Emily Roxworthy: Trailblazing in DEI through performing arts

Emily Roxworthy, the dean of the USC School of Dramatic Arts, joins John Iino in an informative discussion focused on driving progress in DEI through storytelling, empathy and interactive theater. Dean Roxworthy shares her personal story of growing up in racially charged Detroit, Michigan, which in part informed her passion for advancing DEI as the associate vice chancellor of Faculty Diversity & Equity at UC San Diego. She also shares the impact of the recent SCOTUS affirmative action cases on the USC School of Dramatic Arts, and how organizations will press forward with their DEI goals.

Transcript:

Intro: Hi, I'm John Iino and I'm Iveliz Crespo. Welcome to the Reed Smith podcast. Inclusivity Included Powerful Personal Stories. In each episode of this podcast, our guests will share their personal stories, passions and challenges, past and present, all with the goal of bringing people together and learning more about others. You might be surprised by what we all have in common, inclusivity included.

John: Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the podcast. It's been a while but really excited with today's special guests for um those of you who know, may know that I'm a big USC person and so for our children, family out there, we've got a special treat with our guest today. But really all of our audience will really, I think love hearing from our, our, our guests today. And that's Emily Roxworthy. Hey, Emily, how are you?

Emily: I'm great, John. Thanks so much for having me.

John: Absolutely, so great. Well, let me give you a quick bio. I don't mean to embarrass you Emily, but um Emily Roxworthy is the Dean of the School of Dramatic Arts at USC she was formerly on the Theater and Dance Faculty at, at the University of California San Diego where she also served as the Associate Vice Chancellor of Faculty diversity and equity. Her research and creative interests include roleplay training, intercultural theater, digital media, performance and higher education. She also is the founder and artistic director of Workplace Interactive Theater, which is a theater company that emerged from the University of California's office of the President's Commission to create diversity training for all chairs and deans on the 10 UC campuses and using documentary theater based improvisation workshops. And finally, Dr Roxworthy's first book is titled The Spectacle of the Japanese American Trauma, racial performativity in World War Two and was published in 2008. So quite a lot of things there, Emily, welcome to the podcast.

Emily: Thank you so much. It's really great to be here. I'm excited for this conversation.

John: So our podcast is titled Powerful Personal Stories. So we always like to start with our guests to talk a little bit about themselves. And so please share with us your personal story and really how you became such a passionate advocate for all things DEI. 

Emily: Thank you. Um So I was actually born in Detroit, Michigan in the mid seventies. I'm dating myself here. But much of what we know about Detroit today was, was true throughout my childhood. Um It's a very racially polarized city. It's generally um divided pretty strikingly along black and white lines. And my mother was a journalist uh throughout my childhood, worked for the Detroit News went to downtown Detroit every day. And I actually grew up in Detroit for my first few formative years in a very um racially diverse neighborhood and then moved like many white families did to the suburbs. But my mom continued to, to go to Detroit and cover um much of Detroit life um as a journalist and my father was in import, export trade.

So what sort of balanced um this very racially polarized view of the world? Um That was um a lot of what made Detroit distinctive. At the time, my father did trade with Japan. And in fact, um that became my language in high school. I actually took Japanese. Um my high school was wonderful, had Japanese, German offered and then the other school in our town of Birmingham, Michigan um offered um Chinese and, and many other languages. So it was really um a great opportunity and, and my best friend was actually Japanese Canadian. I would spend a lot of time at her family home where Japanese was only spoken, not that I could keep up. Um Even now my, my Japanese after many years is, is really not very good, but I um had sort of a an increasingly nuanced view of um racial and ethnic politics in our country based on how I grew up, including also Detroit, the Detroit area being a very heavily um Jewish American community. Um and learning a lot from a young age about um and from Holocaust Survivors about that really dark part of our world history.

