An agency of Nashville, Tennessee’s city government created to promote the arts has set out to allocate taxpayer-funded grants on the basis of race, hoping to leverage their funding to achieve “anti-racist outcomes.”
The Metro Nashville Arts Commission’s director, Daniel Singh, outlined his goal to encourage “anti-racist outcomes” through the use of arts grants, hoping to return “land, money and narrative resources to Indigenous, African and Asian peoples within the ‘cultural community,’” an investigation from The Pamphleteer, a local Nashville media outlet, revealed.
Singh’s vision for the Metro Nashville Arts Commission was articulated in a presentation called “What Could An Anti Racist Cultural Planning Process Look Like.”
The presentation endorsed the tenets of Critical Race Theory and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) agenda, even claiming that “‘Race’, ‘the arts’, and ‘white people’ emerged at a similar point in history and worked together to facilitate the development of colonial and imperialism.”
One slide of the presentation, titled “Example Principles of Antiracist Strategies,” explains that the Metro Arts should seek to destabilize the “Pan European project of Whiteness” and “disrupt the invisibility of Whiteness” by disempowering “art forms that maintain frames of European Supremacy.”
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Another slide, called “Metro Arts’ Equity Framework” clearly articulates the commission’s intent to give out taxpayer money to grantees on the basis of their race in order to “deeply disrupt systemic inequities.”
“Metro Arts’ is committed to consistently meeting criteria for antiracist reform, centering People of the Global Majority in decision-making, material benefit, and distribution of resources,” the slide reads.
The presentation was created in conjunction with Hillombo LLC, a Pennsylvania-based consulting organization that uses “critical pedagogy …. Marxism, and Critical Race Theory” to create an alternative to the “white racial frame.”
While the commission asks grant applicants whether or not their organization qualifies as “BIPOC-led,” Metro Legal Director Wally Dietz has stated that the commission asks “for demographic purposes, not for the purpose of prioritizing certain applicants” when asked if Metro Arts could be hit with Title VI lawsuits.
The revelations come as millions of dollars worth of operating grants from the Commission have not been dispersed to grantees, with Singh unwilling to explain why the grants remain unpaid.
Last month, Metro Nashville stated that it would audit the Arts Commission.