What is Cultural Justice?

“Cultural justice” is not a term we hear very often—or perhaps at all. We hear and read about social justice and racial justice, economic justice and environmental justice, gender justice and disability justice, and retributive justice and restorative justice. So, when asked if I would write what I thought about cultural justice, my first thought was, Yes! This was immediately followed by, Wait, do I know what I think cultural justice is?

This essay reflects my journey to answer that question. Along the way, I will address how I think cultural equity is different from cultural justice and why I believe the difference between them matters—not only to those of us working in the cultural sector, but to pluralistic democracy in our country.

First, some context. As I write, we are journeying through a second Trump term in the White House (yes, we did it again). To put it mildly, it’s been a bumpy ride. So, what I have to say is much more tragic now than it would be in more benign times, and it continues to be a confounding fact: The extreme right understands the importance and power of culture more deeply than many of those in the middle and left of the spectrum—including those in the nonprofit arts and culture sector.

Case in point: created by an Executive Order on Trump’s first day in office, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) was charged with, among other things, ridding our national government of supposed billions of dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. But that stated purpose was a smoke screen for a different agenda. It was no arithmetic mistake that DOGE went after a number of agencies with miniscule budgets. Some of the small agencies and organizations pointedly attacked or eviscerated were the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the National Archives, the Kennedy Center, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Combined, their budgets are less than one percent of the federal budget. But these agencies punch above their weight as propagators of knowledge building, discernment, critical thinking, innovative arts production, traditional cultural practices, trusted information, and as repositories of documentation, material culture, history, memory, and stories we tell ourselves about who we are or could be. In short, they are the holders and molders of our culture—or more precisely, cultures.

Authoritarians understand that to usurp power you must create new, simple narratives and destroy the old ones: replace fact-checked journalism with “Truth Social”; punish those who question and reward those who kowtow; call what is actually just “unfair” and what is equitable “prejudicial”; erase the plural and promote the monolithic. When you destroy the cultural institutions that aspire to be open and democratic, you lay the foundations for autocratic rule.

Sadly, liberal society in our country, even in the best of times, maintains an anemic resource environment for the broad diversity of culture makers in our country. Why is that, when the cultural diversity of the United States is often trumpeted as our superpower? Why aren’t we championing the creativity, insights, and ingenuity of our many cultures—the different ways of being in and knowing the world—when they have the potential of lighting the way to how we might best coexist and be sustained? 

The complicity of our field in upholding the United States’s social hierarchy can be found both in actions and in words.

Unfortunately, our country as a whole is held in thrall of an increasingly extreme form of capitalism and the racial hierarchy that it relies on. (As of 2024, less than two percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are Black, while Black workers make up 13 percent of the labor force and 19 percent of minimum wage workers.) An overclass needs an underclass to extract from to build wealth, and racial discrimination and its allies, patriarchy and class prejudice, have proven a faithful framework to promote what is too often greed cloaked in narratives of growth, trickle-down prosperity, and meritocracy.  

The construction and perpetuation of dominant culture and systems are foundational to:

• our New Gilded Age inequality (as of 2024, the richest one percent in the United States held almost 31 percent of the country’s wealth while the bottom half of households held 2.5 percent; the median Black family in the US has a net worth of just 15.5 percent of a median white family; as of June 2025, only 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were women)
• increased corporate consolidation (“today’s top 1 percent of companies by sales account for 80 percent of revenues” as noted by Chicago Booth Review)
• super-sized corporate political influence, and 
• the now fast-motion destruction of the equalizing effects of the public sector. “Wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) are the punching bags of this administration because they acknowledge and attempt to address the historical power and resource imbalances and injustices that persist in our country, our states, and our neighborhoods.

The desire for an equitable multiracial/multicultural democracy is in direct conflict with the desire to keep racialized capitalism alive and well. 

But this essay isn’t meant to be a political analysis of the moment; nor am I an economist. This is the backdrop to a critique of habits in the arts and culture field that make it complicit in upholding the pernicious hierarchies of racial, cultural, gender, and class inequality that undergird United States economic dominance—even though we might think we are standing for the exact opposite. My critique, however, acknowledges that complicity can be difficult to avoid given how much established infrastructure holds those hierarchies stubbornly in place. It is hard not to drink the Kool-Aid when you’re swimming in it.

How Did We Get Here?

Since at least the Industrial Revolution in the United States, we have constructed temples to high art and learning—that is, museums, symphony halls, opera houses, and theatres. Captains of industry of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries demonstrated their success, sophistication, and sometimes civic spirit (noblesse oblige) by creating fine arts venues that looked to Europe for inspiration and validation. The philosophy of The Gospel of Wealth by Andrew Carnegie had broad influence on the cultural infrastructure built in the United States and on the philanthropic sector. So, it is not surprising that the arts field (including its funders) lives in the shadow of European notions of “high art,” “fine art,” and “art for art’s sake,” often maintaining Europe’s elite and ethnocentric eye for judging what excellence looks like. 

