Arts & Culture Interrupting Structural Racism Part 2
From the President’s Blog
Eddie Torres
In Part 1 of this blog, we explored our roles as arts funders in structural racism by analyzing the lack of arts in our racialized public school system, and the role it plays in BIPOC children’s and adult’s overrepresentation in the carceral system. We now explore how our government interacts with the private sector, including philanthropy.
Over 4,100 corporations profit from mass incarceration in the United States.
These corporations include private prisons, which hold valuable government contracts. Additionally, private companies that stock overpriced commissaries and provide telephone services, and private companies using prison labor in their supply chains.
From 2000 to 2016 the number of people housed in private prisons increased five times faster than the total prison population (8.5% of convicts are in private prisons). Over a similar timeframe, the proportion of people detained in private immigration facilities increased by 442% (73% of detained immigrants).
Most inmates across the country perform skilled and unskilled labor typically for less than a dollar per hour. This is training for jobs that don’t need to pay decent wages if they get convicts to do it virtually for free. Private corporations are incentivized to lobby for policies that maximize prison populations in order to sustain a business model that is only profitable because they can exploit artificially deflated labor costs.
“This depression of labor costs is part of what drives profits, which drive wealth. Thanks to our campaign finance laws, wealth buys outsize political influence to lobby for more prisons, which begets more wealth. Wealth also allows you to influence housing, tax, education, policing and sentencing policies….and cultural policies. Wealth also fuels philanthropy – including cultural philanthropy – which, in turn, buys even more social capital. ”
This depression of labor costs is part of what drives profits, which drive wealth. Thanks to our campaign finance laws, wealth buys outsize political influence to lobby for more prisons, which begets more wealth. Wealth also allows you to influence housing, tax, education, policing and sentencing policies….and cultural policies. Wealth also fuels philanthropy – including cultural philanthropy – which, in turn, buys even more social capital.
The arts can mitigate each piece of this chain. Further, the arts can be a tool toward abolition. The Justice Arts Coalition and Art For Justice Fund are examples. We can also drive economic self-determination for BIPOC people through people-led investments in BIPOC-owned businesses. Boston Ujima Project is a great example of this, where community members pool their funds and choose the investees. We can also advocate for arts in public education, for carceral reform and for campaign finance reform.
As GIA has said in our Racial Equity Theory of Transformation, racism was established to facilitate economic exploitation. How?
By using cultural inferiority toward dehumanization of BIPOC people, and separation of all oppressed peoples from each other. Replace cultural inferiority, and we reduce dehumanization and separation, reducing economic exploitation.
As we intervene in racialized systems, we must – all of us – lift each other up. At GIA’s conference, keynote speaker Kamal Sinclair spoke out against cancel culture – in which we constantly correct or even shun those with whom we disagree. GIA rejects cancel culture. Social justice must not be a zero-sum game. We must affirm each other’s humanity. Therefore, we support culture – the expression of our humanity. As we work together to be pro-justice, pro-Black, and pro-structural interventions, we must hold each other in tenderness and make each other better than we were before.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eddie Torres is President & CEO of Grantmakers in the Arts.
