After attending Salvador Acevedo’s session, The New Mainstream: How Changing Demographics Are Shifting Your Community, at our Annual Convention in San Antonio this past weekend I learned that there are already five minority majority states in the U.S., and they’re not little.
California, Texas, New Mexico, District of Columbia, and Hawaii all currently have less than a 50 percent White population. This is a huge shift considering that America’s population was about 90 percent White up to the 1970s. It has since declined to 60 percent and continues to follow this pattern. The Hispanic population on the other hand is growing rapidly with an estimated 167 percent growth by 2050 (142 percent Asian, 56 percent Black, 1 percent White).
How does this affect the arts?
Well it proses a huge problem when less than 50 percent of our nation’s population is White, yet your audience is 70–90 percent White. As Salvador said, “we must diversify our audiences, otherwise we will become irrelevant.”
As “prime vehicles for intercultural understanding” (my favorite quote from the session), arts and culture will not survive if it does not reflect our population as a whole. So how do we prevent ourselves from becoming irrelevant?
You must practice what you preach. The change must start internally within your organization before you can start to diversify your audience. Salvador calls this the “intercultural strategy.”
What is interculturalism? It is when cultures actively integrate with one another and form a completely new identity. We can see this trending in popular culture already. Salvador had some great examples to help illustrate this idea for us, one of them being food trucks.
He used a popular San Francisco food truck named Sushirroto that combines sushi and burritos to create a new type of food. Sushirroto is not considered sushi nor a burrito, not Japanese nor Mexican, but rather its own, new identity. The important thing to point out here is that even though two cultures come together to create a new identity, it is still very much prevalent which two cultures they are.
Interculturalism maintains the originating culture’s identities and respects them as a combination rather than a blend. To further illustrate this point, Salvador showed us this commercial for DJ Hero 2:
This same concept also applies to sub-segments within a certain demographic that also integrate with one another. Marketing and engagement is proven much more successful when all integrating parts are respected and targeted to.
Now none of this will be effective if you don’t represent the audience you are trying to reach. This is where the “intercultural strategy” takes place and here are three steps that Salvador outlined for us to implement the strategy internally:
Your organization must publicly take a stance on diversity
- One or group of staff members must be appointed to take responsibility and action upon this stance
- Structural changes must be put in place internally
In order to reach a diverse audience authentically, you must have real live representation of that audience within your organization. Solving the problem from the inside out increases communication and integration, resulting in more efficient audience engagement.
Salvador proved to be a very engaging speaker and was able to deliver loads of valuable information in just a little over an hour and it was really great to have him present at our Convention.