So all of that really formed a curiosity in me to look at how this is sort of as a theater and drama scholar, this is how I look at it. In many cases Um failure of empathy is what's really caused in this country Us to really um be cruel to each other often along racial lines. And I became really interested in how storytelling might be a way that empathy could be unlocked. And we could start to learn from past injustices so that we could do better in the future. And uh a really formative moment for me. Uh In addition, in, in terms of Detroit history was, of course the killing of Vincent Chin. Um in 1982 I I know John that you're familiar with this, this awful, you know, moment in the past in which an Asian American man was murdered by two white auto workers. You know, my family included auto workers. Um in fact, a Chrysler employee uh was one of the murderers of, of Vincent and they really were um attacking him because they saw the Japanese auto industry as a source of lost jobs in Detroit. Um Detroit, as you may know, has a sister city relationship with Toyota, Japan uh since the 1960s because of that motor city relationship. But the really dark side of that was you couldn't drive a car that was not an American car without really being accused of, you know, supporting the enemy. Really, it was really a continuation of a lot of the discourse from World War Two. And then, you know, Vincent paid with his life for being, you know, kind of associated with the, the quote unquote enemy. So all of this informs, you know, really who I, who I became um and who I am today.

John: So thank you for sharing that with our audience. Yeah, the Vincent Chan in the, in the horrible thing as well is that he wasn't even Japanese, he was Chinese American and they just, you know, by, by his race, they, they assumed he was Japanese and they, they murdered him. I love that the concept, you talk about the failure of empathy and the power of storytelling because that's so much of what we try to do through this podcast. And I know we will talk about a little bit in terms of your work in the theater. You know, all the DEI efforts that we, we, we do that I find that when we really focus on storytelling and personal stories is when people really can have that sense of empathy and understand people better. And that's how some of our work really gets uh gets done so, so much there, I really appreciate that. So I, I want to congratulate you. I know that the USC recently recognized you in their 50 years of Title IX anniversary as a Title IX Trailblazer. So I know you've talked a little bit, a little bit in the past about some of the challenges you faced and how have you ever overcome some of those challenges?

Emily: Yeah. So I've been very, very um privileged and, and fortunate in my life and, and higher education has really been a space where I felt very supportive in so many ways as you know, a white woman and a mother. But it's also been really challenging. Um I'm a mother of four. I actually have two step kids um as well. And I had um uh three of my four biological Children while I was working as a professor at UC San Diego and the first I had when I was in graduate school. So my advice to any young woman or young man or young person who is contemplating becoming a parent and in academia is there's no right time to do it. You just have to sort of jump in and do it. Um And it will work out if it's sort of a, a passion for you to be a parent. Um And I think it's so important to talk about that because it isn't talked about very much.

In fact, um there have been um various studies um conducted that show that higher education is actually one of the most unsupportive environments for women who are mothers far more so than law, than medicine, kind of in a surprising way, even more so than corporate America. There's just this idea that being a mother is not consistent with what would make you successful as an academic, whether as a professor or as an administrator. And, and I'm, of course both. Um so a lot of the challenges that I faced have been, you know, facing bias and discrimination for, for being a mom, for having young children and it doesn't really get much easier when they become teenagers, which is the stage that I'm at. Um, so that's been a challenge and, and I talk in, in my, uh Trailblazer uh profile for, for USC about moments where I was explicitly discriminated against because of it.

And, um, I think it's important to talk about those things because, um, you know, as we'll talk about later, I'm sure in this interview a lot of my work with interactive theater and DEI training is, um around this idea of allyship and, and bystander intervention and it's so hard when you see because it's often, there's often a lot of people witnessing that you're being discriminated against whether it's for being a mother, uh for being racially underrepresented, uh religious minority, whatever it is. And a lot of the people, and I really believe this, I believe the good in people. I think a lot of people who are witnessing it don't believe it's right, but they don't necessarily know how in the moment to intervene and so I think that the more that we can talk about the stigma that's attached to certain identities and the the bias and discrimination we face, the easier that becomes.

