning ourselves.  We cannot tune this violin by simply turning one peg—we must turn them all.

** (when you exclude anyone under 18, as we did for both samples in this research)

Portions of this blog post originally appeared, in slightly different form, in an article I wrote on racial diversity in Bay Area theatre for Theatre Bay Area magazine called “Who’s at the Table?” in 2010.

Before going into it though, I think it’s 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) of casual racism as because I was naïve about the extent of the issue.  As I continue to delve into this data, much of which (at least in relation to race—other forms of diversity, which I’m 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.

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.  It has me asking all sorts of questions about will and form—are we really so stubborn as to not change? What does “change” mean, and would it actually make our art more appealing to these large swaths of people who aren’t coming?—and about time, and energy, and coordination, and money.  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.  Where the air is cold and thin, and the wind pushes the clouds away, you can suddenly see all the other mountains you aren’t climbing, and you can fall or you can fly.

Weighing Whiteness

The weight of whiteness in the arts is about 15 percentage points.  It only weighed about 10 percentage points in the early 80’s, but now, well:

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.  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.

It’s a stark picture, I think.

Here’s another:

This is a comparison of aggregated demographic data on 532,000 theatre attendance records in the San Francisco Bay area spanning 2006 to 2012.  This data comes from 25 theatre companies, 137 total seasons.  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.

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.

In this case, the weight of whiteness is 46 percentage points.

I’ve got to say, going into all of this analysis, I didn’t think it would be quite this bad.

One more:

This one does away with percentage points and converts it to something I’ve developed called the Arts Diversity Index.  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).  The green bars are the average ADI scores for each county’s theatres in the study, with variance indicated by the boxes and lines.  The red dots are the ADI scores for the general populations of each county using US Census figures.  The only place we’re coming close is in Marin County, and then only because it’s so relatively racially homogeneous.

Giving Whiteness Context

As a corollary to this data analysis that forms the core of the report I’m 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.  To date, 54 companies have provided data on their boards, staffs and artists for the season ending in 2012, with the following results:

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.  On the encouraging hand, the percentage of white people serving on the boards, staffs and shows of the survey respondents is actually below the percentage of whites in the overall US population and, in most categories, close to on-par or below Bay Area percentages.  On the discouraging hand, despite these great numbers, audience data indicates we’re still seeing an absolutely staggering lack of diversity all the same.

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

What strikes me about this table is how close the percentages are.  The pressure, when it exists, exists in companies where more of the board, staff and artists are white (generally).   Regardless, and with a caveat that further study is really, really necessary here, the diversity of the people making the art doesn’t seem to really get reflected out into the seats.

What Affects Whiteness?

So what does affect whiteness?  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.

(For the sake of this blog post’s legibility, I’m going to spare you the p-values, but all of these relationships were determined to be statistically significant.  It’s also important to note here that correlation and causation aren’t the same thing—we can’t say that more differently-aged people caused there to be more racial diversity—but what this basically means is that where one was high, the other was high, too.)

-          Racial/ethnic diversity was positively correlated with:

•  household income diversity
• age diversity
• marital status diversity

-          Racial/ethnic diversity varied in statistically significant ways based on:

•  the age of the company. The older a company was, the more racial diversity existed (though as you can see below, this difference was marginal at best—but still statistically significant).

• the size of the company’s annual budget. The larger the company was, the more racial diversity existed.

• the average ticket price. Very cheap and very expensive tickets yielded more racial diversity than in between.

So, What’s That All Mean?

Well, honestly, I’m not sure yet.  But what it provides, in a way, is a lot more specificity about where the meager amount of racial/ethnic diversity that does exist is coming from.  Company budget size is highly correlated with age, which basically means that the larger companies within this study, probably more by virtue of being more known and more “mainstreamed” to more people, demonstrate slightly more racial and ethnic than smaller companies.  While increased racial diversity correlating with marital status seems somewhat random to me (I need to think about that one more), the fact that it correlates both with age diversity (which, in this sample, is the same thing as saying “more young people”) and household income diversity (which, in this sample, is the same thing as saying “more less-wealthy people”) makes sense—we know that younger people generally are more diverse, and that both younger people and non-white people are generally less financially well-off.

