Diversity, (Actor's) Equity, & Inclusion

PART ONE: MY "WHITE SUPREMACIST" UNION

The theater is the only institution in the world which has been dying for four thousand years and has never succumbed. It requires tough and devoted people to keep it alive. ~John Steinbeck

I’ve been a proud member of Actor’s Equity Association, the labor union of theatre actors and stage managers, since 1990. It is because of AEA that I have had health care, am accruing a pension and retirement fund, and have enjoyed safe and sanitary workplaces and decent working conditions throughout my career.

Actor’s Equity Association was founded in 1919, at a time not dissimilar to our own, full of social and political unrest. The country had been traumatized by The Great War, people were struggling financially, there’d been an influenza epidemic with a devastating death toll and a lockdown such as we recently experienced, during which theaters were closed for many months. Actors had no job security or benefits, no bargaining power, they could be worked as many hours as managers demanded, they even had to provide their own wardrobe. AEA, led by stars like Helen Hayes and Marie Dressler, was established to improve the lives and livelihoods of theater actors and stage managers.

Actor’s Equity has always been a leader in the area of civil rights, desegregating theaters and instituting sweeping anti-discrimination policies, many still in place today. This from the AEA website:

In 1947, when the National Theatre in Washington, D.C. barred black audience members, Equity resolved that its members would not play at the National and the theatre closed. Five years later, the National reopened under different management and with a non-discrimination policy.

In 1961, the League of Theatres and Producers agreed that no actor would be required to perform in any theatre or place of performance where discrimination is practiced against any actor or patron by reason of race, creed or color. This policy has since been extended to prohibit discrimination based on gender, sexual preference or political belief.

During the McCarthy HUAC hearings and the blacklist, the union refused to expel any Hollywood blacklisted actors. 

The Rosetta LeNoire Award was established by Actors' Equity in 1988 in order to recognize those members that adhere to the union's policy regarding non-traditional casting.  Since then, the union has established numerous awards recognizing companies and individuals championing diversity in theatre, from the Ivy Bethune (“The Ivy” Award), to the Kathryn V. Lamkey (“Spirit”) Award to the Paul Robeson Award, and the soon to be established Frederick O’Neal Award, in honor of the first Black president of the union.

You can imagine my feelings, then, when I started the AEA online course, Best Practices for Inclusive Theatre Workplaces, and saw Actor’s Equity Association described as a “white supremacist organization.” 

This, amongst other objectionable characterizations, irrelevancies and exaggerations in this course led me to reach out to a DEI Strategist at the union. This from my email to the department:

I’d like to address the use of the term “white supremacist." To me, this term has the same meaning as “bigot,” and immediately brings to mind Nazis, skinheads, and the Klan.

To say that AEA has been a traditionally white supremacist organization is wrong and insulting. As a member of this union for 33 years, it personally offends me that official language in union communications defines AEA, and veteran members, in this way. I am not a bigot nor a member of a white supremacist group.

The strategist I’ve been communicating with, Ms. Danee Conley (who has been quite helpful, and thorough as possible in her responses), replied as follows:

I am glad you were able to take the Best Practices training and understand your frustrations; the training is currently in revision, and I have noted the things you mentioned as we build that out.

While I agree that “white supremacist” is a strong term, the sentiment behind it being that Equity, like many organizations, have benefited from the impacts of white supremacy in this country is a fair one. I do agree that there is a way to explore that topic in a different way.

Fair enough. I still think the term is an intentionally confrontational one, and this characterization bears further scrutiny: 

The covid lockdown of 2020 brought a 97% drop in employment for members of my union. As we all hunkered down, we witnessed the George Floyd murder and the surge of the Black Lives Matter protests and demands for change.  By June 2020, AEA had declared itself an antiracist organization.

Actor’s Equity was low hanging fruit for a DEI takeover, because the membership is a largely disengaged one, for the primary reason that most of the membership never work.

In AEA’s 2020-2021 Annual Report, of the approximately 51,000 members in good standing, only around 3500 members—both actors and stage managers—were employed nationally per work week. That amounts to about 6% of members employed at any given time.

Broadway and Broadway tours—the commercial theatre industry, where the most money is earned—accounted for the majority of the work weeks: 54%. And 35% of all members who worked that season made $2500 or less for the year.

See where I’m going with this?  Annually, the vast majority of members of the actor’s and stage manager’s union in America nationwide do not work and don’t make their livings in theatre. 

