Dear Mayor, Commissioners, Mr. Dietz and Mr. Crumbo,
At Metro Arts, you have an Executive Director who is demonstrably dedicated to the stated mission: “Drive an Equitable and Vibrant Community through the Arts.” We repeat that mission here because it unfortunately seems that some do not have a clear grasp on what equity is, and continually impede any movements toward this goal. We also thank Commissioners Wade and Love, who consistently stand up for equity and remind others that separate concerns are separate concerns.
Another issue is that the Executive Director, who was hired for the express purpose of implementing much needed change and equitable policies, is not being allowed to do this work at Metro Arts.
Executive Director Daniel Singh has been systematically blocked from doing the very work he was hired to do, including not even currently being permitted to work at all. Multiple lawyers have been hired to fight the progress Director Singh has made in bringing equity to the arts. This is in excess of our already bloated legal department, and extends even to include an FMLA lawyer to prevent the continuation of actual equitable changes. Retaining Luther Wright to conduct another HR investigation is reminiscent of the events that pushed Stephanie Kang out of her position and collapsed the entire Bureau of Health Equity.
The administration and this commission like to talk pretty words about equity, but when it comes to the doing, there’s much more interest in photo ops and optics, shallow measures that lead to more self congratulatory lip service. When it comes to action, even after decades, still the powers that be seek to stall.
For years, the community has called for equity in the arts, and there has been plentiful documentation of the need for it. When resources are concentrated in a few large white-led organizations, our creative class and our entire city suffer. We know this problem goes back to the beginning of the department, and we have referenced an article about it from 1998, and yet again we hear that we must accept only the tiniest increments so as not to allow any established institutions to feel a fraction of the harm BIPOC have always faced, by design, here in Nashville.
We know highways were built to bisect our town, cutting off Black neighborhoods to physically enforce segregation and ensure inferior access. We know many here to this day have fought for civil rights, leading and participating in momentous wins. We know the remedies have been slow to come and woefully incomplete.
The divisiveness and messiness that is inherent to equity work repeatedly gets blamed on the equity workers. The nature and necessity of “good trouble” isn’t appreciated till much later. Vanderbilt University expelled James Lawson for taking part in a sit-in in Nashville, and 62 years later there is a school named for him.

Undermining anyone trying to clear the roadblocks is one of the tactics used to hold up the work. All humans are fallible, and there will be issues in every workplace, but those issues are exploited to derail equity work being done by BIPOC. The very approach to handling the issues that arise is inequitable.
When we have an opportunity to move forward equitably, the focus is diverted from where the progress is being made, to picking on issues that could be addressed in many other ways. We know these possible other routes exist because we see them taken when the issue is with a white worker.
These are recurring themes we have seen play out too many times. Instead of repeating our bigoted past, let us make lasting change in progress this time in our work towards realizing equity.
Reinstate Executive Director Daniel Singh. Stop standing in the way of progress. The antidote for racism is anti-racism. It can be a tough pill to swallow for those who are not willing to see that they have absorbed some of the racism in which we are all swimming in this society.
Director Singh’s leadership aligns with the community’s vision and persistent call for equity. We recognize his humanity. We notice how he has reached out to members of the community who were overlooked before, and listened. We witness the pushback to this, and the looking to blame anything but what’s really going on: a system that was built to favor a certain few foisting all its bureaucratic minutia in the way of equitable change.
The civil rights movement continues now, in this moment, with the choices you make in your governance and whether they are representative of the people’s will for progress.
Respectfully yours,
Arts Equity Nashville