It’s interesting to me that we only really see increased racial diversity among the very cheapest tickets, and then not again until the largest category.  It says that the idea of discounting may only work when you’re talking about a price that is untenable to a company of any real size.

Which is all to say, the goal of this report isn’t to necessarily provide all the solutions.  It’s to give people a hard, data-driven and statistically tested baseline from which to start a very complicated conversation.  I’m pleased that the blogosphere is carrying forward with it, and I hope very much that once the report is out there in the world, arts communities across the country will engage with it as well.

Last night, my husband, Seth, and I were curled up on the couch binge-watching Downton Abbey.  As it got later, I kept warning Seth that we wouldn’t be able to fully catch up before I had to go to sleep, and at the end of each episode, mimicking our daughter, he would look at me, eyes wide, poking one index finger into the other palm and saying “Mo!?” “Mo!?” in a perfect imitation of our daughter’s baby sign language.  It was cute and endearing, and I was laughing, simultaneously caught up in the joy of being both a husband and a father who loved and was loved.  As he twisted around, lifting his head from my lap and nearly falling off the couch, I felt sadness creeping up, my throat tightening, my eyes burning,  as I realized the absurdity of two grown men trying to lounge on our tiny couch and was reminded that the reason that was necessary is because the other couch was packed up in a pod and traveling across the country, along with most of my clothes and a bed. From that reminder the room felt so empty, unloaded of most of its books, and all of that stuff was traveling across the country not for us, but for me.

The amount of denial I am mostly functioning with–about what is about to happen to my life–only becomes evident in small moments: my husband squeezing my hand while we sleep, my daughter asking for me to give her a bath and read a story. It becomes harder to sustain, this denial of the change in front of me, as the days wind down, the number of baths and stories left can countable on two hands, and then on one, and boxes filling with stuff and the farewells starting.  In a week, I will move across the country and Seth and Cici will stay here. I will see them in person for perhaps two or three weeks worth of time in the next 5 months, brief weekend visits across the country late Friday night to a redeye that lands me back at work Monday morning.  In August, Seth, a marine biologist who was recently awarded a Fulbright fellowship, will use that fellowship to travel to Brazil for six months of research, my daughter relocated to me, and I will see him another three weeks in that time.  We will reunite in a year, in a new place, a year apart.  We are given successes, it seems, but never freely–incredible opportunities but not without sacrifice, and this is what our lives will be in the coming year.

The disruption of change is so hard; the comfort of the status quo is so easy.  The ache I feel, the panic, at the thought of being so far from my husband and child becomes most visceral in those moments when they are at their most lovable.

I punched Seth in the stomach once.  We had been cast opposite each other in a college production of the second part of Angels in America, he as Louis and me as Joe (a situation I don’t recommend), and we had to fight.  I was meant to open my fist, thwap him on the belly and he would double over, but I was bad at stage combat, barely trained, and I was an amateur actor, and there was all sorts of adrenaline coursing through my body, and one of the performances I full-on punched him.  The air I forced out of his belly, the sound he made, his eyes on stage so angry and hurt that I hadn’t been more careful caused me a panic I hadn’t really ever known.  At that moment, in a fraught college production of Perestroika, I figured I had just punched the love of my life out of my life.  And then I had to keep acting.

Seth didn’t leave, though; he forgave me, and he has stuck with me now for almost eleven years.  In that time, he has pivoted from being an actor and stage manager to getting an undergraduate degree in environmental science, a Ph.D. in marine biology, and now this Fulbright.  He is a tremendous success, and I am proud of him.  Like the best partners, he continues to find me interesting, and I him, and he continues to love me, and I him, and he inspires and cajoles me to do and be more than I might have thought I could be.  When I was considering the job I am now about to start at Americans for the Arts, and determined that it would be too disruptive to our family and too much of a burden placed on him, he did not hesitate in telling me that was a sweet but misguided attitude, and I’m glad he did.

To be so loved makes change both more difficult and more possible.

Seth saw, and helped me see, what change would mean.  He helped me understand that the status quo, like Achebe’s center, could not hold.  No matter how much I loved my job, felt blessed to have my job, felt I owed my job and colleagues, the limitations of finances and geography made what comes next the only option.  He encouraged me to take a long view, to understand that this moment of upheaval was just that, a moment, a small part of a long history, and that we would, if we could survive it, be all the better for it.