There used to be two ways of joining the union: either you were offered a union contract for a particular production, or you earned points toward membership as an Equity Membership Candidate, which meant a kind of professional apprenticeship, earning your way into the union.  Using racial demographic numbers, DEI at Actor’s Equity extrapolated a built in hiring bias toward white actors and stage managers, as detailed in the following statement (from the AEA website):

For decades, joining Actors’ Equity Association had been limited to those working for an Equity employer. But Equity theaters, like all entertainment industry employers, are disproportionately run by white people, and their programming and hiring decisions often hold biases in favor of people from similar demographics. Until now, our membership rules have left access to membership in employers’ hands; they have implicitly created a disproportionately high barrier to access for actors and stage managers of marginalized identities. We have inadvertently contributed to the systemic exclusion of people of color and people of other marginalized identities from the benefits of union membership. 

The union addressed this “high barrier” to membership by creating Open Access Membership, which basically means anybody who wants to join Equity can buy in—regardless of employment, experience, training, credentials—with the purpose of allowing more members of marginalized groups to populate the ranks.

In the statement above, AEA places the responsibility for the hiring biases squarely with employers. This underscores an important point:

AEA MEMBERS DO NOT MAKE THE JOBS.
We are the employable, not the employer.

Building up the membership by throwing open the doors to anyone wishing to join might help fill AEA’s empty coffers, but in essence, it creates more unemployed union actors and stage managers, regardless of race, gender or other identity group. When I pointed this out three years ago as part of a thread on the Actor’s Equity Association Members Only Discussion Board on Facebook, I was censored first, then my post was deleted. At that point I quit the board—so much for discussion.

In a conversation I had with a colleague on AEA council, who shall remain anonymous, I learned that the Open Access policy has only, thus far, generated about 2200 new memberships, swelling the ranks by less than 1%. Of those new members, 38% identify as BIPOC. So, out of 51,000 members, this policy has added around 800 new BIPOC members—not a massive success. My colleague shared with me the kind of numbers manipulation applied by DEI to the makeup of council committees and elsewhere, saying, “The amount of resources, both intellectual and financial, going into these DEI machinations is absurd.”

Other factors, no doubt, account for the preponderance of white folks in our union: the repertoire particular theaters produce might have more white roles or be cast traditionally; the demographics of audience members, subscribers and donors, and the culture of the particular community in which the venue is situated may dictate the popular repertoire. Their tastes are, probably, too limited and in need of expansion. Regional theaters everywhere do new play development these days, bringing fresh offerings to expanding audiences. We should encourage non traditional casting, and directors and producers should widen their vision. 

AND THEY ARE. Look around. It’s happening in incredible work all over the country and on Broadway: more diverse representation than in any previous era in American theatre history.

But let’s take a quick look at the demographics, since it’s on the basis of the numbers that the DEI folks at Equity have extrapolated a system of “white supremacy” and hiring bias.

It should come as no surprise that a largely apathetic and disengaged union membership typically fails to respond to demographic surveys sent to their email boxes. Looking at that same season of 2020-2021, this is a partial breakdown of the approximately 51,000 active members in terms of race and ethnicity based on those who responded:

White members dominated at 32,903 or 65.1% of members who responded.

Members identifying as Black: 4,294 or 8.4% (which, as the DEI area points out, is well below the national number).

Now, given the disengagement of the majority membership, the following numbers didn’t surprise me, but I was surprised by the way these figures remained unacknowledged in the DEI conclusions I’ve seen.

The Race/Ethnicity survey included the following categories:

Mixed Race or Ethnicity

Prefer Not to Say

Unknown (members who didn’t fill out the survey or who left the Race/Ethnicity area blank)

The total members comprising these categories were 10,482 or 21% of the total membership.

That’s nearly a quarter of all members nationwide! Add this number to the numbers of respondents identifying as Black, Hispanic and other specific ethnicities and racial groups—and the white dominating bias looks somewhat less outsized, with white members outnumbering other (and unspecified) racial categories two to one. 

I suspect that there will be very different numbers in the next annual report. AEA created a new member portal which required members to answer a demographic survey before they were permitted a first login to access their accounts via the new portal.

I know that Equity can lead again now as it always has. As the industry further embraces inclusion, responds to the forces of cultural change, theatre will give us more and more stories that reflect the true diversity of today’s world. I hope too that fresh forays in casting and interpretation will be paired with dedicated programs of new audience development and outreach. HOWEVER:

I will never be down with an ideology that imposes itself on a struggling and small population of artists just trying to keep a hand in, whilst fomenting distrust and division between members that in no way improves work opportunity or working conditions for any of us.

The flawed and often full out insulting Best Practices online course scolds us that it’s our “job to get better.”  Sorry, AEA’s DEI—you need to do better. Way better. We’re a labor union. We elect our council and our officers. We pay dues. And personally, I don’t deserve to have my entire career and three decades of membership in the union insulted. I suggest some of my sleeping brothers, sisters and others in the AEA ranks might do well to wake up and pay attention to what’s afoot. And our elected council members need to speak up when it’s necessary—and when you can. Please. Reach out to me—I will maintain your anonymity.

Stay tuned for more on this series probing DEI at AEA. And stay strong.