Culture is what shapes how we think about family and community and our responsibilities to them, how we define shared or private resources, and who has power and who doesn’t.

The way we think and talk about the arts today, arguably, is a product of the wealth concentration of the Renaissance, when patronage of the arts made anonymous artisans into individual artists. The meaning of the word “art” moved from referring to a generalized skill (like the art of cooking or the art of blacksmithing) and became something bespoke, commodified, and product-focused—commissioned by the wealthy as symbols of status. This market-driven, “genius”-pedestaling way of defining artistic production and artists still lives with us and can dictate what kind of cultural production gets valued most highly in esteem and in dollars.

The complicity of our field in upholding the United States’s social hierarchy can be found both in actions and in words. It has been a minute since the 2017 Not Just Money study by the Helicon Collaborative showed that in the previous five years of arts funding and staffing in the United States had become less equitable despite significant efforts (and claims) to address this issue. Have things gotten any better since then?

According to a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts research brief that looked at managers working at museums; publishers of books, magazines, and newspapers; advertising, public relations and design firms; and at bookstores from 2015-2019, roughly 80 percent were white, as were 75 percent of managers of performing arts companies. And in a 2019 study of the diversity of artists in the collections of eighteen major United States museums, 85 percent of artists were found to be white and 87 percent were men.

Things may have gotten a bit better regarding the racial diversity of arts organizations’ rank and file makeup at museums, for example—though regarding leaders, not so much. Increased funding in 2020-21 to Black communities due to the “racial reckoning” is turning out to be a blip on the radar of real change, and the percent of Black-led arts organizations (11 percent), in particular, hovers below the average for Black-led nonprofits overall (15 percent).

“Diversifying faces in high places” is not a new strategy to address imbalances. Yet it hasn’t progressed very far very fast, and it hasn’t done enough to advance cultural equity. Even given a broader spectrum of decision-makers allocating support for diverse art forms: If the review criteria always come from a dominant culture lens, what difference can it make? 

How We Talk Matters

The arts field’s added complicity in its use of language is a subtler and sneakier thing—a form of covert power. It shapes our mindset in the way implicit bias does. The hierarchy is encoded in how we speak, though we may not notice it. So even though we think we are doing the right thing to combat inequity, our use of language can pull us back.

Let me explain.

The term “arts and culture” is a culprit in the perpetuation of the cultural hierarchy that places European elite art forms (chamber and orchestral music, ballet, opera, theatre, painting, sculpture, etc.) at the top and everything else below. By literally putting “arts” first, the focal point of our attention is on them, and it is the European elite forms that usually spring to mind when we hear the word “arts.” 

So, instead of putting “arts” first, what if it was “culture & arts”—moving the notion of culture before arts? What difference would that make to how we think about our work and how we feel about our field? 

I believe placing “culture” before “arts” creates a useful Gestalt switch—and puts culture where it belongs. Of the two notions, culture is primary when we think of it as the overarching framework for the things we do that make us recognizable as a group, a people, a society. I’m talking about the language we speak, the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the stories we tell ourselves and others about who we are. Culture springs from our ancestry, the kind of environment we grow up in, and our relationship to the land we live on. Culture is what shapes how we think about family and community and our responsibilities to them, how we define shared or private resources, and who has power and who doesn’t. Culture gives us our sense of what is beautiful (aesthetics), why we exist (spirit), and how we should behave (ethics). Those sensibilities in turn imbue what we do, make, perceive, and experience with meaning and significance. It is from this cauldron of culture that artistic activities and products emerge. Arts are a set of practices; but culture is the context from which these practices spring and get their meaning.

Saying “Arts and Culture” Reinforces the Status Quo

Using the phrase “arts and culture” acts as an agent of the status quo in other ways—not only by putting “arts” in the first position. The use of the word “culture” in the singular also serves to maintain the status quo. Again, with “arts” first, our go-to image is of the typical items and activities in marble institutions. Then, having “culture” follow up in the singular leads us to default to the dominant culture, the supposed one culture that all “serious” art forms belong to and that functions as the lens through which to judge not only its own arts but all others. 

The linguistic habits of our field reinforce the othering and denigration of art forms that are not a part of the dominant culture image of high arts with European roots. We typically add qualifiers to the word “art” or names of different artistic disciplines to distinguish art forms that are not part of the dominant culture club: “folk art” is not considered refined, “outsider art” is not legitimately schooled, “traditional art” is branded as an artifact of the past and not contemporary, “community art” is often considered to be low brow and low quality, “world music” is everything except European classical music (as if the latter were so sublime as to not belong to this world), and my particular pet peeve, “ethnic arts/music/dance/theatre,” which erases the ethnicity of Europe altogether.

