What pass do I get for having worked for a gay black immigrant (Preston Bailey) for almost seven years? For having most of my clients be gay men and/or women for the almost ten years I have been in business? For having written about the inequities of gay people being unable to marry for my law school thesis in 1991? Yeah, not a thing.
I am a racist, full of biases and discriminatory thoughts. Am I aware of them? Nope. Do I have them every day? No question. I come from the pinnacle of privilege: white man given every advantage society has to offer — from higher education to access to conversations and opportunities my very privilege affords me. And my name hides the fact that I am 100% Eastern European Jewish. So there is that too.
How could I not be ignorant of the biases that live in our world, yesterday and today? The only thing I can say with certainty is that I understand that I do not understand (HT to my brilliant wife, Cate). What I can do every day is to live my own mantra: to do better when I know better. It is a daily practice of humility, grace and humanity. I will own the shame my own unconscious racism brings to bear and then I will let it go with the vision of being better. As I tell my children, it is never the falling down, but the getting back up that matters. Who cares that I do not have a hateful heart, that my intentions are not discriminatory? My actions speak otherwise. My commitment is to listen and hear hard truths every day so that I can embody being better, with full and complete understanding that there is no there there, just movement.
Now to creative business. Racism is ever present in all parts of creative business as it is in all parts of our culture in the United States. We exclude others for the color of their skin, sexuality, faith, and economic status every day, all day. We absolutely need to do the work of exposing these biases and hateful exclusions, and to do our ultimate best to eliminate them. However, I have also seen these very same biases been used to justify equally shameful business practices. I have watched an unscrupulous wedding planner remark after getting off the phone with a client where she discussed the budget that she was not going to let that client “Jew her down”, despite the fact that she did not have her proverbial sh-t together when it came to professionally discussing said budget — she just wanted blind trust. This has nothing to do with race, it has everything to do with respect when you are spending someone else’s money.
I love Preston forever and ever. It is a well known fact that he was deeply in debt when I joined his business, teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The only reason he made it out was because he decided to run a better business. That meant both of us doing the hard work of analyzing and assessing every single thing his business did, every single moment of every single day. To the penny – truly not kidding. He had lived under the premise that borrowing from the future would take care of the ills of yesterday and today. By the time we came together, he already knew that carousel had ended and wanted to be sober. Was it my whiteness, my pedigree, that lent him credibility to come out of his unfortunate financial situation? I do not think so, even a little bit. But maybe to some others. And that is the thing: It is too easy to put a label on anything as the reason. The reason Preston recovered is because he did the incredibly challenging work of getting better. He took risks, gave me a chance to change things (not easy at all to do) and enforced a discipline with his business that he had never done in his previous twenty years of business. The discipline lead to better opportunities and better opportunities lead to even better opportunities. That is how it works: being better every day to make tomorrow even better. Nobody knows if it will work out, but that ignorance does not excuse the effort, it demands it. Many many creative business owners just refuse to grasp that truth, even today.
It has been a long, long time since I have been involved with Preston or his business, but I know the man and his voice. He is the very representation that hard, mindful work is its own reward. I am equally certain that, since we have parted, he has made missteps and been the victim and perpetrator of racism, conscious or unconscious. It is his humanity as it is all of ours. The real question is what we do with it once we see it. My confidence is that Preston meets it head on and his candor moves things forward. Such is his life, his grace and his gift.
My naïveté is that we can level the playing field to give all creative businesses a chance at finding those who care most about their work and vice-versa. If a black heterosexual female wedding planner is the best artist to handle the wedding of two white men, then my hope, my deep unbinding prayer, is that that is exactly what will happen. We have a long long way to go, no doubt. This is the work though and how we can do better tomorrow.
Practically, though, it means that every creative business owner needs to do the deep, intrinsic work on their businesses first. Why should I entrust the essence of my very life — my home, my wedding, my building, my image — to your business if you do not know your own narrative, how to take me on the journey that I need to go on with you for me to experience the world as you would have me? I might be the subject of the story, but you are the story teller. It is not hard to do good business if you have the courage to own the story of your creative business as only you would tell it. And if you do not have that courage, please forgive yourself, ask to find it and, if not possible, just get out of the way for those that do.
The very best part of our culture is we love redemption and redemption is ours if we are willing to be humble and get down to doing the damn work. As we tear down the biases and seek to heal the gashes at the fabric of our society, we will all want the placebo of saying look at what we are doing. That just is not good enough. No one needs a gift, we need authentic connection and real opportunity to express that connection across all platforms. This will take time and conviction.
No one can cook a meal in a raging fire. Consistent, constant heat at the right temperature is what is required to give the chef her chance to be brilliant. But make no mistake, there is a monster difference between a chef and a great cook. The chef is a professional and knows how to be brilliant every moment of every day. So yes, let us light the fire, keep it burning well, but do make it impossible for anyone to ignore the question of whether the artist in front of you is singularly able to tell your story through their own as a creative business on every level — financially, physically, emotionally, even spiritually. If yes, fantastic, if not, then let us make it necessary, required even, for that person to move on until she finds the artist that can. Faith, conviction and courage required of all involved.
