Trump's 'taking down everything Black': Fired Kennedy Center VP slams president's takeover

President Donald Trump’s efforts to take over cultural institutions and attack diversity, equity and inclusion programs has centered on the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the venerable arts institution in Washington, D.C. The Kennedy Center was established by Congress and has been run by a bipartisan board since it opened in 1971, but Trump upended that in February when he moved to install his loyalists in key positions and make himself chair. Last week, the Kennedy Center’s new leadership fired at least seven members of its social impact team that worked to reach more diverse audiences and artists, including the vice president and artistic director of Social Impact, Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The acclaimed artist and playwright joins Democracy Now! to discuss Trump’s changes at the Kennedy Center, which he criticizes for destroying a “sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression.” Joseph notes that while the Kennedy Center has not yet made drastic programming changes, the rhetoric from Trump and others “severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, as we turn to the Trump administration’s intensifying attacks on cultural institutions and diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, including the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

In February, President Trump ousted the center’s longtime chair, David Rubenstein, made himself chair of the board. Trump also fired longtime President Deborah Rutter. Last week, the Kennedy Center fired at least seven members of its Social Impact initiative, including its vice president, artistic director, the renowned artist Marc Bamuthi Joseph. The team aimed to expand the art center’s reach to diverse audiences, to commission new works by Black composers. The job terminations come weeks after President Trump took over the Kennedy Center and also appointed his allies, including his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, to the board, and her mother and second lady Usha Vance and two hosts on Fox News, Laura Ingraham and Maria Bartiromo.

Marc Bamuthi Joseph recorded this video from his office just after he was fired.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Well, I am sitting in my office at the Kennedy Center one last time. It’s funny. I’m taking things down, like this red, black and green American flag and this extraordinary piece of artwork that my man Greg made that honors Stevie Wonder and this poster from BAM and a commemorative album that was organized by Swizz Beatz. Basically, I’m taking down everything Black in my office, just as the new leadership of the Kennedy Center is doing its best to disavow much of the literal color that has made this place special. I am grieving and angry and also ready to be rid of the moral injury that has come with being in this place. It’s hard to say goodbye, but it isn’t hard to say goodbye to an oppressive situation. So, may liberation be my liturgy. I’m proud of what we made here. We will always have an impact.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, speaking after he was fired as vice president and artistic director of Social Impact at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the last time he was in his office. And this is a portion from Marc Bamuthi Joseph’s spoken word performance Friday, when he went back to Oakland for a timely production with the Oakland Symphony titled “The Forgiveness Suite,” accompanied by musician Daniel Bernard Roumain.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Steps to grace. Face the hurt. Unthread the truth. Choose mercy. Engage your transgressors. Say I leave this pain with you. Grace requires a loosening of other people’s stuff for American-socialized Black girls who considered shame reflexively when self-love wasn’t enough. Grace is never enough when the forgiveness isn’t deserved. But here you are, facing the truth, reconciling the pain by extending grace.

AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been listening to Marc Bamuthi Joseph. He joins us right now from Virginia.

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Bamuthi. Talk about what happened last week. Talk about what’s happening to the Kennedy Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Peace, Amy. Good morning to you, and good morning to everyone listening and watching.

I feel so privileged to be the child of immigrants and having lived in the state of California for a long time. Moving to D.C. infused me with a different sense of patriotism and connection to the American promise, to the plurality that makes this country truly great.

There has been, as you’ve distilled, an infusion of a kind of binary political discourse into what’s supposed to be a sanctuary for freedom of thought and freedom of creative expression. The Kennedy Center, it should be said, has not officially canceled any performances or explicitly contractually removed themselves from relationship to any artists. But as you’ve been describing so diligently and so bravely over the course of your entire career, we create atmosphere through rhetoric. The stated agenda as institutionalized in spaces like the National Endowment for the Arts, let’s say, severely restricts and almost criminalizes demographic realities outside of white, straight, male Christianity. The specific attack on gay, trans and drag performers has narrowed the cultural radius at the Kennedy Center significantly, so that artists feel like they can’t in good conscience come to the Kennedy Center. So you’re seeing artists like Issa Rae or the producers of Hamilton or the artist Rhiannon Giddens remove themselves from their relationship to the Kennedy Center.

And that, in turn, trickles down to the brave staff, who are arts professionals who care about cultural providence and have to do their very best to make it possible for artists to continue to be at their best. But against the backdrop of this oppressive regime and this politically narrow board of directors, that’s extraordinarily difficult to do.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, you have this unbelievable moment that we just played, Jon Batiste playing “Star-Spangled Banner.” President Trump is saluting —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — at the Super Bowl, and he had just fired him from the board of trustees of the Kennedy Center —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — along with many others. And then John F. Kennedy, you’ve got the portrait there in the John F. Kennedy Performing Arts Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And when he came for his board meeting, President Trump as chair, what he put up, new portraits, himself, his wife, Usha Vance and Vice President Vance.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah, you know, what you’re seeing all over government are folks who aren’t necessarily experienced in the lines or departments or vectors of action that they’re supposed to lead. And there is no formal experience in either nonprofits, arts management or the art of curation that is now present at the top of the organizational chart, beginning with the board chair. So, you know, the desire to satisfy one’s ego or the desire to be vengeful, apparently, has superseded the desire to serve this nation in terms of making a safe space for artists, particularly artists from historically marginalized communities or historically minoritized communities to thrive.

