The National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa has backed away from its plan to host an evening performance of Aleshea Harris’s “Is God Is” to an “all-black identifying audience” on Feb. 17th.
Quillette’s Canadian editor, Jonathan Kay, reportedly asked the government-funded performing arts centre whether a mixed-race couple would be allowed to attend the show.
It’s not clear whether he received a response from the NAC, but Kay’s Twitter posts ignited a firestorm of controversy over the theatre’s plan. Their revised website now reads that the Crown corporation is “committed to creating a welcoming experience of the performing arts for all Canadians.”
That it required so much controversy before the organizers stated what should have been obvious to them from the beginning is perhaps the real problem here. A national performing arts centre should always offer its programming to “all Canadians” without racially profiling its ticket holders.
The notion that our national arts institutions should exclude some races, and that doing so is somehow a sign of progress is, quite frankly, regressive.
One of the landmark civil rights decisions delivered by the U.S. Supreme Court was Brown v Board of Education in 1954, which overturned the segregationist precedent established by the Plessy v Ferguson case of 1896.
Plessy, a man of mixed race, had been denied a seat in a rail car reserved for white passengers. He was forced to sit in the rail car set aside for blacks. He refused to comply and was subsequently imprisoned. The court’s majority in Plessy upheld the railroad’s policy and ruled that the provision of separate but equal services for blacks and for whites did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s equal protection clause.
The court found that “a legal distinction between the white and colored races—a distinction which is founded in the color of the two races, and which must always exist so long as white men are distinguished from the other race by color—has no tendency to destroy the legal equality of the two races, or re-establish a state of involuntary servitude.”
The court reasoned that so long as the railway provided equal services, the fact that the races sat in different cars and were prohibited from mixing ought to be regarded as no affront to their equality or their liberty.
It’s as if the NAC was unwittingly returning to the pro-segregation logic of the Plessy ruling, and doing so, ironically, in the triumphant spirit of what goes by the name of “anti-racism” these days.
So long as the performance on one evening is equivalent in quality to the performance the next evening, then surely, the organizers must have thought, there is no harm to fundamental principles of equality or liberty, even if the theatre segregates the audience by race.
After all, the NAC would be providing a “separate but equal” experience for everyone involved. But such was the U.S. Supreme Court’s logic in 1896 that helped to sustain segregation in the south for another generation before Brown v Board, 1954, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Justice Harlan, writing the dissenting opinion in Plessy v Ferguson, saw things differently.
“If a white man and a black man choose to occupy the same public conveyance on a public highway, it is their right to do so; and no government, proceeding alone on grounds of race, can prevent it without infringing the personal liberty of each,” he wrote.
Could the NAC really exclude whites, indigenous peoples, or people of Asian descent without effectively infringing on the personal liberty of everyone?
Only when Kay asked the simple question about whether a mixed-race couple could attend the performance together, did it perhaps dawn on the organizers that their plan wasn’t as progressive as it first seemed. Or they merely caved to mounting pressure.
Either way, it is disturbing that it required this much controversy before the cultural elites running Canada’s National Arts Centre remembered that their job is not to segregate Canadians by race but to create “a welcoming experience of the performing arts for all Canadians.”
