“From White Liberalism to Abolitionism in Arts Institutions”

With renewed calls for racial justice, many arts institutions seek to “do good” in support of Black Lives Matter and other movements to end systemic racism. Commonly considered liberal bastions, the arts are nonetheless strongly associated with white privilege and elite status. Nowhere is this truer than in the arts education pipeline. In this lecture, Dr. Amelia M. Kraehe discusses white liberalism as an ideological stance that masks racism in contemporary K-20 arts education before introducing abolitionism as a contemporary praxis grounded in a Black radical tradition to move the arts beyond gestures of goodwill and toward racial justice.