Seth studies the connections between stages of life–the migration of young larvae into a large and chaotic world and their re-settling into a new order for the sustainment of the whole.  I think about the fear of larvae sometimes–humanizing and trying to storify them as an artist married to a scientist–these relatively defenseless organisms out in a dark and unknown sea.  They were long thought to have no control–a valid assumption, give the proportions. But it isn’t true.  These little larvae, so impossibly small, can regulate all sorts of things.  They can move up and down in the water based on where food is, where heat is, which way the water is moving–they can avoid predators, and launch themselves into the deep sea, and hold in that safer growing ground until they are ready to come back in.  Their populations, spread up and down the California coast, are miniature cities connected by superhighways of tides and currents, all being ridden with intent and bravery by millions of tiny little  pioneers carrying forward.

I think of myself six years ago when I started at Theatre Bay Area.  I think about how little I knew, and how little I understood of what my plan was.  From that home base I have been given the opportunity to carry forth into a national conversation that has opened my eyes so widely, to become a voice in a conversation I would never have imagined was happening.  I am forever grateful, and today, as I sit down at a farewell lunch, I will be sad to go.

On the homefront, I will take the next week to pack up suitcases and snuggle with my daughter, who is so young that she is relatively oblivious to what is happening, and for that I am grateful.  I will plan with my husband, each of us periodically incredulous that such craziness is about to happen, and curl with him at night on our one couch, and try to forget the number of hours ticking down.  And when the moment comes where the change must happen, I will cry and be fearful, but also know the weight behind me, the opportunity ahead of me, and the great surmountability of the distance between my body and my hearts.

To my husband, Seth, who so rarely gets his due in these writings.  I love you.

The Bank of Canada recently released a new $100 bill as part of an overhaul of their currency.

Per this article:

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.

When The Canadian Press broke the story about the erasure last August, spokesman Jeremy Harrison said the Bank of Canada was striving for ‘neutral ethnicity’ in its depictions of people on bank notes.

Harrison referred to ‘the Bank’s 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.’

Is it truly possible to “avoid depicting any particular ethnic group?”

In July 2011, I wrote a post on how we make meaning in the world through experiencing art which I later refined into this section from my essay “Sowing New Beans” that appeared in Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art:

Noam Chomsky, a linguist and political theorist now known more for the second appellation than the first, outlined a concept in the late 1960’s that he called “universal grammar.” He was investigating how languages are created and acquired, and he settled on this idea that all of us, from the moment we’re 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.

I often think of art in this way—as the manifestation of something fundamental and internal, built from blocks we all carry with us even if we don’t know it.  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.

I’m having trouble with the idea that art is universal lately.

The goal of the Bank of Canada, as evidenced by the spokesman’s statement, was to move from depicting a singular ethnicity to depicting something larger—in other words, to move from an attitude of multiculturalism (the celebration of difference) to an attitude of universalism (the celebration of our commonality).  All of this in an effort to celebrate Canada as a diverse, open and tolerant society.  They had to decide whether to celebrate the inclusive homogeneity of the “all” or the multivariate heterogeneity of the “everyone,” and they chose the former.

“Universalism” 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.  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—which is to say the deracination of an Asian scientist into something that looks suspiciously like a white scientist.  And yet, we are all so very similar when you look at the science.

In her essay “Relations,” Eula Biss writes:

“When 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.  The precise sameness of these dolls…convinced me that they were, like us, sisters.

“There is no biological basis for what we call race…Race is a social function.  But it is also, for now at least, a social fact.  We may be remarkably genetically similar, but we are not all, culturally speaking, the same…”

She goes on to quote Albert Murray, who called American culture “incontestably mulatto,” and then tells a story of a segregated restaurant in the South where “a sign on one side of the room advertised ‘Home Cooking’ and a sign on the other side advertised ‘Soul Food’ and the customers on both sides were eating the same biscuits and gravy.”

“For all their traditional antagonisms and obvious differences,” she quotes Murray, “the 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.”