The work that we did in Social Impact — and I’m so proud of my team, my staff and all of my colleagues who supported us — you know, that work was meant to focus on the historically marginalized, but also it connected to this idea of the constitutionality of inspiration. Our belief is that you cannot be — you cannot have access to the franchise, to the American franchise, if you don’t have access to the impulse of creativity, that just like you have access to the ballot box or equal protection under the law under the 14th Amendment, you also have access and protection to inspiration. How can you be an American if you cannot hope? And who authors hope more than artists? So, this diminishment of creativity, of ideas, the diminishment of folks’ access to high-level inspired works of art is among the more un-American things, I think, that a leader would do.

AMY GOODMAN: During your time there, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, you helped launch the Culture Caucus, which offered two-year residencies with groups —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — that work with queer and trans youth, formerly incarcerated people —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the disabled community.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: You also established a national partnership —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — called Conflux, which worked with the National Arab Orchestra —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — the First Nations community and World Pride.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Your audience, mainly wealthy and white.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And can you talk about the direction that Trump is now taking the performing arts center in? We heard from, what, Steve Bannon, one of his allies, that he had spoken to Ric Grenell, the new head of the Kennedy Center, that they’re going to be bringing, what, in one of the first performances, the January 6th Choir to perform there to usher —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — in a new era of culture in the new Kennedy Center.

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah, I won’t speak to the president’s curatorial tastes. They speak for themselves. I think maybe what I would point to is the list of maybe more than 200 musicians who didn’t want their music played at his rallies. That speaks to a broader environment, I think, and disconnect between the arts community and the political direction of the president of the United States.

All the work that you cited, that’s the work that we stand on and that we’re proud of. You know, your listeners and your viewers know, going out to have a date night or a family night is increasingly expensive — parking and food, and, you know, not to mention the cost of the tickets themselves, child care. A lot of the work that we did was we lowered the barrier to entry from a financial standpoint, but also from a social standpoint. You know, my folks always want to know who all gonna be there, right? Well, what we did in Social Impact was we helped usher in a culture of invitation. The Kennedy Center, historically, at its best, produces more than 2,000 events a year.

So, maybe less than focus on what happens curatorially, I think we all have to ask ourselves: How many artists are willing to come into a space with such a narrow field of cultural vision? What is the scale of the Kennedy Center going to be like six months from now or a year from now?

What happens inside the building is only as powerful as the people and the artists within it. So, you know, God bless all the curators at the Kennedy Center, but maybe more importantly, God bless the artists, who now have perhaps one less venue to share their work with the world. And then, God bless the audiences, because audiences or, you know, American citizens, folks who have less access to inspiration erode the democracy from the point of a lack of sight onto the creative horizon.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to also ask you, Bamuthi, about Trump’s executive order —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: — signed last week, appointing the vice president, JD Vance, to eliminate, quote, “divisive, race-centered ideology,” unquote, from Smithsonian museums, research centers and the National Zoo. The order, called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” aims to remove exhibits and programs that portray U.S. history and values as “inherently harmful and oppressive,” unquote. It cites in particular the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which opened in 2016. The Smithsonian operates independently, since it was established as a public-private partnership by Congress in 1846, but roughly receives 60% of its funding from the federal government. You know, you’re an Oakland guy, but you’ve moved to Washington —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: — for your job, that you were just fired from, and I’m sure you’ve spent time at the African American museum. The significance of —

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Absolutely.

AMY GOODMAN: — putting Vance in charge of deciding what exhibits are appropriate or not, what is American or not?

MARC BAMUTHI JOSEPH: Yeah. Yeah. It is chilling. It is a harbinger. It is a signifier in the most ominous of terms.

I think about the words of John F. Kennedy inscribed on the wall at the Kennedy Center. Kennedy spoke of an America that was unafraid of grace and beauty. I think about the writers and the teachers who made me, everyone from Dr. Daniel Omotosho Black at Clark Atlanta University to the author Toni Morrison, the poet Nikki Giovanni. I think about how they all authored the story of our overcoming.

America is actually built on struggle. And, you know, it’s obviously impossible to decouple American history from a genocidal, hyper-patriarchal, hyper-capitalist frame and origin story. But the idea of democracy itself is a radical idea. The Constitution itself is a critical theory. It describes a way, a populist way, that requires participation in order to actually make the country thrive. In order to be — in order to fully participate in the democracy, you have to sublimate or suppress your apathy.

My partners at SOZO Artists and I think about the idea that the way to turn apathy into empathy is to infuse inspiration as a conversion element. These museums, these Smithsonian museums, inspire folks because they distill the story of our overcoming. You enter — even if you entered one of the Smithsonian institutions apathetic as to the idea of struggle or overcoming, you are inspired inside of that institution, and you leave a more compassionate and more empathetic human being. So, you know, this description of what the Smithsonian institutions do, particularly what we call the “Blacksonian” here locally, that description is severely un-American and disconnected from the American promise. But maybe more critically, it minimizes the opportunity to generate empathy among not only the citizens of this country, but visitors from all over the world.

AMY GOODMAN: Marc Bamuthi Joseph, I want to thank you so much for being with us, renowned artist and playwright, fired from his role as vice president and artistic director of the Kennedy Center’s Social Impact initiative.