Black Lives Matter

To our community: 

This is a commitment to begin. 

For the past three months, the staff and board of the Center at West Park have been working to preserve our organization and protect the community of artists we serve through the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the last few weeks, we have awakened to a new understanding of a deeper crisis, one that has been over four hundred years in the making: the crisis of systemic racism in our society. 

We are outraged and we are heartbroken by the murders of Rayshard Brooks, Tony McDade, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many more Black and Brown people by White police officers and vigilantes. We know their deaths are part of a long tradition of racist violence against Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) in the United States stretching back through centuries of genocide, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, exclusion, internment, exploitation, mass incarceration, and systemic racism, and that this continuing violence and its perpetual threat cause immeasurable harm to BIPOC communities every day. 

On June 2, Black women leaders in the entertainment industry called for #BlackOutTuesday. They said #TheShowMustBePaused “to intentionally disrupt the work week” and “take a beat for an honest, reflective, and productive conversation about what actions we need to collectively take to support the Black community.” We heard the call and, like many predominantly white performing arts organizations, wrote a statement of solidarity to share with you all. But we realized that our statement was inauthentic. We were not prepared to pause, we did not take the time needed for the conversation that the day called for, and we did not have the record of action and advocacy to call ourselves allies. We began to realize why the call for pause and reflection was so urgent. That evening, we had a conversation with artists in the Object Movement puppetry program about undoing racism in our communities and in ourselves. 

On June 8, three hundred BIPOC theater makers posted a call to action, “We See You, White American Theater.” If you have not read the letter, we strongly urge you to pause and do so now. We read it and recognized ourselves and our actions. The Center at West Park is a predominantly White institution with a predominantly White staff and board, serving predominantly White artists and audiences, located in one of the Whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods in New York City. We were called to overcome our white fragility, our resistance to accepting responsibility for our own part in systemic racism, and to examine how our white privilege has shaped the Center and its programs. This message was reinforced by the powerful Broadway for Black Lives Matter Again forum June 10-12. 

The Center was founded to stand at the nexus of art and activism, of beauty and justice. Our mission is “to build a more inclusive community” through the arts. This ethos inspires our artist residency program, which has presented works centering the voices of BIPOC artists like Turning 15 on the Road to Freedom by Linda Blackmon Lowry, Black Panther Women by Jacqueline Wade, and the Open Choir’s Will Be Heard. However, we recognize that we have not yet lived up to the promise of our mission. In focusing on our own struggle for survival, we have sometimes forgotten that our survival is bound up in the survival of all, that we cannot thrive until all are thriving. We neglected to put the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the center of our work, which led to these core values being pushed to the margins. This has resulted in racially inequitable outcomes in our board membership, staff recruitment, artist residencies, and audience engagement. We wanted to build a new, equitable home for the arts and we didn’t get it right. We are committed to doing better. 

First, we must declare that Black Lives Matter and they have always mattered. Black lives mattered in 1619 and in 1865 and right now and forever. We must and will be more intentional in showing that Black Lives Matter in every facet of our work going forward. 

This is our commitment to begin: We will engage in deeper listening, learning, and self-examination to better understand our own privileges, biases, and blind spots. We will organize conversations, workshops, and strategies to explore and define our role in undoing systemic racism in our organization, our community, and our society. We will launch programs that center BIPOC voices, policies that ensure that more BIPOC hold power in every circle of our organization, and partnerships that expand, diversify, and strengthen our community. All these steps and more are needed to begin to more deeply understand and fulfill our mission to build a diverse, equitable, and inclusive community through the arts, to undo our culture of white fragility and false supremacy, and to contribute to a truly antiracist society where there is never any doubt that Black Lives Matter. 

We do not yet know what all these steps will look like. Right now, we are holding a series of internal conversations to better understand where we are, where we need to go, and what next steps to take. We are forming a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force with members of our staff, board, and artistic community to guide this process going forward. Please look for more announcements and commitments to specific action from us soon. 

This will be a perpetual process of growth, healing, and accountability. Joyfully, it is also a process of liberation. Today is Juneteenth, a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. This day reminds us of our shameful history, and that the wounds of this history are still fresh, but it also reminds us that great change is possible and imperative. Accepting our role in making change is not a burden, it liberates us from the weight of supporting systems that oppress us all. We must remember that justice is intersectional. The work of antiracism intersects with the work of LGBTQ rights, of gender equality, of accessibility, of workers' rights, of immigrant rights, of the rights of religious minorities, and of economic justice. This is the struggle for our collective liberation, and we are humbled and grateful by this opportunity to begin again. 

In Gratitude, 

The Center at West Park

Scott Pyne
Executive Director

Zachary Tomlinson
Artistic Director

Marian M. Warden
President of the Board

If you are looking for steps you can take right now, we are inspired by the Movement for Black Lives, Communities United for Police Reform, New York Budget Justice, and Broadway for Black Lives Matter.