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

To make the value judgment that the current picture of theater attendance is ‘wrong’ inadvertently calls into question, I fear, the validity of the existing aesthetic choices and preferences of people of color…I worry that strong funder incentives to racially diversify audiences inadvertently encourages institutions to value people of color for their skin rather than for what’s underneath, and to reinforce visible markers of diversity…In 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—on white people’s terms.

I fear Ian is being more cynical here than he may have need to be.  Wouldn’t it follow that encouraging institutions to value people of color “for their skin” (though I think that’s entirely too simplified) requires those institutions to also value what those people, you know, want to see.  I’m not, for example, advocating herding people unwillingly into a room and forcing them to watch Tartuffe.  If they don’t want what’s on offer, then they won’t come, right?  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.  Currently, I would argue, we spend almost no time functionally thinking about diversification—we instead simultaneously assume (1) our work is universal and (2) they just don’t know it.  In that mode, I’d suggest that getting people to think about it, even for so functional a reason as continued relevance and sustainability (i.e. “my organization doesn’t die”) is perfectly acceptable as an outcome, and ultimately does encourage shifts in work.  If we start from zero, and step one is utilitarian, then ultimately mightn’t we get to someplace that is more inclusive and truly universal?  Like the old therapy of smiling until you feel happy, relying on muscle memory to jumpstart the emotion.  This sounds, perhaps, sort of tawdry, but we must start in order to get anywhere.

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.  True universalism, interestingly, seems to cycle through its seeming opposite–multiculturalism–recognizing our commonality by first recognizing our difference.  In his essay “Reflections on Art, Culture and Universalism,” Eugene Kamenka puts it this way:

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.  They broaden our knowledge, our sensitivity, our imagination.  They help to make us better people…The 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—more than one ‘culture.’  This assumes that behind the ‘cultures’ of the anthropologist, there lies a universal culture.

In America today, we like to recognize difference, for better or worse.  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—gays and mostly-Hispanic immigrants.  Republicans, wandering through the last election cycle with blinders on, used fearmongering largely based on the “otherness” of people who weren’t 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’t so much a good idea now.  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.  At least that’s what we like to believe.  When our government talks about diversity now, it talks about accommodating the differences among peoples, not about assimilating those peoples into one common America.

The reality, of course, isn’t as tidy or true as that.  This is especially the case in our cultural institutions, where the idea of universalism has had, for a long, long time, a strong foothold.  We present the individual story on stage as artifice in order to talk about the universal story.  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’t been a hugely addressed issue.  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.  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’re stuck with a broken bone that we’ve been damaging more by believing it was all fine.

We have not been truly seeking universalism–the universal truth for all–anymore than we have been truly seeking multiculturalism.  What might have once been telling the truth of our world has somehow turned into something less than that.  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.

I think about this story sometimes, which Tina sobbingly told me some time in high school, as I watch my daughter, whose birthfather is black, interact with the world of her two white dads.  We did not expect Cici to be half-black; the picture we saw of her supposed birthfather was of a large and woodsy-looking Irishman, flaming red hair and beard, green eyes, skin like paper.  When Cici came out, she was all red from the birth and then yellow from jaundice, a mop of black hair and flattened nose the only indications of what would eventually be revealed to be the truth, and for a while Seth and I, exhausted and overwhelmed from the experience of becoming new fathers, chose to believe Cici’s birthmother’s explanations that Cici had apparently just picked up a strain of Black Irish genes from the far side of her family.  Cici’s eyes, then, were blue, and Jake Gyllenhaal kept floating behind my eyelids, so I let it be believed.

This all seems so silly now, both our denial of the reality and what I now see as an anxiety that she might not just be white.  As I watch her play, so beautiful, her curly hair a perfect synergy of her races, her skin like caramel, her nose still centered on her face but now far from being the only thing that might show her mixed heritage, I very rarely notice the differences except in moments when I am thinking about how to care for them.  We have carried forward over the past two years, stumbling and bumbling as she has become a young toddler with more cognizance of her world, to ensure that it is not as white as we discovered it to be when we looked through her eyes.

