I am writing this publicly to challenge outreach arts programs, including mine, to rethink cultural engagement and the narratives and attitudes around outreach arts education. What are the true goals of the program? Is it really important? Does the community even want or need you there? Are the art practices equitable? Today's blog reflects on the good, bad, and ugly of my experience and aftermath as an outreach kid.
As you may know, I am the artistic director of Emotions Physical Theatre, and we are starting to create arts programming for schools. For most of my life, I have fondly looked back on my time as an up-and-coming dance artist. I used to believe that finding an arts outreach program was the best thing that ever happened to me. However, as I’ve spent more time in therapy and watched some of the same practices I endured happen repeatedly, I'm starting to question my heroes and the system.
If you had met me four years ago, I would have told you that dance changed my life. The outreach arts program saved my life. But saved my life from what? This is a phrase I hear a lot in outreach education material. The language has changed over time, but back then, we used to call in-school outreach programming, "urban outreach."
Urban Outreach
What was (is) “urban outreach?” An arts organization, usually white, would provide programming to a Title I school in predominantly black areas. This organization would take pictures and videos and discuss all the "good they were doing” and "saving lives." It involves a lot of self-congratulating on how wonderful the organization is. In my experience, the phrase "Getting out of the hood" was often used by non-profits and the media. “Getting out of the hood” and going where? It means going to white spaces. These spaces could be colleges, dance companies, or earning enough to move to a suburb. This is a mind frame I have bought into for many years.
The Power of Arts Education
We talk about how important and influential the arts are. As a choreographer, I know how to tell a powerful story and make it feel real. Stories can impact a sense of oneself and the world. They can inspire us. In art education, that power is magnified because of the storytelling aspect during a child's formative years. Remember, both trauma and healing happen in a relationship. Have "urban outreach" programs been responsible with this power? Did the “urban outreach” education story and relationship cause trauma or healing? How does the narrative in "urban outreach" affect a student's sense of self and perspective on the world?
White Savior Arts Programs
From my experience of being on grant panels, writing grants, and reading the language around "urban outreach" programs with the goal of "getting them out of the hood, " this kind of program language makes the following assumptions:
Students need an arts organization.
That arts organization has its answers, and it knows what is best for the child.
The child is headed for danger or will become dangerous due to the child's race, location, and/or social interactions.
White spaces are good and safe for children.
Black spaces are bad and dangerous for children.
This arts program is their only and best opportunity.
That arts organization is the source of "valuable art."
These are dangerous assumptions because they communicate that something is inherently wrong with the child's current situation. If not checked, it could communicate something to the child, that something is intrinsically wrong with the child. Only this group of people or a particular kind of art has the answer or can make you valuable. This is counter to why arts should be in the schools. Art is about self-exploration and expression. “Urban outreach” with the goal of "getting students out of the hood" centers on whiteness and glorifies whiteness as the hero and a standard to achieve while simultaneously ignoring and demeaning local cultural art. This set me up to be a confused artist.
Whites Saving You….. From What?
I have told stories about how art and dance saved my life. I would have been in the "streets" if I wasn't in rehearsal. As I get older, the heroes I once looked up to have crystallized into pictures of very flawed human beings. I start to question the validity of the statement above. I was an art nerd. If I didn't have rehearsal, I would be drawing, painting, or practicing martial arts in my room. I don't think under any circumstances would I have joined a gang or started selling drugs. Anybody who knows me could tell you Shawn Rawls is no gangster or thug. The only people who would think that are racist white people with a savior complex.
So, my question is, what did the white saviors save me from? I would have made art with or without them, and I would have gone to college with or without them. Plus, college arts programs are overrated (https://editor.wix.com/html/editor/web/renderer/edit/c3280119-2232-4e10-9fc9-cd7b0aae2f75?metaSiteId=43d0866f-01d3-45e6-9067-2c0f4efc0694). Despite the urban outreach programs, I would have received stellar training in visual arts, hip-hop dance, and video. After many years in therapy and working through my thoughts, I realized maybe outreach programs didn't save me and only changed my value system.
The Urban Outreach Narrative Aftermath.
This is a tricky subject for me to write about. On the one hand, the skills I currently use to make money have all been taught in the urban outreach programs I started out in. I did get good at art making and dance. I currently feed myself and members of my community with these skills. However, I am at the beginning of challenging a narrative that was given to me that no longer benefits me. I have started to wonder if it ever did benefit me or if it just taught me to devalue myself. The narrative I was taught was to use art to erase the black off of me. Maybe that's what the white saviors were trying to save me from ………being black. Or to make me a respectable kind of black, decent and docile. But decent to who? Who decides those rules? The urban outreach education I experienced trained me to seek value from performing for whites.
I got to graduate school and was asked how blackness and hip-hop affect my work. I felt like white people were now asking me to perform blackness after telling me for so many years that blackness was terrible and something to be avoided. This was the last straw for me. I felt like performing blackness for the validation of white people was worse than performing whiteness for white validation. They wanted a minstrel show.
So now, I am asking myself the following questions, this time without seeking validation.
Who am I?
Why does my art look the way it does?
Where does my classical training belong?
Where and how do my past, race, and class show up in my art?
Moving Forward: Building Better In-School Arts Programs
I share my story in this blog not to solicit sympathy but as a warning to myself and other directors as we build, teach, and create in-school programs. As a dance community, I ask that we wield the power of arts for the genuine improvement of our schools and students. At Emotions Physical Theatre, in-school education focuses on giving students tools for storytelling, self-expression, and self-discovery. The school program should meet the students where they are and inform and celebrate their culture and identity. Lastly, the program should be about developing the students rather than creating the art organization. They don’t exist to pad the company budget, add faces of color to the company website, garner political goodwill or simply reinforce superiority complexes. We can do better and these students deserve better.
How can we create positive experiences for students without congratulating ourselves and centering our own agendas? What does positive change look like?
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