But then I also think training is very important. And then I just think that um the times that I've been able to bond with other mothers in academia has really been helpful. And really early in my career, actually at UC SD, I became very close friends with a woman from a different background, an African American woman with an adopted infant and neither of us had childcare. And so we actually had a childcare share arrangement where we would, one of us would watch both of the babies so the other could work. And it was really a nice moment of solidarity that I think gave us both strength and, and that's also been a real guiding light for me.

Jonh: I recall you mentioned that um you know, so many people think that the bias is that women suffers from men and, you know, in, in senior positions. But you know, in your case, there's also senior women were were just, you know, giving you the wrong advice or not being supportive.

Emily: Absolutely. I think an area in, in DEI um that we don't pay enough attention to is intergenerational conflict. Um And a lot in the case of feminism, a lot of women from previous generations or older generations had to make a lot of really tough choices and sacrifices to be able to succeed. And I think that often when um they see us making different decisions which are made possible by hopefully a continuing progress in, in gender politics in this country, I think it, it sometimes can, can lead to strife. And so I was, when I got pregnant in graduate school, actually, I was told by the head of my program who was a woman, a very powerful successful woman that, that I care deeply about. She said, have you ever heard of birth control? That was the reaction and I don't blame her for that. She just, this was what she needed to do to survive was to forego being a mother. And, and she really didn't see how I could succeed if I made a different choice.

And, and thankfully, I think things are slowly getting better. I think we see, you know, one step forward often as much as one step back. And for instance, in the case of Roe v Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court and it can be disheartening. Um But I think when we look at the, the way different generations have had to approach this, we do see progress, slower than we'd hoped. Um But it can be disheartening, I think to experience it from, from people that you think should be allies. And again, it always goes back to empathy though John, if you can figure out how to understand where they're coming from. You can start to see a way toward progress.

John: Oh, absolutely. And, I love what you're talking about that, that this next generation because I do feel a sense of hope with, with our next generation and then they deal with or see some of the issues that, you know, we have, you know, a lot of people are, are with us and they, and they certainly are following everything we're talking about, but there's pockets of within the organizations, pockets around that just still don't, still don't see it that way. And the power I think of the younger generation is really uh is at some point, you know, maybe we'll just all get there where we're trying to achieve, we're trying to accelerate that. But I know it's just the, the power of that next generation. So you're talking about allyship and importance of allyship and you talked about your background in Detroit and it's, you know, so fascinating. So tell us a little bit how you focused your 1st book on the Japanese, you know, American trauma in, in World War Two. And you mentioned, you know, growing up in Michigan and then the strife with Toyota and all the, the Japanese automakers and the rest. But and your, and your Japanese Canadian friend. But how did you choose to study the Japanese American trauma?

Emily: So it's, it's actually an um a humbling story in, in many ways. So I mentioned that um we had a lot of Jewish American neighbors and community members would come to speak in school on pretty much on an annual basis and share their experience in the Holocaust. So I was very aware of the extermination camps from World War Two that were in Europe. I did not know until graduate school, and some of this is the curriculum in the Midwest, It isn't like it is here in California, the Japanese American incarceration from, from World War Two, not part of, of what was taught back then. I'm not sure it's part of it now, but it wasn't until graduate school that I even learned about the Japanese American incarceration. The fact that more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, two thirds of them US citizens, were forced to evacuate their homes on the west coast and, and go into inland concentration camps during the war.

It was only in an Asian American literature class at Cornell where I started my doctorate that I learned about it and became fascinated because I had actually gone to graduate school, gone to get my, my doctorate to study Japanese war waging. Because I thought it was fascinating, that was so theatrical because that all of the accounts that I would read, you know, kamikaze other forms of, of the way that, that Japan waged war in the Pacific War, it just seemed very theatrical. And once I started to dig in, I realized that was really a, a Western construct that was filtered through various stereotypes um about Japanese culture being sort of inherently theatrical.