What I have learned is that I didn’t know how monocultural my world was.  I apologize to any readers of this who aren’t, you know, white and male, who find this particular revelation laughable–I get how obvious it may be, even as I hope you understand how surprising it was.  This monoculture, of course, holds no malice–it is simply the manifestation of a particular gravity that Seth and I now find ourselves pulling against clumsily, cultivating in Cici a love for Princess Tiana, integrating books with multicultural heroines into her overflowing shelves, preparing ourselves to think about what it will mean for Cici to become aware of her blackness in our household.

I am a WASP to my core, always searching for placidity, always folding up blankets and putting back toys at night, always fighting against entropy.  The indelicate intentionality of our efforts at diversification, the blunt-force nature of it, the fake-it-till-you-make-it-ness of it, pushes against my natural impulses. It feels obvious and pandering and clumsy, but we do it because that’s how we learn to walk, clumsily.

In his essay “Notes from a Native Son,” James Baldwin talks about discovering “the weight of white people in the world.”  I don’t think I really understood that quote–that whole essay, really–until we got Cici.  The pervasive weight of our views was not apparent to me until we were required to pull against them, the inertia that such weight engenders unclear until we attempted to change direction.  We carry forward in a mighty, invisible tide, so cozy as to only be apparent when you try to turn to shore.

It is at this same moment that the arts find themselves now.

“Should an arts organization that finds itself located in a more diverse community be expected to serve a more diverse audience?”  I asked that question yesterday on Facebook and Twitter, where it started some very interesting conversations.  Three times it was called overly simplistic or disingenuous.  It was not meant to be, but I take the point.  When pressed on the nature of the question and why it was problematic, those I was corresponding with stretched back to questions of mission, of the particular idiosyncratic nature of each organization, and of the danger of proscriptions like what I was proposing without taking into account the particulars.  I take that point, too.

But I asked the question because, as I continue to evaluate data for this forthcoming paper on the diversity of Bay Area theatre, I have been struck strongly by the homogeneity of the cohort, particularly when it comes to race.  It should be said that among the 25 companies I am looking at there are no truly culturally-specific theatres (because they had insufficient information in the various data banks from which I pulled to take part), but it should also be said that these companies do represent a strong cross-section of the type of work, structures, and sizes that make up the majority of the nonprofit theatre system.  They have differing missions, they exist in differing places, they do demonstrably different work, and yet when you graph their race/ethnicity diversity indices against the average US Census populations of the counties in which they perform, this is what you see (click for larger image):

In this graph, the green diamonds are the average diversity index scores for the theatre companies in the study who perform in that county.  The scores have been normalized, with maximum diversity sitting at 0 and maximum homogeneity sitting at 1.  The green bars behind the diamonds show the spread–the maximum and minimum index scores achieved by any organization in the cohort.  The red squares, down towards the bottom, which is to say in an area that indicates markedly more diversity than the green things, are the diversity indices for the counties using data drawn from the US Census.

There is basically no difference in the level of diversity among the theatres’ audiences across counties at all, even in the counties where the actual total populations are majority-minority.  More than that, in all counties even the best diversity score is still far from the county’s general population.  On average, these twenty-five companies have audiences that are over 80% white in one of the most diverse regions in the country.

As one marketing director at a company in this study said to me, “Why is it useful to tell us what we already know? Do you think we don’t know we aren’t diverse?”

No, that’s not what I think.  I think we know we serve a whole lot of white people, just like we know we serve a whole lot of older people, a whole lot of very educated people, a whole lot of wealthy people.

Last week, I wrote about “valuing” versus “managing” diversity.  This is a perfect example.  When I asked that question about whether companies in more diverse areas should be expected to have more diversity in their audiences, the answer was almost universally, “Yes.”  We value diversity almost universally.

We get it, abstractly, the same way I understood that, as ambivalent about race as I was, as liberal as I was, I still wasn’t really ever around people who weren’t white, and that that might not be the best.  But it is not enough to simply understand the existence of disparity, we have to be willing to actually do something.  We have to understand the reasons why we can say “Yes” to my question and yet still make no functional movement forward on changing that.

The inertia of whiteness is strong and pervasive, which makes the problem relatively easy to identify and very difficult to consider tackling.  The monoliths that are our older, white, wealthy subscribers, many of which directly prop up our organizations and without which we would horribly destabilize, make thinking about the people on the other side of that monolith difficult.  The conscious effort required to attempt diversification, just like the conscious effort required to think about searching out new black friends with kids–a prospect which feels artificial and utilitarian, and which requires me to confront the laziness of my white reality–is tiring, even moreso for the fact that the benefits, if there are any, won’t be reaped for a decade or more while the discomfort begins as soon a you take the first step.

