January 26, 2021
In early June 2020, WAM Theatre released a statement of solidarity with #BlackLivesMatter in the aftermath of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, James Scurlock, and too many others.
In that statement, the WAM Team and Board, as individuals and as an organization, committed ourselves to aligning our activist work with the principles of anti-racism.
In our Accountability Plan, we name the practices and behaviors of which we are now aware that have excluded, exploited, and misrepresented our BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) WAMily artists and community members, and we outline the measures we will be taking to repair that harm and to reduce and prevent future harm.
Today, we are writing this open letter to you, our WAMily, to invite you to share this journey with us and to hold us accountable to the principles we say set forth in today’s accountability plan.
Our WAMily is wide and wonderful. It includes all those who work with us as artists and staff; partner with us as community collaborators and beneficiaries; attend our events; and volunteer, donate to, and support our organization in other ways. Our intention is that all members of our WAMily—across race, gender, sexual orientation, location, age, and ability—feel seen, heard, and valued. Today, we speak to all of you.
WAM is a predominantly white professional theatre organization that operates at the crossroads of arts and activism, focusing on intersectional feminism and gender equity. We create our art in a rural community, the ancestral homelands of the Mohican Tribe, now known as the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. While the number of people of color in Berkshire County has grown 76% since 2000, this population currently forms only 8% of the county’s total.
As we share our accountability plan with you, we acknowledge We See You, White American Theater. Its list of demands, which emerges from years, decades, and generations of harm and trauma, clearly required an immense amount of strength and emotional energy to craft. With humility, we extend gratitude for that work.
We are also grateful to all those from whom we continue to learn, including Gwendolyn VanSant and BRIDGE, a valued community partner that is a vital to our cultural competency learning; Nicole Brewer, an anti-racist theatre consultant who works with our leadership team; Heather Bruegl, Director of Cultural Affairs for the Stockbridge-Munsee Community, who partnered with us in 2020 on The Thanksgiving Play; and Trenda Loftin, who serves as our BIPOC Staff Advocate.
WAM’s mission remains focused on advocating for the rights of women and girls. But in order to address one form of systematic discrimination or disadvantage, we understand we must address and disrupt them all.
To all of you in our WAMily, thank you for holding us, the WAM Team and Board, accountable as we work to dismantle our white supremacist culture and become an anti-racist organization.
We are guided in the work by this quote from Me and White Supremacy written by Layla F. Saad:
“For real change to happen, you must also challenge systems and work to create structural changes, dismantling white supremacy institutionally as well as personally. It is hard to imagine what a world without white supremacy would be like. A world where BIPOC get to live with the same level of dignity and humanity as white people. And yet we must continue to work toward it. White supremacy is the paradigm we have come to accept as normal. But normal does not make it right. It never has.“
Here’s to doing all we can to create the world in which we want to live.
With gratitude,
The WAM Team and Board