White Artists. We Got Work To Do.

White artists and White led artist organisations, we need to stop gaslighting our black colleagues and be honest with them. 

Like so many of us, over the last couple of weeks,  I’ve seen artists taking a knee for Black Lives Matter. I’ve seen theatres and gallery’s go dark for BlackOut Tuesday and I’ve seen countless posts amplifying voices of black artists and storytellers. And this is great. Don’t get me wrong. I genuinely think it is important, that at this time we don’t leave it up to our Black colleagues to carry the burden of dismantling racism in our world. 

But I have personally, really struggled, to take a knee, or black out my screen or even manage to utter something meaningful. Because, I think the biggest thing we can do is to say to our black colleagues you are right.  We, your white colleagues have not stood in solidarity with you. I have quietly let power structures stand because they have benefitted me. And I don’t think I am the only white person who this is true for. 

I can honestly say I have taken jobs and not questioned enough the balance of diversity within the team. I have worked as part of festival programmes and theatre seasons, and not even considered if the line-up represented the society we wanted to speak too. I have probably worked for organisations who have all white leadership teams, and I haven’t even bothered to check or question. I have read scripts without questioning the representation that might prop up the inherent power structures. The truth is I haven’t thought long enough or hard enough because my White privilege has allowed me to not think and not examine. 

And also, because, the truth is, and I say this as a white middle class heterosexual male, being an artist is hard. Even with all that privilege it is hard. So any step up the ladder, any offer of a job or funding grant, comes with an overwhelming sense of relief and a feeling of I earned this. In that moment, It’s hard to look around you and say, wait a second, how has my privilege been at play here. Because my ego is fragile and I wish it wasn’t but it is. And sometimes I want it to be easy and to say, well done me. I’ve earnt this.  But that is the time when we need to look hardest. Because, we haven’t earnt anything if we have trodden on someone else’s neck to get there. 

I am not writing this to absolve my guilt. The least I can do is sit with it. Because as a white artist, it has taken me countless conversations with peers, It has taken me countless moments of realising my privilege, and I’m horrified to say,  it has taken me witnessing the lynching of George Floyd on camera, to take a moment to say I need to use my privilege to speak up and call out and stand in solidarity with my Black colleagues.   It’s horrific but it’s true. I don’t in any way want to trivialise what happened. But it took something that extreme to shake those arts organisations to say something about what has been happening in our names for centuries.

As I said I think it is great, that White led arts organisations and White artists are speaking out. But when we say we stand in solidarity there has to be a massive caveat. We stand in solidarity now, today, at this moment. But we haven’t in the past. When you saw those racist structures, you saw them. These posts of solidarity don’t absolve us. They should say, we haven’t always stood in solidarity. We didn’t always stand in solidarity. And we are sorry, because it’s not like we didn’t know about it. You have said it. You have told us all about it. You have stood and you have screamed. And you have gently taken us by the hand and pointed it out step by step. And you have protested. And you have written and drawn and sculpted and sung about it.  And I got angry, and I shouted at your side, and I signed the odd petition. But honestly I did not pay it nearly enough attention. 

For me  to see how important the conversation should be the barbaric truth is, it has taken another needless death. It has taken me, being able to watch it with my own eyes. It has taken Black people around the world rising up again to demand justice, to really see how vital dismantling racism needs to be for all of us.  

We didn’t stand in solidarity. But we can stand now. Because solidarity shouldn’t be a moment it should be a process.  I hope this marks the change. I hope we, White artists and White led organisations will do the work. I hope we will work to remove the racism that harm us all.  I know we will continue to make mistakes, biases will continue to blinker us. But I hope we will think harder and fight harder as Cornel West said quoting Beckett, ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’