Classism, Systemic Oppression, and the Arts: The gates are locked and the gatekeepers say they can’t find the keys
By: Anna Smith
Tags: Arts Education, Nonprofit, Dismantle White Supremacy, Arts Education Grants, Theatre

Classism, Systemic Oppression, and the Arts: The gates are locked and the gatekeepers say they can’t find the keys Anna Smith Sep 2·7 min read

The last 12 hours in the Bay Area theatre community have been a rollercoaster. Here are the bullet points:

All three of these issues intersect and all three affect me personally (albeit at differing levels). Let’s start with the one that I have the closest connection to:

For those who don’t know I founded and run an exceptionally small nonprofit organization called The Quinan Street Project that provides theatre arts education to public elementary schools in the West Contra Costa Unifed School District (WCCUSD): a racially diverse mid- and low-income community with a rich history. I founded this organization out of a necessity in my hometown school district for there to be more opportunities for children in my community to participate in the arts the way that I was able to because of my family’s financial and cultural capital. It didn’t seem like a super radical idea at the time, but as I began to lay the groundwork for the organization I was told the same thing over and over: “The only organizations that survive in West Contra Costa take money from Chevron (which I wasn’t willing to do) or are so established they have a massive foundation and reputation to lean on. You’ll never make it.” Thankfully I was 27 years old and full of sparkle in my eyes and hope in my heart.

However... they were right.

As I began the journey of tracking down funding for my organization (the original mission was to never charge schools a cent) the more I saw that foundations in the Bay Area either didn’t fund orgs in Contra Costa County, funded the arts and education but not “arts education,” or (my favorite one!) didn’t fund organizations with budgets smaller than $1,000,000.

EL OH EL HOW DO YOU START THEN!?!?!?

Actual footage of me looking for grants in 2013

Over the last 8 years we have built ourselves up and have received some semi-regular grant funds and developed relationships with donors, but the issue is still extremely present. Our annual budget is under $100,000 per year and we still aren’t eligible to apply for certain foundations because of either geography, mission, or budget. One source of relief has been through the California Arts Council.

The Council began funding us for the 2019–20 school year and also funded us for the 2020–21 school year. The grants are in the 5 digits and the first two grants we received were from their Artists in Schools granting program, which put highly qualified artists in residencies at schools in California. In 2020 (as if we didn’t have enough going on) they completely rebuilt their entire granting program and did a big marketing push claiming that their funding would go predominantly to organizations with small (under $250,000) budgets and BIPOC led or BIPOC serving orgs. They offered two new granting programs that we were eligible for and could potentially get us $48,000 (A LOT OF MONEY!) for the 2021–22 school year. In July their granting decisions were announced and we did not get funded.

This was a HUGE blow for us financially, but on a larger scale it broke my heart to see that our OWN TAX DOLLARS weren’t being reinvested in our community. Contra Costa County was barely represented in the granting decisions and it signaled to more than just me that our state was letting us down as a community and letting down our kids.

I had also just gotten into a huge fight (discussion?) with a bunch of colleagues about defunding white supremacy in our organizational budgets after the Teaching Artists Guild released this absolutely devastating and moving video outlining how teaching artists (mostly BIPOC teaching artists) felt used for diversity check marks but not paid or treated fairly in relation to the organizations as a whole. The video is from teaching artists of all disciplines from all across the country — it is not specifically attacking any organization in particular, and frankly it isn’t attacking anyone at all. It’s a plea for help as teaching artists want to live sustainably doing the work they love for OUR organizations. My colleagues essentially gave me the “we agree, but there’s nothing we can do” argument, and it sent me over the edge. I started screaming about the future of our industry and how the way we spend our money is what our values are and how on earth are we supposed to foster the next generation of BIPOC and queer teaching artists if we aren’t investing in our educators and education programs? I was silenced pretty harshly by someone I used to consider a mentor and I felt like I was being sent out to sea alone without a paddle as the people who were supposed to help me waved from the shore.

Now I hear you: how does this relate to Lily Janiak’s article and the all-white Into the Woods?

Well, my question for you is: how doesn’t this relate? This is what systemic racism and classism looks like in action.

Here’s the sequence of events:

You pay taxes.

Those tax dollars go to governmental agencies whose job is to use the funds as they see fit.

Those agencies become the gatekeepers for who has access to arts education at what age and to what extent.

Areas of wealth pay for their children to receive arts education either in their schools or outside their schools or both.

Areas with a lack of wealth do not receive arts education in their classrooms without help from outside entities (like QSP).

Because of this there is an overrepresentation of whiteness in children who are getting arts education and a lack of representation of BIPOC children receiving arts education.

Those children grow up and enter the workforce.

Now here’s your trivia question: which group of kids do you think are going to enter an industry that has unstable and sparse income and which do you think will go into an industry that has a stable income of some kind?

So now we come to the Lily Janiak article.

Please read the article, but the long and the short of it is that the actors’ union recently claimed racial equity as the reason they are making it easier to join their union. Now, I support unions and the right to unionize for any profession in the name of protecting workers’ rights. The issue with this particular decision is that Actors’ Equity Association has long held a reputation of actually making work for actors more difficult to come by because SURPRISE! OUR THEATRE COMPANIES DON’T HAVE BIG ENOUGH BUDGETS TO PAY ACTORS MINIMUM WAGE FOR THEIR WORK!

And because of THAT we come to the all-white Into the Woods.

The company producing the show is a unionized company and offers a living wage to their actors regardless of their union status. For actors in the union the weeks count toward their health insurance and other benefits making their dues worth paying. The actors that accepted this show were accepting a job in their industry with human rights. The company that hired them, on the other hand, willfully ignored what is surely a cabinet full of headshots and resumés from BIPOC actors claiming the good old “Well, if they don’t come out to auditon how can we cast them?” argument that we all love so much. For more on this read my only other article. Apparently I only blog once a year when I’m absolutely furious.

These events and articles are NOT. UNRELATED. Not even a little bit. This is the system at work. And it’s working! It’s doing exactly what it’s designed to do: keep white people in charge and keep BIPOC artists in poverty.

My dear friend, John, and I were talking about this whole debacle earlier today and he said “These are the eggs you have to break to make the cake” and I hope he’s right. I want the world that people like John and I envision. Where my students take my job and take the jobs of all the white ladies who started things with good intentions. But we can’t do that without funding and we can’t do it if the white people already in charge don’t read. a damn. BOOK FOR ONCE. YOU CAN LISTEN TO THEM, TOO!

Today we got confirmation that the California Arts Council reconsidered several applications from orgs with budgets under $250,000 and Wheeee Surprise Yay — We are funded for 2021–22! But my goodness it’s hard to celebrate. It feels abusive and icky and manipulative. Of course we will accept the grant funds and write the appropriate thank you notes and put their logo on our website and all that, but it feels a little like we saw behind the curtain this year. Not being funded is not an unusual thing in nonprofit administration, but not being funded and then having the funder magically find another chunk of money to hand out is… super uncommon and odd. Not to mention disingenuous.

Listen… no one does everything right. No one is perfect. But my goodness, we have to keep doing the work to be better. It cannot just be one summer after a horrific murder. Dismantling the capitalist-white-supremacist-cis-het-patriarchy is a daily task, and it needs as many participants as possible. Get on the train, donate to your favorite arts organization, and call your friends into these conversations. We need you. It’s ugly out here.