Participation in the Arts by Black and White Americans

Survney data are used to explore differences between black and white participation in EuroAmnerican antd Afro-American art. Most black/white differences in Euro-American highculture participation reflect educational inequality; butt even with controls, black Americans participate at somewhnat lower rates than whites. Differences are greatest for public consuimption, smaller for private consumption and arts production. Blacks participate substaintially more thla whlites in historically Afio-American art forms. Two competing explanations, a convzterCgenice theony positing acculturation and black/whtite convergence, and a resistance mnodel predficting greater differences with increased economnic competition, are as.;essed. The evidenice suiggests middle-class convergence with regard to Euro-American, anid undiminished distinctiveness with regard to Afro-American art forms, reflecting the need of upwardly mobile minorities to maintain credible membership claims in both domziianat and mini1tority cultures. Despite the volume of research on black social participation in the United States, remarkably little attention has been paid to a symbolically important form of behavior, participation in the arts. What little research exists has been largely atheoretical and inconclusive. We fill this gap by analyzing the behavior and tastes of blacks and whites with respect to several kinds of consumption and avocational production of traditionally Euro-American and historically black art forms. Although Park (1950) and others believed that black Americans would "acculturate" as racial barriers to socioeconomic equality diminished, scholars have rarely tested this prediction with data on specific cultural phenomena. Contributors to the large, contentious literature on social participation have likewise stinted discussion of cultural participation and have curiously assumed, without evidence, that black survey respondents' reports of associational activity indicate participation in specifically black associations (Cohen & Kapsis 1978; Guterbock & London 1983; McPherson 1978; Olsen 1970; Orum 1966). By contrast, we focus on artistic activity as symbolic participation in distinct status cultures (Gans 1979) and distinguish between participation in and tastes for activities and art forms that are predominantly white as compared to those that are traditionally black. *This article is a revision of a paper prepared for the 1987 Conference on Social Theory, Politics and the Arts, State University of New York at Albany. Research support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Research Division is gratefully acknowledged. We are indebted to Susan Olzak, Richard Peterson, John Stanfield, and Blair Wheaton for valuable criticism and suggestions. The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors alone. Direct correspondence to Paul DiMaggio, Sociology Department, Yale University, 140 Prospect St. (1965 Yale Station), New Haven, CT 06520. i The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 1990, 68(3):753-778 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.102 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 04:19:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 754 / Social Forces 68:3, March 1990 Analysis of black/white differences in artistic participation also provides an opportunity to explore the applicability of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "cultural capital," developed in research on France, to a more fragmented and culturally heterogeneous society (1984; DiMaggio & Useem 1978). Following Bourdieu, we regard participation in the high-culture arts as a form of investment in "cultural capital." It is an open question, however, as to how universally the dominant form of cultural capital is valued and used in strategies of mobility in the U.S. For black Americans, who have experienced unique exclusion from mainstream institutions, to display distributions of involvement in high culture by socioeconomic status similar to those of whites would represent powerful evidence for the hegemony of a single cultural standard. We use data from the 1982 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA), first, to document black and white patterns of arts participation and, second, to evaluate two competing explanations of the patterns we find. Blacks as Arts Consumers in the U.S. American high-culture arts organizations emerged in the late nineteenth century anid were institutionalized, along with standards of taste confirming the prestige of the works they presented, by the 1920s (DiMaggio 1982a; forthcoming). Black Americans were excluded from these institutions both indirectly, by virtue of educational discrimination and exclusion from white middle-class circles of art appreciators, and directly. The Houston Museum of Fine Arts, which admitted black visitors only one evening per week during the thirties (Coleman 1939), may have done better than most: the author of a study of museum attendance felt justified in removing blacks without comment from the population base of southem cities before calculating rates of visitation (Rea 1932). Racial exclusion, tacit or open, also characterized the policies of most northem arts institutions, such as the Harlem Opera House, which was closed to blacks until after the first world war ("Harlem Opera House" 1987). Black artists were barred from white companies, and "Unless Negro students and teachers will accept segregation in the 'peanut gallery,' they have no chance to hear the best white artists on the stage" (Woodson 1934:271). Opportunities for blacks to participate in high-culture arts audiences increased slightly in the 1930s, but such audiences were still usually segregated. For example, the Federal Theatre sponsored many black companies (Flanagan 1985 [1940]; McDonald 1969), and the Carnegie Corporation supported visual-art exhibits that toured black colleges (Coleman 1939). Despite remarkable achievements by black artists in the face of harsh discrimination (Cruse 1967; Cureau 1977; Marable 1983), racial exclusion at public performances and exhibitions did not fully abate until the 1960s. Expansion of opportunity for blacks to attend high-culture events reflected social change and increasing openness of nonprofit arts institutions and commercial media to black artists and genres. Higher rates of schooling, especially college attendance, exposed many black Americans to socializing experiences similar to those encountered by middle-class whites. The Civil Rights Movement helped erode segregation in places of public entertainment and, especially in its Black Power phase, enhanced the engagement of many blacks with noncommercial cultural forms. Limited admission of black artists and styles into the pop music mainstream increased white acceptance of traditionally black genres (Gillett 1970). The 1960s also marked a transformation in the resource base of such cultural institutions as orchestras, art museums, opera companies, and resident theatres. Whereas they had previously depended on the largesse of wealthy patrons, who had little reason to seek audience expansion to excluded groups, by 1970 the emergence of philanthropic foundations and government as patrons of This content downloaded from 157.55.39.102 on Mon, 03 Oct 2016 04:19:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Art Participation by Blacks & Whites / 755 the arts inspired widespread rhetorical commitment and, at times, concrete programming to expand minority audiences for high culture (American Association of Museums 1972; Hart 1973). Moreover, a traditionally Afro-American art form, jazz, was annexed to the realm of high culture, with a place in university music curricula and its own program in the federal arts agency (Peterson 1972). The elimination of crude forms of racial exclusion from audiences and the diminution during the 1970s of geographic inequality in access to the arts made it easier for black Americans who wanted to consume the high-culture arts to do