During the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted in June 2020, we published the letter below in an eblast on June 4, 2020 denouncing the systemic oppression of black people in America. Since then, we have engaged Authentic Coaching and Consulting, Tanya O. Williams and Bari Katz, to work with TMT to audit our organization’s practices, blind spots, and unconscious biases, and provide anti-racism training for our board / staff / artists. We have just begun the work and will continue to update this page and share our with our community the steps TMT is making to becoming a more just and equitable organization.
George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Nina Pop, James Scurlock, David McAtee, Jamel Floyd.
We grieve for the horror of their loss and the loss of countless other Black lives. We are angry. We are sickened by the racism that still deforms every aspect of American culture, and we are passionately committed to working for change.
We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement. Black Americans have continued to suffer under the yoke of white supremacy for over four hundred years. African Americans must no longer bear the burden alone; everyone must take up this work.
We at Target Margin Theater want to listen and learn. We commit to questioning ourselves, our practices as individuals and as a company, and ceaselessly challenging our habits and structures. Our company has grown and thrived with all the benefits of white privilege. We have to explore what this deep truth means and how to change it for our future.
Our mission is to reinvent the world; this work starts in the theater but is only meaningful because it extends far beyond the theater. We pursue a political project, a social imperative, and an artistic ideal. Our creative work celebrates difference and otherness. The artistic, social, and political dimension of this work are one and the same; they are indivisible.
Our industry and culture have been dominated by white audiences, white artists, and the privilege that comes from their whiteness (i.e. money and access); and thrived on the inequities and exploitation of black and brown people, their stories, their labor, their very lives, for far too long. We do not have answers, but we do have questions:
We do not have answers, but we do have questions:
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How are we complicit?
How will we change?
What action should we take?
We own these challenges and we promise to rise to them. We will continually ask these questions, challenge ourselves internally, and make dismantling these structures a necessary ongoing conversation in every part of our work. We promise also to be open to other voices. We invite anyone who is a part of the Target Margin community at any point over the past 30 years who wishes to hold us accountable for these values. Call us out for our privilege and complicity in ways we may or may not even realize. Write to us. We will own and share your words. But even if no one chooses to contact us, we will undertake this work. We will never stop creating real tangible ways we can change the world.