I like the blog but I wish the writer focused on clarity. He tends to be all over the place. And he tends to put a lot of the important stuff at the end of blog posts not in the beginning.
Writer and actor Annette Hubbell was engaged by the Rancho Santa Fe Library in San Diego County, California to perform vignettes from her “Women Warriors” program in 2024. A contract was issued for Hubbell to portray Tubman and Mary McLeod Bethune, as well as Harriet Beecher Stowe, two Black woman and one white woman.
Then, according to Hubbell, shortly before the performance was to be given, the library asked Hubbell to swap out Bethune and Tubman for other famous women, white women, in her repertoire, reportedly because it would not be appropriate for her to portray the Black historical figures.
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What’s likely to get lost here is that, in Hubbell’s own telling, she offers a menu of vignettes from which presenters can choose and the library allegedly requested Bethune and Tubman, only to change their mind as awareness sank in and the performance approached. If the library had done its due diligence, if the various departments that weighed in closer to the performance had been involved at the start, Hubbell might have been asked to do different characters from the beginning and what now is being decried as censorship would never have arisen.
Someone, somewhere along the way at the library really dropped the ball with that initial selection – were they paying attention? – and now the library, and champions of authentic representation, will likely pay the price. This case too easily fits into the narrative advanced by four months of vigorous attacks on anything that conservative firebrands can claim to be a result of legitimate and necessary equity, diversity and inclusion efforts, which they seek to vilify and eradicate.
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It’s impossible not to wonder whether the furor here could yield a Kennedy Center booking for Hubbell so that Richard Grennell and his cohort can stick another thumb in the eye of those who decry his partisan reframing of that institution.
I could guess who Grenell was but I googled anway.