I get all of that.  But let me suggest that we start here: when I ask the question ”Should an arts organization that finds itself located in a more diverse community be expected to serve a more diverse audience?” do not immediately push back on me with a discussion of mission.  Do not immediately pull out culturally-specific arts organizations and how it would be unfair to ask them to dilute their missions.  Not to be indelicate, but do not suddenly be concerned for the welfare of the few organizations in our ecosystem that are functionally trying to get the art we love to people other than us, and that are given less attention (undeservedly) in almost all circumstances than their mainstream (white-serving) counterparts.

A mission is a driving principle, not a shield.  Unless your mission is “we make art for white, old, rich people,” that pain you’re feeling at the thought of diversification isn’t mission-based, it’s bottom line based.  A mission should not allow a company to opt out of serving a wide array of people unless the mission is to only serve a narrow range of people–which is, to point it out, decidedly not the mission of any of the twenty-five organizations in the study.

The art we make is local.  It is place-based, which means it is community-based, whether we want it to be or not.  As Catherine Michna points out in her wonderful essay on avoiding gentrifying art, bussing a bunch of white people into the Ninth Ward is not the same thing as serving the people of the Ninth Ward.  Fundamentally, a graph like the one above, where our theatre culture is just a large white smear across a canvas of many different varying shades of beige, is wrong, and is exactly reflective of the endemic problems of our field.

We are now, I would argue, past the time of “not my problem.”  We will have an easier time changing direction if we all put our backs in to it, don’t you think?

Last week, I was at a mini-conference hosted by the Duke Foundation (and curated by the good folks at EMCArts) that was in part designed to get at the sticking points around sustainable innovation inside arts organizations.  There were a lot of takeaways, but one that I think was tremendously valuable was this comparison between the for-profit and non-profit sectors in terms of innovation (and here, let’s say that diversity, as old a concept as it is, carries many of the same disruptive possibilities as any other innovation—which is to say, change).

In a for-profit organization, innovations are incubated for years, tested and retested, and then set loose in a beta environment where they are expected to have issues, need continued subsidy, and perfected.  Even after they go through beta, they often are given “runway” space—a few years floating on general operating funds before they clear a profit and/or have demonstrable positive outcomes.

In non-profits, of course, that runway is truncated almost to nonexistence.  We must, by virtue of working so close to the bone financially, have relatively quick assurances of (1) positive outcome and, more importantly, (2) little or no negative outcome in order for something to be worth it and to become integrated long-term in the organization.

Foundations often use their funds to drive change without (and I say this without judgment, really, knowing the higher financial outlay this would require) providing the runway for long-term integration of that change.  Funding priorities change with relative frequency, leaving organizations with vestigial programs built off of no-longer-existing funding and conflicting priorities—and that’s just when it something that doesn’t necessarily harm the core business (like, say, educational programming).  Diversity is bigger than that—it requires more care, more time, and the very real possibility that bringing on one group means off-boarding another group.  When it comes down to it, diversification isn’t, I don’t think, about convincing people of the good of doing it—it’s about allowing them the room and security to try without the fear that such effort might destabilize the organization.

In 1999, two researchers published an article in the Journal of Sports Management called “Managing Cultural Diversity in Sport Organizations: A Theoretical Perspective.”  The two researchers, Alison Doherty and Packianathan Chelladurai, use the frame of sports to actually take on some very fundamental questions about what diversification can do (positively and negatively) in workplaces in general.

