ROOTS & Race: Walking Our Talk

Some Thoughts on the 2003 Annual Meeting and What We Decided There

Lisa Mount

The 2003 Annual Meeting of Alternate ROOTS was a watershed event in many ways: the best food we've had in years thanks to the culinary artistry of Fast and French, a renewed sense of commitment from members (including record numbers volunteering to serve on the executive committee and workgroups, as well as more than $10,000 in contributions pledged by members), and real decisions made about how to substantively change the predominantly white culture of the organization. What follows are my highly personal reflections on this year's meeting's discussions and decisions about undoing racism.

Addressing issues of race has been high on ROOTS' agenda since its founding, because Jo Carson and the others who organized the meeting at the Highlander Center deliberately invited the Free Southern Theater and Carpetbag Theatre, among other black theater companies working in the south. Formally, ROOTS has had a policy of working to dismantle the power structures of race since 1987, when a performance by Margaret Baker entitled "Rock 'o' My Soul in the Bosom of Just About Anybody Except a Minority Baptist Church" told the story of Moses and mixed it up with the story of Little Black Sambo. Some audience members saw it as satire, but others were deeply offended. Pearl Cleage and Zeke Burnette spoke up and demanded attention be paid to the use of hurtful stereotypes in any context. Pat Arnow's article "The Alternate ROOTS Dilemma: From Little Black Sambo to Son of White Man" summarizes the outcome of this event: "After hours of discussion following Baker's performance, the members drafted a resolution that the executive committee deal with racism when discussing and planning programs."

I wasn't a ROOTS member then, but we are fortunate to have ROOTS history available to all, in the form of the ROOTS Reader, now online at http://www.rootsreader.org, a partnership between ROOTS and Art in the Public Interest. These stories are much more complete in Pat's article there.

At this year's Annual Meeting, much of the structured discussion was about race (and lots of meal time, pool time, late-night walk by the lake time conversations, too). This was deliberate. It's too important not to talk about it, and the talking led to doing — which is more important.

ROOTS is, fundamentally, an artistic organization, and as such we deal with big issues using artistic principles. One of the principles we've applied to our struggle to understand and ameliorate the effect racism has in ROOTS is Juggler's Rule #3: Jugglers Never Quit. We never quit trying to undo racism within this organization. (The other Juggler's Rules, all penned by Lenny DeLuxe, a.k.a. Rodger French, are: #1. Gravity Always Wins, and #2. Jugglers Never Lie.)

ROOTS never quits journeying down the path of becoming an antiracist, truly multicultural coalition of arts workers. Individual ROOTers may tire of the struggle and have to check out for a while, but enough people stay engaged in this difficult conversation to keep us moving forward. "Heaven knows how we will get there, but we know we will." [From a ROOTS favorite song, "We Are Going," by T. Osei, L. Amao, M. Tonton, W. Richardson, R. Bailey and R. Bedeau.]

We're approaching the journey with renewed energy these days, fueled by an organizational assessment in which every single person who was interviewed mentioned addressing racism as a key issue, and supported by the unyielding determination of Executive Director Carolyn Morris to see that we do not shy away from this Hard Work.

This year's [August 2003] Annual Meeting made some real progress in dealing with racism and its effects both within and outside of ROOTS, as 35 board members voted to change ROOTS' policies to require the next two years of Community/Artist Partnership Projects (C/APP) grant applicants to demonstrate how they specifically and deliberately address racism in order to qualify for funding. Any or all of the three aspects of art — content, form or process — can have an antiracist focus. When people respond negatively to this idea it's often because they think we're dictating content, but there's form and process to consider as well.

There are a lot of ways these projects can approach this standard. We're artists, with a million means of expression in our repertoire, which means we have a million ways to make anti-racist art. And because of our vast repertoire, we have a clear understanding of the way that racism intertwines with class discrimination, educational disenfranchisement and corporate greed — among other ills that beset our planet in these times. We're expecting that the projects that get C/APP funding in 2004 and 2005 will find ways to illuminate or illustrate the issues ROOTS and ROOTS artists have been grappling with for years. We're taking this step two years at a time; my hope is it will be so successful we'll keep it long after this time of experimentation.

Frankly, I can't understand why anyone would think this is a bad idea, but, in their collective wisdom, the staff and executive committee knew that ROOTS members would be very concerned about this as a direction for the organization. In designing the Annual Meeting where we were going to make a decision about this, the executive committee made sure there were plenty of opportunities for people to talk and learn about race and racism, its effects and its manifestations in ROOTS and elsewhere.

Gerry Conroy and Anita Burns of Awaken, our strategic planning consultants, led a four-hour session during the Annual Meeting about understanding institutionalized racism and dismantling white culture. Things got heated but never boiled over. ROOTS has set itself the task of becoming a truly multicultural organization that feels welcoming to people of all races, cultures and communities; to do this we have to know what we're up against in terms of how we replicate the racist society in which we operate. We know we do. Every activist organization that sets out to change a problem goes through a period of recreating that problem within the organization before it becomes really effective (or dies of it).

We asked Gerry and Anita to put together a discussion that would teach us about the dynamics of race and culture, and give us the opportunity to state for ourselves how we wanted ROOTS to address this issue. They and the strategic-planning workgroup assembled a panel featuring ROOTS members and friends that opened more than a few eyes. I really appreciated Hollis Watkins reminding the white people in the room that we can choose whether or not we're going to deal with race, but he, as a black man, never has a choice in the matter. He does not have the privilege of forgetting that racism exists. As a white person, I do. I also loved watching Keith Hennessy and Andrea Assaf passionately but respectfully disagree with arguments and concepts they thought overly simplistic, as they called for more depth and complexity in our analysis of race and culture.

