Diversity: Not Just for White Guilt Anymore

Posted by Robbie Q. Telfer, Jul 29, 2011


Robbie Q. Telfer

Robbie Q. Telfer

An important principal to the Encyclopedia Show is diversity. I had mentioned earlier diversity of artistic genre – we try to get not only poets, but solo performance artists, visual artists, creative nonfiction and fiction writers, musicians, comedians, live animals, experts on the topic, jugglers, etc…

Demographic diversity is also extremely important to us. We have youth perform in every show, as well as people coming from as many different communities as possible – and in hyper-segregated Chicago, that might mean more. A larger goal of our show is to replicate all human emotions, so we’re trying to bring in all humans.

The key to diversity, though, is not to tokenize people from outside my demographic (white guy), but to try honestly to understand the values of the different communities I am pulling from and featuring only excellent representatives.

It makes for a bad show if you don’t care how the non-white guy’s pieces turn out just because you feel guilty about institutionalized racism. Also, tokenism is infantilizing and deeply insulting.

Benevolent racism can be just as damaging as its other forms because it says, “We don’t expect anything from you anyway, so as long as you conform to our rules, we’ll feel like we’re fighting racism.”

Benevolent racists are probably also the first to feel justified in their disappointment when minorities transgress the unspoken rules the majority has written and continuously altered throughout time – it sets up racists to continue being racists by thinking that they’re not racist.

It is worth it to us to work a little extra hard finding the best contributors we can from all backgrounds, and I feel that other white producers who grow comfortable in their homogeny are lazy. Artistic greatness lives in every community.

That said, it is difficult as a white guy with white guy interests to diversify our audience. We’re trying.

There are a lot of pitfalls in live event productions, and many of them are much simpler than the high-minded, lofty ones I’ve outlined above. However, I feel that if you have your over-arching philosophies down, your ethics sound, and you make sure you have good people filling key roles, the small stuff takes care of itself.

However, should we, or our constituent shows in the Encyclopedia Show community, ever think the show and its structure is more valuable than the human-artists who fill it, then I hope we’d have the good sense to hang it up and move on to something else.

Good ideas are important, but they need people to make them come alive.

A church is just a building if there’s no congregation.