So the more I dug and which is what graduate school is meant to do, right? It's meant to make you question everything and, and really dig in. Um But once I learned about the, the concentration camps, I knew that that was what I needed to study. And I was fascinated by the fact that every single one of the 10 internment camps is what they were called at the time. And then the assembly centers, the 10 internment camps, every single one had very vibrant performance culture, whether it be vaudeville, Kabuki and Noh, you know, Japanese traditional forms of theater, um comedy. I mean, everything you could imagine because it was a way of surviving and often a way of resisting this really unjust thing that was happening. So I saw my, you know, always very terrible Japanese language skills, but they were there. I saw that those combined with my um you know, interest in, in empathy and in, you know, telling really all the sides of the story.

Um And then of course, the theater piece, I, I thought that I was a, a good scholar to take on that research and it was my research for about 10 years. And um I continue, there's always more um there were Japanese language uh newspapers published in every camp. And the assumption on the part of the US authorities was that that was just a direct translation of the English language newspapers. But in fact, it wasn't, it was often, things were sort of in there that um were different and that were questioning what was happening. Um And the way that the American government was treating them. And so, you know, all those years of struggling to learn Japanese really paid off because I was able to sort of discern that. But I always had this, you know, sort of outsider view because I'm not myself part of the culture. And in fact, I'm part of the culture of the oppressor in this case. And so um it was always a very delicate balance to do that research. I found it was very fulfilling.

John: Fantastic. So my grandfather was a journalist and so he, you know, was one of the founders of the Japanese American newspaper here in Los Angeles that was, you know, reporting all during, during those times as well. So, so let's shift a little bit and talk, talk about your work at USC and the work you do on DEI, you know, as the Dean of the School of Dramatic Arts, how have you further your own DEI goals?

Emily: So we really see our um goal at the USC School of Dramatic Arts is not only really training students in the, in the entertainment industry that we're all striving to accomplish, right. We're all striving to have an entertainment industry that reflects the beautiful diversity of the United States and of California in particular, as you know, the, the sort of center of, of the industry here in Hollywood, but also to kind of feed a pipeline of diverse talent um for stage and screen. And so the way that that looks is really trying to find and we're really um all of the art schools at USC are really fortunate that we're able to just go out and find the best talent we can. I mean, USC has become an incredibly difficult, academically, incredibly difficult school to get into. But we also consider talent and passion for the art form and in all art forms, but particularly the performing arts, um really the most diverse backgrounds that we can bring together, those are the rich stories, right? And when those are brought together in unique combinations, which is what we call diversity, right? It is going to create beautiful artwork. And so, um it really goes hand in hand with the most excellent drama program in the country. We really need to be the most diverse as well. And that's sort of how we approached it.

John: So Emily, when you talk about, you know, really creating or, or, or fielding the most diverse student body, you know, we're very much aware of the recent Supreme Court cases involving Harvard and the University of North Carolina that basically struck down affirmative action. So how will those cases impact what you're trying to achieve at the school?

Emily: That's a great question. And USC is certainly um one of those schools that, that we're talking about being um potentially severely impacted by this decision, um because we are so so competitive on our applications, right? What is wonderful about the arts and humanities is we are always looking for applicants to tell their stories about where they came from. And that my understanding of the ruling is that that will still be allowed. We're not looking at redacted essays from, from students talking about the struggles um and the experiences that have led them to this point, that will still be something that, that students are encouraged to discuss and often those struggles and experiences come from um their cultural and racial, religious and, and other differences. Um So that will continue to be part of what students write about in their applications continue to be part of in the case of the dramatic arts, what they put forward in their portfolios and their audition materials, right? They can still select those texts that speak to what makes them unique. And that's what we're really interested in is the most unique talent that we can find. And that's what this moment in the entertainment industry is about, which is so exciting, which is that we want um specific stories from unique backgrounds. That's what we're, you know, sort of leaning into as an industry.