I was reminded by Karen Stephens of the necessity of stating the basic definition of racism, which I learned from the People's Institute for Survival and Beyond when they did an Undoing Racism training at ROOTS in 1995: Racism = Prejudice + Power. Everyone's got prejudice, but when it's combined with the power to disadvantage another group or individual because of their race, it's racism. And whether we like it or not, white people are the beneficiaries of racism in this country, just by virtue of our skin color — a car full of white people isn't likely to get pulled over at random, but we all know folks who've been stopped for no better reason than they were "the wrong color" for a neighborhood, a condition known as Driving While Black.

I participated in a small group discussion where the white people immediately turned to the people of color to pose the question "How can we fix this" and almost as quickly realized that this was a trap: We were asking the people of color to do the work we, as white people, needed to do. We then turned our hands to coming up with solutions together, which was much more satisfying. Best of all was how the session ended: with joyous salsa music and a spontaneous dance break, a time for bodies to say what voices hadn't been able to.

ROOTS includes a structured Undoing Racism learning opportunity in every Annual Meeting. It's part of an agreement we made nearly 20 years ago and renewed in 1995 after the combined influence of the People's Institute's Undoing Racism training and a controversial performance called "Son of White Man" by Ed Haggard that galvanized that year's Annual Meeting. Pat Arnow's article on the ROOTS Reader tells the full story, but here's the short version [from Arnow]:

The problem wasn't that performer Ed Haggard took off his clothes during his one-person show, a section he called "I'm too white," and smeared his body with blue paint. It was what he said while he was doing it. He said that if he had more color, he might have a sense of rhythm, a love of nature. He painted his genitals and said if he had more color he might be more virile.

We used Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process to work toward understanding about the impact of Ed's work on both the black and white people in the room. It was contentious and passionate, and finally concluded at 3 a.m. Like the Little Black Sambo episode, the stories are told to this day. Ancient history? Yes. Fundamental to ROOTS culture? That, too.

Slowly but surely we keep finding ways to walk our talk — a phrase popularized by Rev. C. T. Vivian, from whom I took my first antiracism training. The decision to focus our regranting on antiracist artmaking is, literally, putting our money where our mouths are.

Still, it's not a decision we take lightly. We worked hard to contextualize it at the Annual Meeting. We brought it up as a decision to be considered on the first full day — Wednesday. The Undoing Racism workshop was on Friday. During various sessions, people who felt that elevating racism to a place of prominence over the other "isms" narrowed ROOTS' focus too sharply had the opportunity to speak their piece. They were all white people.

In various discussions we encountered people who represent the changing understanding of race that the next generation of multiracial leaders is fostering. Race is not just a black-and-white issue, in the South or anywhere else. It is, however, a major factor in our society, to the detriment of people of every color, including white folks.

When we conducted the Saturday board meeting at which we voted on this policy change, the first question we explored was our collective understanding of the impact and nature of racism in the South — the region ROOTS serves. And since this is a ROOTS meeting, a gathering of artists and cultural workers, the way in which we considered this question was NOT by sitting around talking it to death. We did it with movement, aligning ourselves along a physical continuum that represented the spectrum of our points of view. Ann Kilkelly worked with me to design a sociometric process, also known as cultural mapping, so that everyone in the room could literally see where we all stood (as we are able) on these issues.

When it comes to understanding race, ROOTers represent the whole spectrum of possibility, from people who feel completely clueless to people who really know the dynamics of race in our region. When it came to agreeing or disagreeing with an antiracist focus being a criterion for getting a C/APP grant, the majority of people put themselves on the "agree" end of the spectrum. All of the people of color were in the "agree" territory.

You should know that this board meeting was not restricted to board members only. ROOTS currently has about 85 board members, but true to our founding principle of "who comes, is" anyone who comes to an Annual Meeting can participate in our discussions. Only board members can vote, but we welcome multiple perspectives before we "call the question."

In the end, the disagreements with the changes to ROOTS grantmaking were about sophisticated technical issues in grant disbursement — challenging but not life-threatening decisions. A workgroup is coming up with recommendations on granting policies other than the antiracist focus.

When the discussions and the movement were all done, all but two of the board members at that meeting voted to make this change in ROOTS' grantmaking focus. Thirty-five people stood together and agreed that we cannot credibly claim to be active against oppression in our communities if we are not active against oppression in ROOTS. The most virulent form of oppression, and the one that exacerbates all others, is racism. So now we have a filter through which to screen our grantmaking: If C/APP projects aren't addressing racism, then they're not really working to end oppression, and we cannot support them. It's a rigorous standard, but it's the right thing to do.

There are some who might accuse me of airing ROOTS' dirty laundry by writing this for our nationally distributed publication. But ROOTS is the only arts organization I have personal experience with that is explicitly making antiracism a focus in both its policy and its practice. I'm hoping that hearing the stories of how ROOTers are dealing with this may push other artists, arts organizations and funders to work on this with us.

Lisa Mount is board chair of Alternate ROOTS, a regional organization of artists working in the diverse communities of the southeastern U.S. Mount is an independent arts-management consultant who refuses to specialize. Her company, Artistic Logistics, is based in Sautee-Nacoochee, Georgia, one of the "100 Best Small Art Towns" in the U.S. She is the rhythm banjo player for the DeLuxe Vaudeville Orchestra. She produced and directed the one woman show "My Life As A Prostitute." Current and recent consulting clients include the National Association of Artists’ Organizations, Highways Performance Space, Georgia Council for the Arts, National Performance Network, and YA/YA (Young Artists/Young Aspirations).

This essay originally appeared in the Fall 2003/Winter 2004 issue of UP from the ROOTS Journal, a publication of Alternate ROOTS

Original CAN/API publication: March 2004