ACHIEVING CULTURAL EQUITY THROUGH CRITICAL ANALYSIS
By Jamie Haft
Introduction
In June 2007, I joined Voices from the Cultural Battlefront: Organizing for Equity, the
twenty-year international conversation about the role of art and culture in the struggle for
social justice, human rights, and a sustainable natural environment. I was twenty-two
years old and had just graduated from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts,
where I studied theater for social justice. At arts school, I was encouraged to abandon my
heritage in order to become more marketable, so, consequently, my post-graduation plan
was to delve deeply into my own culture. Upon serendipitously meeting up with Voices
participants, I was immediately struck by the way they brought a consciousness of
heritage and identity to their art making and justice-seeking.
Voices had just been re-convened after a four-year hiatus by two of its leaders, Dr. Marta
Moreno Vega (Caribbean Cultural Center) and Dudley Cocke (Roadside Theater/
Appalshop). The occasion was the thirtieth anniversary of the Caribbean Cultural Center
African Diaspora Institute, which chose to celebrate not only its own longevity but also
that of other cultural institutions founded by leaders who began their activist work during
the civil rights movement. As Vega declared, “It’s time to reunite the family,” which
included veterans Kalamu ya Salaam, Dr. Sonia BasSheva Manjon, Dr. Bernice Johnson
Reagon, Dr. Amalia Mesa-Bains, Tonya Gonnella Frichner, Peter Pennekamp, Caron
Atlas, Olga Garay, and Dr. Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen. As articulated by Vega, the
questions informing the June 2007 conference at my alma mater were: What do culturally
grounded organizations that have reached their thirtieth anniversary have to celebrate?
How can their work be sustained?
New York University Professor Jack Tchen opened the June anniversary conference with
his commissioned paper, “30 Years and Counting: A Context for Building a Shared
Cross-Cultural Commons.” Tchen examined the culture wars from 1980 to the present
through the lens of “hypercapitalism,” or what also has been called “neoliberalism.” He
argued:
This dramatic move to privatize all and subject all rewards to the marketplace is a
return to “the survival of the fittest” ideology of elites. ... Such a false system of
survival “merit" serves to promote massive individual alienation and social
fragmentation. It destroys what we have left of a public commons — a shared,
inclusive space not privileging private wealth and power over basic human rights and
values.
There was consensus among conference participants that the Reagan administration's
policy of trickle-down economics and the cultural wars that it incited inaugurated the
present era of economic and cultural hardship for arts organizations serving poor and
working and middle class communities where the majority of Americans lived. In the
conference’s ensuing two-days, a recurring theme was that the art and social justice
movement had lost its critical discourse, both internally and in relationship to the broader
arts and culture sector.
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To begin addressing this loss, Voices leaders decided to launch a national dialogue
project using Tchen’s analysis as the lens to focus discussion and spark critical reflection.
As of April 2009, Voices has hosted five such forums: in New Orleans, LA, on December
6-7, 2007, as part of the National Performance Network’s national conference; April 4-5,
2008, in Amherst, MA, at New WORLD Theater’s Intersection conference; August 5-10,
2008 in Arden, NC, as part of the Alternate ROOTS 32nd Annual Meeting; in Los
Angeles, CA, October 1-2, 2008, during the Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in
Public Life national conference; and in Memphis, TN on February 21, 2009 at Folk
Alliance International Conference.
The Forums
In the early 1990s, the Voices conversations were infused with the prospect of cultural
democracy, as there was still sufficient energy in the art and social justice movement
created by the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, women’s movement, and
movement for the rights of gay and lesbians. In 1993, the seminal publication of Voices
leaders, Voices from the Battlefront: Achieving Cultural Equity (Africa World Press),
boldly posited that just as W.E.B. Dubois correctly predicted the color line would be a
defining issue of the 20th century, the struggle for cultural equity would be a defining
issue of the 21st century. Not long after the book’s publication, the coalition’s momentum
succumbed to twelve years of relentless right wing attack that employed a strategy of
divide and conquer, encoded in the culture war, to derail the democratization of art and
culture.
The purpose of the Voices forums was to restart the critical discourse around three themes
necessary for recovery of national momentum: knowledge production in service to the
principle of cultural equity; enhanced accountability among art and social justice
organizations and their leaders; and the call to inspire a new generation to lead the
movement.
The forums were iterative and intentional about learning. Each began by clarifying terms.
Culture was defined as the distinctive spiritual, intellectual, emotional, and material
traditions and features of a people, and equitable as meaning fair and just. As a matter of
principle, then, all cultures had the inherent right to develop, expecting fair and just
treatment in relationship to all other cultures. Then, drawing on Tchen’s analysis, forum
facilitators asked participants to consider the proposition that there now exists a form of
hyper-capitalism that puts the demands of the free market before a people’s spiritual,
intellectual, and emotional well-being. Borrowing Karl Polyani’s analysis in his 1944
book, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of our Time,
facilitators postulated that when any society, whether pre-industrial, industrial, or postindustrial, embeds itself in economy, rather than the economy being embedded in the
society, social decay ensues. Was unregulated “free-market” capitalism, which puts profit
before people, destroying communities globally?