So I think I'm, I'm very hopeful and very optimistic that we're going to continue to be able to accomplish these goals. I think what I'm scared about is, youknow, part of my work and, and the work of several other faculty here at the School of Dramatic Arts, Anita Dashiell-Sparks in particular. And Doctor Brent Blair, um is we use interactive theater as a tool to help to train people to be better around diversity, equity and inclusion. And these sort of decisions have a chilling effect on that kind of work, even though that work isn't about, you know, many of the things that um have been criticized around, you know, uh critical race theory and, and other, you know, sort of flash points and in all of these debates over the past few years, um it really, it goes back again to empathy to just listening to each other and, and learning what is different about each other's experiences and how we bring that into the room.

Interactive theater allows us to stage those differences because what's beautiful about theater is you have an array of different characters on stage who all have different experiences and you are forced to hold all those differences in the balance at one time and understand how they interact. And that's the basis of interactive theater is also getting the audience involved in, in hearing those stories and then telling them the stories themselves. And so I do think all of this work continue even with the Supreme Court decision and, and more that are being, you know, considered, but it really forces us to get even more nuanced in, in what we, how we attempt to achieve these goals.

John: Yeah. And, and um as I think of it, obviously it will play out in the coming months and years. But when you talk about, for example, in the performances or the essays that, you know, the applicants will, will give, it's forcing people that come from diverse backgrounds to really emphasize their diversity. And, you know, not historically but you know, a common trap that diverse folks face is that they have to assimilate and they, you know, are forced to become, you know, part of the, the mainstream so to speak. And so now by the shift of hopefully, or forcing some of the students to emphasize their diversity, it will embrace their themselves and becoming more aware of who they are in themselves and as opposed to trying to assimilate. So as I say, who knows where that ultimately will lead? But it, it's maybe a positive outgrowth of the decision. You talk about interactive theater and there's, it's so powerful and the ability to create diversity or, you know, create that empathy. So I know you've developed a lot we've talked about in, when we introduced you, talk about what would you achieve through interactive theater, especially when it comes to diversity training.

Emily: Yeah. So that was a great point. You made John though about, you know, if one of the ways that people from diverse backgrounds have survived is to assimilate and now we're really changing the expectation and saying we need you to talk about actually what makes you distinct and um you know, in, in terms of Japanese culture, right the idea of, you know, ganbatte or um just you must survive, you must, don't complain, you must sort of figure out how for the sake of the children or whatever it is to just rise above and be successful and, and, and happy. Um And now you have are sort of expected to um talk about the struggles and, and discrimination things you faced. And that's something that the interactive theater work we do really takes on. Is this the burden that's placed upon diverse people to explain and teach people from majority and privileged groups like myself, what this all means. And, and that I do fear will become even more acute um in this era um of when affirmative action has become so constrained and what the way that we attempt to release that burden from um people from underrepresented backgrounds through the work we do is by listening to the stories.

So when we talk about documentary theater, what that means is if you think about a documentary film, you go around and an interview on film everybody involved in a certain incident. There's actually a great documentary about the murder of Vincent Chin that, that I highly recommend in the case of documentary theater, you still collect those stories, but you don't record them instead they become the basis for a script, but then other people perform. And so what we do is we put these vignettes up on stage in front of the organizations that the stories come from and then we ask them to observe, right, to observe those dynamics and reflect back to us what they saw. Um And what rang true, what maybe seemed caricatured and then you get to hear all of this perspectives in the room. That's sort of the first stage.

The second stage is actually to start to crowdsource solutions for the problems that we saw on stage, right? So, OK, you saw that microaggression and microaggression is a term I don't really like partly because when we first started this work um through a UC office of the President Commission in 2014. Um shortly thereafter, um Fox News and some other conservative media outlets actually got a hold of a, a worksheet. So this was a a year long tour. We went to all 10 UC campuses to perform for all of the leadership, right? So all the academic administrators, chairs and deans to help them be better leaders around DEI know there was a separate worksheet that was created not by my theater company. But by um uh the office of the president and it mentioned some microaggressions, things like uh the American dream said that that was a microaggression, which I didn't agree with. I thought it was a bit heavy handed and it was never something we talked about in the actual theater performance, but it became a flashpoint and there were editorials published and, and even eventually the UC office of the president actually pulled the plug on the program after a year.

