Spotlight on Marc Bamuthi Joseph

Introducing Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Vice President and Artistic Director of Social Impact
John F. Kennedy Center 

In the first episode of Active Hope, you describe yourself as a poet, a dad, and an educator. As you noted, there aren’t a lot of working artists that also run cultural institutions. How do these multiple identities support and inform the others, and make you more resilient as a cultural leader?

It’s unfortunate that we often have to segment out our intimate identities in terms of our professional applications, but then in our professional lives, we use words like integrity or accountability. Those first identities speak to a history, a pedigree, a kind of trajectory of expertise, but they also speak to communities and visibility and audience, so if I am performing intelligence for a community of 6-year-olds that’s different than performing intelligence for a community of suffering or disenfranchised mothers and so forth. I don’t leave my intimate identities at home with me knowing who I’m ultimately accountable to.

The thing that I say is that art is oxygen for the body politic and the Kennedy Center is rare air, and our work is to remember that some of us can’t breathe. Resilience is a very kind and generous word, but those intimate identities are a little less about resilience and a little more about survival. My work at the Kennedy Center isn’t what ensures my survival. My identity as a father and the accountability therein, that’s ultimately what I’m beholden to if I want to survive as a person. 

Within 3 months of the lockdown and less than a week after George Floy'd passing, the Social Impact team at the Kennedy Center initiated a number of strategies for the next 3-5 years to foster anti-racism within the center and across the performing arts. Can you tell us about these strategies and how you encourage a whole institution to put in place this kind of system?

What predates the murder of George Floyd, what predates the murder of Breonna Taylor, what actually predates the charter of the United States of America is a legacy of white supremacy and the systemic execution of white supremacist ideology so as to create a psychology of subjugation that makes it possible for the capitalist instinct to take root. What predates any of our institutions or cultural institutions here in this country is a capitalist ambition so it is impossible to talk about wanting or seeking to be an anti-racist institution if you can’t also talk about the relationship between racism and capital in this country and you can’t talk about the relationship between racism and capital without talking about the design of both. Part of the design and revelation of these instruments is a concession. In my mind, the Kennedy Center can’t be an anti-racist institution. It can aspire to have a culture of systemic solidarity or systemic allyship, but in so far as it can try, it has to approach its practices in a systemic and structural way. In the same way that racism is structural, anti-racism activity must be structural.

I have a fairly long history as a performer and as a community educator to be placed in itinerant positions of community engagement, so being based in California where I lived for most of my adult life, someone might fly me into Massachusetts or internationally to engage certain segments of the community for an hour or two. These moments are so fast and generally speaking haven’t been tied to a theory of change or culture of solidarity within the institution that I was practicing with at the time. Taking this historical lens and this personal biography, it was important to lay out a plan for the Kennedy Center that investigated structural change, which thought about change as an ecosystem of activity, of interwoven activity and not just programs because programs are something that the arts community in particular has been doing forever.

Programs, generally free activities that diversify an audience makeup by drawing demographically linked activities to under-served communities, but there’s a difference between programs that diversify and programs that cultivate equity. It was really important that we structurally designed programs that seek to cultivate equity in under-resourced areas, in the areas of artistic and community empowerment, activation of our spaces through the lens of public health, cultural leadership, AND performance. We announced eight specific areas of work last year. It was important that this 8-spoked wheel served those impact-facing programs and that all of that activity was tied to a social vision so that we weren’t just reacting to this explosion on the racial timeline, but that we were proactively authoring a social vision of a more inspired and equitable future and designing a fistful of programs that was in service of a vision, not in response to a calamitous, chaotic event.

If an organization does not already have a social impact arm, how does it begin this important work and do you think it’s necessary that all arts organizations engage in it? Given the fact that we are within this white supremacist pedagogy, not everyone may be educated as to what we need to do to move forward. How does one start to cultivate that if it is not already present at an organization?

Not all arts organizations have to do this work. I do think that if an art organization says that it wants to do this work then it really has to do it. Arts organizations should consider that their mandate is to make space for creative experiences for high-caliber talented individuals and groups. That’s what we do. If we think of ourselves as cultural centers then I think that’s a bit different and the mandate is more expansive. If we make statements of solidarity (as many of us have) and we have the political will to move beyond our statements and seek to reconstitute our organizations to put our money where our mouth is then it’s incumbent upon us to really do the thing.

The first step is to do something more than deep listening. It’s to do deep investment in smart people, generally folks of color, generally women of color, to hear from a justice standpoint what equity looks like. In 2021, most organizations can do diversity. Inclusion is a little more intimate, but I think most organizations can do inclusion too. If we’re going to do equity, we have to talk about power and that requires more than deep listening. That requires reconstitution of the proportion of resource allocation and who consults an organization about cultural equity and cultural power.

There are any number of professionals that can do that work, but you have to find the right people and I think I’m one of them that can start engineering the bridge. One of the better ways to be in allyship is to say alright, I’ve consulted with A, B & C. I didn’t take a year to do it, I took a month to do it, and now I’m ready to craft a five year plan, and here’s the path of executing the plan.

You mentioned this concept of public healing during the ISPA congress. There is grief on an international level not only over the loss of life from Covid-19, but also with respect to historical inequalities and injustices. Since our usual societal mechanisms of grieving and healing as a community were inaccessible over the past year, how might our sector encourage public healing when we are finally able to gather again as a community?

Again, I don’t think it’s within the mandate for all organizations to do this work. I think that most cultural organizations are very uniquely positioned because we are a public square: restaurants, parks, stadiums, sporting events. They are places where people intentionally gather to share space and the rules of engagement in those spaces are right now undefined. There’s some of those spaces that are hyper democratic like parks. Then there are spaces that are more transactional like restaurants. Cultural spaces are this unique hybrid where folks are going specifically to be inspired and the talent pool within those public spaces is about narrating and configuring humans in unique ways, so it’s very rare.

Public healing is actively understanding that we’ve all been through a psychological trauma, and to think intentionally as to how we invite people back into public space. There is a need to address not just the transactional body, but also the process-based body that is trying to process how to touch again, how to be close again, how to be in intimate space that traffics in inspiration, different than being in public space that traffics in the anger of protest or in the kind of escape that you find in sports. There’s something unique about our position in the public imagination and across the public landscape that enables us to think about healing in a specific and intentional way and it’s one of those rare times where if we paid some intentional care as to how we invite healing into our space, we could really do some good.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with our global performing arts community?

I’m hosting a virtual, three day solidarity retreat over the weekend of June 17-19. It’s a fee-based deep dive into some of these frameworks that are really meant to bring folks into ethical compliance and beyond. In thinking about so much of what was said in June of 2020, I’m hosting three days for arts professionals that really want to take those statements, embody them, and move forward. The weekend is called Healing Forward: Journeying in to Allyship.

One of the things I really go over is how to make this an organization-wide initiative, so there’s some work that focuses on C-suite folks, there’s work that focuses on development and community engagement, there’s work that focuses on program and engagement, and there’s work that focuses on PR and marketing. Over the weekend, we tie it all together to present a vision of how to move your organization forward towards systemic solidarity.