Following the definition of terms and presentation of the economic analysis, facilitators
called upon forum participants to reflect on their individual experience by asking: How is
hyper-capitalism affecting you, your organization, and your community? The responses
were shared in a circle, insuring everyone had the opportunity to participate:
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When I arrived in Nashville in 1987, it was a relatively innocent place. Country music
was not for making profit. During the recent presidential campaign, Sarah Palin used
one of my songs, “Independence Day,” completely ignoring its context of domestic
abuse. I had no legal recourse, so I donated the song royalties during the election
cycle to Planned Parenthood. As a consequence, I got a lot of hate mail that said,
“Country music is conservative, you just lost a lot of fans, and you’re going to pay.”
Worst of all, in my community of artists, Music Row, no one publicly supported me.
I see hyper-capitalism when a university degree becomes a commodity, and when I
and my generation become tied to the global financial system because we’re all $200
grand in debt. If the gateway to becoming an artist is through a hugely expensive
degree, who gets to be an artist anyway?
The most shocking thing is, we’ll play in a high school in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and
we’ll bring in our folk instruments and we’ll hold up a banjo and ask, “What’s this?”
Literally only one student will know.
I’ve got two about hyper-capitalism. One out of every five Black men will be killed in
the next year by a black man. Right now, Black women are the group that’s at the
highest risk for HIV in America and the world.
Hyper-capitalism: Two percent of the cultural institutions in Dallas get 80% of the
arts funding, and that’s only 2% of the budget of the city anyway.
My husband and I were family farmers in Minnesota, and we washed out in the mid80s, when family farmers went down the tubes. We auctioned off our livelihoods and
started over in Nashville because of a love of music. We started a house concert
series. We have pot luck. We have community. Last year at this conference, we went to
a panel on house concerts. They were talking about revenue and mailing lists and
sound systems. They said you had to be careful because you’d be bombarded with
artists bothering you all the time. We didn’t belong there.
This Voices Forum is the first time in the past four days of this conference that there
has been a conversation in a circle – and all the sessions on justice issues have been
placed in conflict during this same afternoon slot!
The purpose of these more than two hundred personal reflections was to test the Voices
analysis against individual experience and then for each group to further develop the
economic hypothesis based on their collective knowledge. This design was based on
theories of change articulated by Voices leaders. Dudley Cocke:
Effective cultural organizing for social justice begins small, with the individual. First,
one discovers his or her own truth of an issue, and then tests and develops that truth in
dialogue with others. When this individual and collective learning process is
multiplied, a national movement for reform develops and changes society. Such a
movement can only be sustained when this grassroots process of individual and
collective learning continues to inspire awareness and shape the actions. This theory
of change emphasizes that those who directly experience a problem must make up the
generative base for devising and enacting the problem’s solution.
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Implicating oneself in the problem is integral to this dialogic process. At the Voices
forum in New Orleans, when one participant spoke of her complicity in hyper-capitalism,
one of the Voices facilitator’s, Kalamu ya Salaam, asked, “If you were working in the
kitchen in the Big House, how would you define slavery?” He continued, “The question
is not whether you have privilege; the question is what you are doing with that privilege.
We didn’t ask to be born in whatever situation we were, but we can choose what we do
with the resources that are available to us. I’m not saying you should go spit in the
master’s face and give up your job. But if you’ve been working in the kitchen and it’s
been three months since you threw some food out the window, there’s something wrong.”
In the ensuing conversation, the stories of many participants suggested there was a
significant lack of ethics and personal accountability among many of the organizers and
organizations working at the intersection of art, culture, and social justice. The reason
identified was the collapse of the movement’s critical discourse.
In planning each of the Voices national conversations, one constant challenge was getting
agreement to shift from a passive conference format to an organizing action format.
Typically, it was suggested the event be formatted into a panel of experts. In the spirit of
ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, who coined the phrase cultural equity in his 1977
Journal of Communication essay, “An Appeal for Cultural Equity,” and whose
groundbreaking work stood for the inherent genius of every cultural community, every
person in a Voices forum was expected to fully participate. The Voices format
emphasized that all the knowledge needed to take the first action steps was in the room.
Participation of young people and community members was of paramount importance to
the forum methodology. As the founders of cultural arts organizations surpass thirty years
of service, the next generation will need to lead the charge, bringing 21st century realities
to the forefront. There was a call not to dilute the analysis for the sake of young activists
or community members. For example, when planning one of the forums, there was an
initial resistance among some of the local leaders to using the economic analysis,
believing their constituencies wouldn’t understand how the heady analysis related to the
immediate issues facing them. As the participants’ subsequent stories about negative
stereotypes in the media, gang violence, injustices in the prison system, and the need for
immigration reform illustrated, they were quick to see how their issues were impacted by
hyper-capitalism.
Initiating actions to advance cultural equity in participants’ home communities was an
important focus in all of the forums. The idea was that a series of local actions would
become the basis for a national movement, and that a renewed and vital national critical
discourse would fuel and support these local efforts. To date, the most developed local
action is Dr. Marta Moreno Vega’s Cultural Equity Group (CEG). After the June 2007
conference, Dr. Vega, equipped with the Voices economic analysis, began arguing
publicly that the Department of Cultural Affairs’ new funding structures weren’t
responsive to communities of color. “It’s a class issue as much as anything else,” she
said, “because most of the institutions in our communities don’t have access to wealth.”