And then that was when I formed an LLC for my own theater company. Um And then just started accepting on core invitations come to these campuses and to other campuses outside the UC system to, to do these workshops um because they were really popular and they seemed to create change because again, what you would do is start to talk about the problems. This is my problem. For instance, you, you would say with what just happened on stage in that faculty meeting or what have you and OK, well, how could you intervene? Right, if you were one of the other people in that room, what should they say to start to um make this less toxic right, to make this a healthier workplace environment? Um And then once we had collected those suggestions, then we would try to replay the scene using those suggestions. So then you get to actually reality test them and then we talk about, did that work the way you thought it would work John, when that person, you know, made that, that intervention and then we would try other things. So it really gets you and, and this is very research based, and once you practice um these interventions, you actually can then do them in real life too. So um that's sort of how that works. And at USC we've started to implement it.

As dean I don't have time to do much of it myself. But as I said, I have two wonderful colleagues, Professors Sparks and Blair who do this work in all kinds of different settings. So athletics, for instance, USC athletics department, as you probably know is huge. Uh 500 student athletes, 300 athletic staff each year, they have an event where we take the stories from the student athletes about what it's like to be a student athlete at USC. We turn those into vignettes and we do this exact type of work and it's really popular and it's really affirming um of a lot of the microaggressions. It's a word that I don't love, but it's a, it's a useful word that, that student athletes face on our campus. We also do it now for all of the new students, all the new undergraduates that come into USC it's part of their uh new student orientation program um that they get to learn a bit about what it's like to, to be a student to have roommates and all of this, you know, through, through interactive theater. So it's really gratifying to see it being used by students. It's being used by staff and faculty in some of the other schools at USC and I think that this work will continue. Um because again, it's, it's really not about making anybody feel bad about their identity. It's about learning to have empathy for each other, to appreciate different perspectives and to coexist and thrive with people from different backgrounds.

John: I just love that and full disclosure. I, as part of orientation for new students, I, I did get to see the, the performance by the, the dramatic arts uh students uh in terms of that what you said role playing or just going through a conflict with your roommate, right? And when I came away, just like you're saying the power for uh of, of, of doing that storytelling, of doing that performance in DEI programs because like you're saying, being able to act out the different interventions, different things to see. How does that feel? Does that feel right? Something I see I can do because we all know that, you know, effective change by learning is by doing. And so so much of what we try to do in DEI programs is change people's behavior by practicing a different behavior and experience it. How did that feel for you? We're comfortable saying that, right? And so it's just, just a powerful, powerful tool. So I'm sure we're going to see more of that in, in, in standard DEI trainings because it is so powerful and you've had such great success with that training.

So Dean Emily Roxworthy, it's just been, you know, we could go on and on and on. I can't believe we're already out of time because this is just so many fascinating things to talk about. I want to thank you for all the work you do you have done and continue to do in DEI, and we're not going to be discouraged by the recent cases because we know that all that people are doing and that the spirit that people have and what we will achieve our goals. So once again, thank you for coming and sharing with our audience.

Emily: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

Outro: Inclusivity Included is a Reed Smith production. Our producer is Ali McCardell. This podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, PodBean, and reedsmith.com.

Disclaimer: This podcast is provided for educational purposes. It does not constitute legal advice, and is not intended to establish an attorney-client relationship, nor is it intended to suggest or establish standards of care applicable to particular lawyers in any given situation. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. Any views, opinions, or comments made by any external guest speaker are not to be attributed to Reed Smith LLP or its individual lawyers.

All rights reserved.

Transcript is auto-generated.