The normalization of this Europe-inflected default culture in the United States, mixed with the dominance of a deculturized whiteness, places all other races/ethnicities in a second-class position (or lower). Assimilation to the dominant culture doesn’t have to be as brutal as it was in the missions of California or the plantations of the South to be deeply injurious to those who have experienced cultural erasure, internalized self-hate, and never feeling a sense of belonging—never mind not being able to thrive economically or health-wise. 

A side effect of perpetuating an ethno-sanitized dominant culture that is not often talked about is that it can make white Americans’ cultural rootedness invisible to them. When your culture is the default, it becomes invisible to you in the way water is to a fish—it surrounds you, so you don’t even know that it’s there. Hence, many white folks are at a loss when asked about their cultural identity. 

This is the flip side of W. E. B. DuBois’s “twoness” of the soul of oppressed peoples—where one suffers the devaluing of one’s own culture and must adopt the culture of the oppressor to survive. The dominance of an idealized whiteness also serves to zero out the deeper cultural rootedness of the white soul.

I believe that cultural justice can only be achieved if we 1) respectfully and ethically engage with each other to understand the parts of our different cultures and 2) negotiate how the best of them could be harnessed for us to live together better.

So, where were we? I was arguing that “culture” should come before “arts” because artistic products and practices can’t be deeply understood (or evaluated) without first knowing about the cultural context they spring from. If you don’t know anything about the specific cultural context and history of an art form, how can you really know what it’s all about? How can you understand what the classical North Indian dance form of Kathak is about if you don’t know anything about the storytelling aspects of its gestures and movements? If you are asked to evaluate singers of son jarocho who are trading couplets and you don’t understand Spanish or realize that the singers are improvising words and musical phrases and are jousting in a game of one-upmanship, your job will become an impossible task.

How Do We Level the Cultural Playing Field?

If we want to promote cultural equity–that is, leveling the cultural playing field–we need to acknowledge our country (and the world) is full of a multiplicity of cultures that are valid ways of being in and knowing the world. They should be respected on their own terms, not for how they fit (or don’t fit) into the dominant culture. That is, we need to take our lip service to pluralism more seriously.

But aren’t people coming here because they want to partake of American culture as it is? 

I can’t speak to what people who come here think of United States culture. I would say, before the current administration, that the United States’s professed values of freedom of speech, freedom of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, and due process, though flawed in their execution, were admired generally. But I would challenge how our idea of “out of many, one” has played out. 

As noted above, assimilation to a dominant culture has not only done great harm. It has shut out the myriad possibilities of becoming a stronger and wiser nation made possible by respecting diverse cultures and being willing to try different ways of moving in the world, managing resources and relationships, and practicing democracy. That is, to give being a truly multicultural country a try, we need to stop treating non-dominant cultures as essentialized tourism opportunities (“festivals, food, fashion, flags, and famous people”) and question why we are still celebrating “minority” history months (a sure indicator that we still don’t consider those histories a part of history proper). Instead, let’s explore how our pluralism doesn’t have to be put in a box beneath dominant culture.

Not only should “culture” be considered conceptually primary in our work in the arts, but we should be saying “cultures” in the plural, not in the singular, to remind ourselves of the true breadth of the cultural landscape to consider and learn about. Let’s explicitly make plural what has stood in the singular for at least as long as there has been a nonprofit field. Try saying “the cultures and arts sector” and see how it changes how you think about it.

A Pluralizable Democracy

Now, let’s consider what it would be like not to just be a pluralistic democracy, but a pluralizable one. I believe this is a step that needs to be taken to achieve cultural justice. Beyond the cultural equity of respecting and acknowledging the validity of the many cultures that exist here in the United States, I believe that cultural justice can only be achieved if we 1) respectfully and ethically engage with each other to understand the parts of our different cultures and 2) negotiate how the best of them could be harnessed for us to live together better. This is what I mean by our democracy being truly pluralizable. Can we have enough mutual respect and openness to each other’s ways of being and knowledges to make our “out of many, one” not assimilationist but integrative?

But where did the arts go? Don’t we still get to support what artists do and make?

Of course. The point is to put the cultural frame first and then the field becomes so much more capacious in its scope because of the plurality of cultures and the range of systems they encompass. And it can become much more equitable because we will use more relevant lenses to understand the insights of various art works and the cultural context from which they flow.

The senses of aesthetics, spirituality, and values that manifest in each of our cultures are often the portals that people feel they can step through to connect with others both alike and unlike ourselves. The more we explore cultural crossovers, the more we can find points of commonality that are so sorely needed at this time.

An open society must be willing to support, step into, and experience the nuances of our differences. The extremes tend to plaster over the complexity and richness of these differences and propagate intolerance over compassion. If we are to survive this moment of massive undoing of efforts toward belonging and self-determination, we need to not be afraid of our differences and to find and value the meaningful overlaps between us. Sometimes it just might be sparked by a song or a dance.

Let’s try saying “cultures and arts” and see how it changes our mindset. And if we can change our minds, we’ll have a chance to move the needle on cultural equity, and then, cultural justice.