Vega began organizing a coalition of cultural organizations and artists in New York City
(including Association of Hispanic Arts, Bronx Council on the Arts, Harlem Arts
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Alliance, Children’s Art Carnival, Asian American Arts Centre, Museum of
Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, among others) to advocate for the equitable
distribution of funds and other resources to under-resourced and under-served emerging
and mid-sized organizations grounded in the culture and arts of their communities. The
objective of CEG was to stabilize its field, providing necessary technical assistance and
program management resources to assure the growth of its member organizations.
It wasn’t long after getting organized and going public (among other media, The New
York Times published a CEG story on July 24th, 2008) that coalition members began
getting push-back from New York City officials and funders, including thinly veiled
threats to rescind their funding. Under this pressure, several organizations dropped out of
the coalition. Given how veteran activists hold that you’re not engaged in the struggle
until meeting resistance, Vega proposed a national intervention: offer training for young
arts activists to prepare them for their confrontation with power. The experience of CEG
was making it clear that a proliferation of local actions advancing cultural equity would
require an earnest national discourse.
Moving Forward
The 2007 – 2009 round of national forums helped clarify present circumstances,
including the external forces and policies derailing the national and international
movement to achieve cultural equity as a fundamental human right. The forums also
revealed how these external forces and policies, which had delegitimized the cultural
democracy movement, had weakened and, in some cases, corrupted the movement’s
internal critical discourse upon which its goals of knowledge production, accountability,
and new leadership depended.
Especially given the recent trend among colleges and universities to develop art and
community engagement programs, Voices leaders thought it important to examine the
role of the academy in knowledge production related to issues of equity. Had higher
education become part of the system that was putting profit before people and before
community? Did the academy play a role in the movement’s loss of its critical discourse,
and what positive role could it play restoring the discourse? The September 2008
research report, “Culture and Community Development in Higher Education,” written by
Arlene Goldbard on behalf of a team of researchers and advisors (including Dudley
Cocke), highlighted some of the barriers obstructing college and university knowledge
production in service to cultural equity, including a fundamental uncertainty on the part
of the academy as to whether community knowledge should be respected and integrated
into academic programs. The report makes a series of recommendations with perhaps the
most important for the purpose of this essay being: “Community cultural development in
higher education should have an explicit goal of supporting and developing the field
beyond university walls.”
Several ideas for improving knowledge production have emerged from the forums and
the Voices leadership retreat in April 2009: 1) Organize higher education consortia to
advocate for cultural equity. 2) Ask colleges and universities to manage an interdisciplinary discourse linking economic, political, and cultural analysis as a way to
understand the cultural history of the past thirty years and to describe a way to move
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forward. 3.) Develop a “university without walls” premised on a balance of community
engagement, training in artistic craft and organizing, and scholarship focused on the
history and animating ideas of cultural democracy and its relationship to broader social
policy.
The problem of accountability within the movement regularly surfaced in the forums.
Cocke stated in New Orleans:
I’ve been part of starting a handful of national organizations committed to cultural
equity and social justice, only to see the leaders and membership get distracted with
careerism and other personal agendas that were divergent from the organizations’
founding purposes. There are a lot of people who want the cream without committing
to the churning, and ethical issues can quickly ensue. Sustaining an ethos in which we
help each other stay accountable is a challenge for this field.
Vega stated in New York:
Some of us are working on issues of justice, equity, and freedom for our communities,
and some of us are just doing art, and there’s a difference. We need to clarify the
language that we use to define what it is we’re doing. I’ve never been about the art.
The art conversation has always limited our possibilities, especially given the
structures of funding. It’s never been about the art, because I always knew that there
were great artists in our communities. It has been about providing voice to the issues.
It was never the goal to have artists hanging at the Metropolitan, and it was never a
goal to develop institutions that were mini Mets, Black, Latina, or Asian Mets. That
was never our goal! But it was the goal for some.
As we are witnessing in the current financial collapse, lack of accountability can be less
then inspiring, adversely affecting the generational transition of leadership. Some of the
forums saw heated exchanges between younger and older participants. In New Orleans,
Caron Atlas delineated: “The veteran activists are concerned with sustaining their
organizations and sometimes have legacy issues; the younger activists often have a
general distrust of institutions.” Carlton Turner explained, “What about when an
organization needs to adapt to different needs? At some point, the institution has to fight
for its own survival, and not always in the best interest of the people it’s supposed to
serve.”
To empower the next generation of activist-artists, some of the young leaders in Voices
are focused on analyzing the movement’s recent history and progress in order to find a
strategic way forward. They are asking: What are the assets and deficits young activists
are inheriting from the movement? What strengths and weaknesses do young activists
bring? To ripen their analysis, they are proposing that a group of veteran social justice
and human rights leaders drawn from different fields and sectors be invited to share their
analysis, which then would be probed by the new leaders to formulate a forward-looking
plan of action.
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