Racial Equity

Grantmakers in the Arts (GIA) is committed to addressing structural inequities and increasing philanthropic and government support for BIPOC artists and arts organizations. Racial equity is a lens through which GIA aims to conduct all of its work, as well as a specific area of its programming.

Since 2008, GIA has been elevating racial equity as a critical issue affecting the field. To actualize this work within the sector, GIA published its Racial Equity in Arts Funding Statement of Purpose in 2015. Through webinars, articles, convenings, and conference sessions, GIA provides training and information to support arts funders in addressing historic and structural inequity through their grantmaking practices as part of an effort for racial justice as a means toward justice for all.

GIA believes that all oppressed groups should benefit from funding. We give primacy to race because racism is the means by which oppressed groups are manipulated into opposing programs that assist them. Therefore, Grantmakers in the Arts’ equity work – including our discussions of support for trans artists, artists with disabilities and for disability arts – is NOT race-exclusive but IS race-explicit. GIA’s vision for the future of our work is to increasingly reveal how the liberation of all oppressed people is interdependent.

GIA has made a strategic decision to foreground racial equity in our work for several reasons:

Within other oppressed peoples’ communities (including women, members of the lgbtqi community, people with disabilities, and others), it has been well-documented that people of color still face the worst social outcomes.
GIA feels that others’ strategies of combining considerations of race with other considerations too often result in racialized people being pushed into the background or ignored.
The U.S.’ creation of race was established to keep oppressed peoples separate.

Unless we articulate our support for racialized peoples, while calling out this separation strategy, we inadvertently reinforce this separation strategy.

Specific themes of our racial equity programming include:

The analysis of how funding practices create structural challenges for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color)/ALAANA (African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native-American) organizations (Eurocentric quality standards, matching requirements, among others).
The impact of these practices, as manifest in racialized disparities in levels of funding.
An exploration of the use of coded language to justify racial inequity (i.e. referring to white audiences as “general” or “mainstream,” while organizations of color are “culturally-specific.”

When it comes to self-identifying language, GIA seeks to use terms that communicate our respect. We do not seek to impose language on members of any group. We respect the manner in which anyone prefers to self-identify. When referring to issues of racial equity, “we use the term BIPOC to highlight the unique relationship to whiteness that Indigenous and Black people have, which shapes the experiences of and relationship to white supremacy for all people of color within a U.S. context.” We take this explanation and practice from the BIPOC Project.

GIA has also used the racial and ethnic identifiers African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, and Native American. We have used African, Latinx, Asian, Arab, Native American – represented using the acronym ALAANA – because we know that many believe the term, “people of color,” conflates together entire groups of people and as a contrast to white. This results in a continued centering of whiteness as the norm and the standard from which other identities deviate.

GIA does not refer to organizations that are founded by, led by, and feature the work of ALAANA/BIPOC communities as “culturally-specific,” as we believe this term centers whiteness as the norm from which other organizations deviate.

GIA is committed to communicating respectfully. GIA does not ask that anyone self-identify with or use any term other than ones they prefer.

Racial Conversation as Long Table Performance

October 15, 2014 by Steve

Conference blogger Latoya Peterson turns in her first set of observations from Houston:

Can a conversation about race be a performance? What does that simple framework shift do to the conversation? The answer: everything. The long table conversation is a fascinating thing to watch unfold. Participants come in and out as they please. There is snacking and scribbling, mostly on topic. Some people were determined watchers, setting up camp on the chairs on the far edge of the perimeter. And others eagerly queued up in the seats closest to the table, waiting for the moment they could tap someone on the shoulder, sending that performer out and putting themselves into the conversation.

October 20, 2014 by Steve

Conference blogger Barry Hessenius turns in a final post to the GIA 2014 Conference blog:

The 2014 GIA Conference was, I think, very successful. This gathering remains small enough to be intimate, but large enough so that the conversations are expansive. As the funding community continues to grapple with some very large challenges, as a body it is making steady progress on working together to, if not collaborate on every approach, at least coordinate some of what use to be very disparate and wide ranging approaches. Perhaps the word that ought to be included in the vocabulary above is the word SHARING.

October 22, 2014 by SuJ'n

In October 2014, at the GIA 2014 Conference in Houston, Aaron Dworkin (The Sphinx Organization), Maurine Knighton (Nathan Cummings Foundation), and Roberta Uno (Ford Foundation) presented a session on addressing the significant disparity in how funding reaches underserved communities and smaller arts organizations. Per its design, the intended session outcome was to develop a list of key strategies to address inequitable funding in collaboration with the audience members. Here it is:

September 25, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

Introduction

The Power of Imagination

September 23, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

Those in the premodern world who hoarded possessions and refused to redistribute supplies and food, who turned their backs on the weak and the sick, who lived exclusively for hedonism and their own power, were despised. Those in modern society who are shunned as odd, neurotic, or eccentric, who are disconnected from the prosaic world of objective phenomena and fact, would have been valued in premodern cultures for their ability to see what others could not see. Dreams and visions — considered ways to connect with the wisdom of ancestors — were integral to existence in distant times.

Disrupting the Status Quo

June 30, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

Marco Sanchez was in the third grade in 2010 when the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory (SDYS) launched the Community Opus Project in Chula Vista Elementary School District (CVESD). Participating in the after-school El Sistema–inspired music program, Marco went home from his Community Opus sessions two days a week and taught his younger brother Rodrigo what he was learning in class. This was not unusual for a Community Opus student, who has been immersed in a program that encourages peer teaching as a cornerstone of its pedagogy.

I Hate Classical Music

June 30, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

For several years my brother, Alex Laing, principal clarinetist for the Phoenix Symphony, and I, senior program officer at the Heinz Endowments, have been having often intense conversations, where my brother probed the thinking behind Heinz Endowments’ grantmaking that placed an emphasis on African and African diasporic culture, distressed neighborhoods, and teaching artists. Heinz Endowments, having taken the advice of Anasa Troutman of the consulting firm Lion and Butterfly, has begun to call this work transformative arts education.

Future Aesthetics 2.0

June 30, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

In January I had the privilege to attend the Future Aesthetics 2.0 retreat, co-organized by Marc Bamuthi Joseph, director of Performing Arts of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and James Kass, executive director of Youth Speaks. Participating were twenty-three performance-based artists, Helicon Collaborative partners Holly Sidford and Alexis Frasz, and Cheryl Ikemiya from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, which funded the project through its Fund for National Projects.

March 3, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

2013, 49 pages, D5 Coalition, Chicago, IL

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Placemaking and Placemakers

March 3, 2014 by giarts-ts-admin

When the Network of Ensemble Theaters (NET) set out to produce MicroFest USA: Revitalize, Reconnect, Renew, we wanted to look at the positive impact that art and artists were having on communities around the country. Our intent was twofold: to acknowledge and advance the pioneering and current work of ensemble theaters committed to community-based practice and positive community change (placemaking), and to foster mutual learning with a wider spectrum of artists, cultural workers, and community partners also contributing to community well-being and social change (placemakers).