More on Issues of Whiteness and Diversity...

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.