The Positive and Negative of Diversification

Doherty and Chelladurai draw on a whole lot of extant research into the effects of diversification in the workplace.  In the positive, they note:

“In comparison to homogeneous groups, racially and ethnically diverse groups make more cooperative choices, are more creative, and produce higher quality ideas when faced with a brainstorming task…In addition, although racially and ethnically diverse groups were less effective than homogeneous groups at the outset of a complex problem-solving task, they eventually interacted as effectively and performed better with regard to the range of perspectives and alternatives offered.  Shaw (1981) reported similar findings from a review of research on gender-mixed groups…As work groups become more tolerant of different points of view, their organizations become more open to new ideas in general and generate more and better ideas.” (284)

On the negative side:

“The organization is at risk of increased ambiguity, complexity, and confusion caused by different perceptions and miscommunications resulting from cultural diversity…Diversity in age was negatively associated with frequency of communication…[and] individuals in the racial and ethnic minority experience more stress in an organization and are less satisfied with their careers than their nonminority counterparts…Research indicates that group diversity in age, race or gender is associated with reduced commitment, increased absenteeism, and increased turnover for all members.” (285)

Perhaps not surprisingly, most of the benefits of staff diversification are long-term, whereas most of the downsides are short-term.  As humans, generally, we yearn for what the article calls “parsimony, consistency and meaning” (286)—things which are disrupted, at least temporarily, by diversification.

Cultures of Similarity and Diversity

The article posits that this tension between the short-term issues and long-term benefits of diversity place the success or failure of such efforts squarely in the hands of the management at the organization.  The authors posit two dichotomous organizational cultures, an “organizational culture of diversity” and an “organizational culture of similarity,” laying them out as a set of competing values and assumptions (the most germane of which are sampled here):

Overlaying the “typical” arts institution (perhaps giving the caveat of “of a certain size and stability”) with these values and assumptions, the comparison, at least to me, is unfavorable.  Is that institution relatively rigid in structure, or relatively flexible?  Is that organization inclined to (and/or in a financial position to) accept risk, or is it more likely to avoid risk where possible?  Ditto staff-level conflict: is conflict accepted as part of the process, or avoided where possible?  Finally, does that organization generally find itself oriented towards the present or near-future, or more towards long-term trends and needs?

Valuing vs. Managing Diversity

The authors go on to discuss another extremely valuable distinction having to do with diversity, which they set up as the difference between “valuing diversity” and “managing diversity.”  Valuing diversity is what you might expect—caring that diversity exists.  The authors describe it as “an attitudinal construct encompassing a mind-set of openness to diversity among people.”  As (mostly liberal, mostly open-minded) artists, it seems fair to say that we most likely to “value diversity.”  Where the distinction comes is in this concept of “managing diversity,” which is “a behavioral construct encompassing actual strategies that a group or organization can undertake to capitalize on the diversity of its members.” (289).  Which is to say, not just caring about the idea of diversity, but setting up structures and systems that allow for diversity and the various types of disruption it can create.

The Tension between Stability and Change

I think this article confirms something that I’ve been trying to sort out for a while, which is that:

1)      We can both value diversity and resist it at the same time within our organizations, and that resistance can be entirely subconscious.

2)      In the end, that resistance often emerges as a need to avoid potentially damaging short-term disruptions in the face of more abstracted long-term gain.  (See also: fear of losing subscribers)

This article also forces me to reflect on the strange relationship that arts organizations have to various groups to which they are beholden, that perhaps reinforce the more myopic and present-facing view that may stand in the way of diversification.  I’ve already touched briefly on this fear of losing those most loyal patrons—a fear which, rational or not, is not something to be taken lightly.  But the other area where this can emerge, I think, is when we think about the foundation-organization relationship.  I think that foundations are driving a lot of the movement in terms of diversity—interestingly on both sides.

I do not think that (most) arts organizations maintain cultures of similarity out of an innate desire to hold back diversification.  Instead, I think that the leaders of those organizations either consciously or subconsciously understand the ramifications of moving from “valuing diversity” to “managing diversity,” and that those ramifications are scary, even up against the possibility of losing funding for particular initiatives.

Dougherty and Chelladurai end their article discussing “environmental pressures,” to which, among many other things, I would put foundation funding.  They say:

“Environmental pressures can also provoke the transformation of organizational culture as members are forced to adapt to external changes…It might be expected that these environmental forces will challenge how diversity is managed in the organization…[but] organizational culture is not quickly or easily manipulated and changed.  Just as individuals do not easily give up the elements of their identity…so groups do not easily give up some of their basic underlying assumptions simply because they have been challenged. (293)

To this I would add, “especially when the challenge is to something so fundamental, and the assumptions, wrong or right, have been carrying the organization for decades.”