Sunday Morning Thoughts

It's another day in the USA. Sunday, in fact. Among other things, that means this is a day on which many lynchings occurred so that more people could attend, including children who needed to learn what being a U.S. citizen meant for them & their parents and what it meant for those who aren't considered white. Because the USA is relentlessly consistent, it remains the case that as long as the person you kill is not white, you stand a good chance of not being held accountable. (Today = 65 days since Darren Wilson shot Mike Brown at least 6 times, 2 in the head. Has he been arrested? No; he's collecting a paycheck. If we were a more honest country, we'd say outright that denigrating and/or destroying non-whites is part of what American tax dollars are allocated for. As tax payers, Mike Brown's devastated parents are literally funding the salary of their son's murderer. And, have you ever noticed that educating certain populations is too expensive, but there's always money to denigrate and destroy them???) Yes, as long as you victimize people who are not white (especially not white men), it doesn't much matter who you are—cop or not, respected and educated or not. Also, killing non-white people is simply an option; less lethal forms of violence are also available.

The identity of those whom you victimize matters more than who you are, but when you are the "right" kind of person, you get even more latitude. It's the American way! So, if you are a white man of wealth and position, you will have serious support if you choose to become a predator. And, lucky you, you can make that choice over and over again, and American institutions (and those empowered within them) will respond by very literally MANUFACTURING your innocence. [I am forever grateful to David J. Leonard for that articulation.] The institution's "leaders" will insist that, though there's no denying your guilt, you will suffer only the least significant consequences. Indeed, those "leaders" will instruct everyone to make sure that you feel at ease. Everyone is supposed to act as if you didn't enact violence on people's psyches and disrupt their lives. Everyone is supposed to act as if the violence and disruption aren't still reverberating. It makes sense, then, that such a predator would operate from a stance of innocence and entitlement, doesn't it? It makes sense that, when back in the space where he did so much damage, he would laugh loudly and go around to co-workers and tell them that he's at a point where "I need to be able to say hello to you." Why should he have any reason to think that what he "needs" isn't the only thing that matters?? The institution has assured him—and everyone else, including his victims—that the only thing that really matters is his comfort and his position. Who cares about how comfortable or uncomfortable his victims are? Who cares about the position it puts his non-victim co-workers in? In fact, if you don't make him feel welcome, YOU are suddenly the person who is "unprofessional" and "uncivil." His being a perpetrator literally does not matter because if you say something, YOU are the problem. YOU are making the workplace uncomfortable. Don't you realize that what he did is in the past? It has no purchase on the present because your "leaders" told you so, remember? It's magic! And isn't magic delightful? Really and truly, it would be funny if it weren't so foul. It would be funny if so many lives weren't unjustly bent and disrupted to accommodate the space taken up by white male perpetrators whom you must pretend are innocent, lest you pay a heavier price than they ever will. 

In environments like this (and make no mistake, the USA is such an environment), COWARDICE is treated as a cherished virtue. Even those with safety and stability in the system take a perverse comfort in acting as if they are completely powerless. It's disheartening, but I continue to have faith that "leaders" will show actual leadership and that others (who don't see themselves as leaders) will appreciate the injustice enough to pressure those deemed leaders to do the right thing. Surely, options exist besides continued injustice, continued complicity. Surely, folk will do better... Whether it's the unjust killing of Mike Brown in Missouri or John Crawford in Ohio, the lethal violence that Black & Brown women face from police and other self-proclaimed authority figures; whether it's the everyday humiliation and violence of stop-and-frisk and anti-LGBTQ surveillance, bullying, and attacks; whether it's sexual harassment in the workplace, at school, and on the streets, MAY WE ALL LOSE SLEEP UNTIL WE'VE GOTTEN CREATIVE ABOUT DOING WHAT WE CAN, IN FACT, DO.

What Are You Speaking to Power?

Since the October 2011 publication of my book Living with Lynching, I have been asked whether I see parallels between our contemporary moment and the period that I study, 1890 to 1930. The short answer is yes. In fact, I find the last turn of the century fascinating partly because it looks so much like this one. The similarities include the ugliness of anti-immigrant sentiment, the need for women to fight for baseline equity and safety, the ease with which certain families are denied recognition and respect, and the dehumanizing treatment of the poor while corporations are treated as people. (See the 1886 Santa Clara decision and today’s Citizen’s United case leading to the doctrine that “money is free speech.”) And, of course, there are striking parallels between the lynching era and our present moment in terms of the strategies being developed—right now—to keep certain populations from voting.

Questions about whether or not the dynamics I examine still exist usually arise in relation to a very specific claim. Armed with the insight of those who lived and wrote in the midst of lynching, I contend that racial violence was a response not to black criminality but to black success. I hope to write several posts addressing various versions of the historical parallels question. Here, I begin with one from Michael Eric Dyson, who interviewed me for his hour-long radio show honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. on Monday, January 16, 2012.

I was describing the revisions that black male lynching dramatists offered when they entered the genre a decade after it was initiated by women. While women playwrights had put forth ideal images of black manhood, black men offered the pimp and the coward. The message of their plays is that the mob attacks black patriarchs, those who gain traditional success and are family and community leaders, but it will often spare pimps and cowards. Michael Eric Dyson asked if there was any parallel between the collective message of these plays and today’s cultural landscape, in which black pimps are welcomed in popular media. I said that there is a link and that the circulation of pimp imagery is acceptable, and even desirable, because it does not disrupt the status quo. Let me elaborate here.

Living with Lynching is about citizenship. I am interested in the many ways that the nation defines citizenship as white and how racial violence contributes to this mission. After all, lynching emerged only after slavery ended (so, killing blacks didn’t mean losing property), and it intensified when black men began gaining ground politically. (Black women were far from voting rights at this point.) To discourage black men from voting and otherwise participating in the political process, whites used violence and they invented the black rapist myth to destroy black men’s reputations, portraying them as unworthy of citizenship. In other words, the images allowed to circulate in the public sphere—black rapists and white heroes who avenge rape—reiterated the assumption that whites are the rightful citizens.

Today’s pimp imagery works in a similar fashion to ensure that only certain people come to mind when you say “citizen.” Any success that a pimp might have is deemed immoral, so his popularity only confirms that black men cannot be responsible citizens because they do not live by the ideals of upstanding manhood that the country claims to respect. It is more threatening to have a black man who exemplifies american ideals, such as Barack Obama. He did everything according to what should bring him respect: he went to Ivy League schools, he’s heterosexual, he’s married, he's had only one wife, etc. He creates much more anxiety than does the commercial gold mine Snoop Dog because he embodies what the nation says it values, thereby illustrating that black men can be more admirable than whites, even by conservative standards.

Noticing this tendency is not enough, though; placing pimp imagery alongside Barack Obama reveals other dynamics that should not be overlooked. Namely, though conversations about the pimp lifestyle center on non-whites, white men have freely engaged in nefarious activity—including pimping, raping, and otherwise abusing women—since the founding of this nation. Indeed, this country’s biggest pimps have been and continue to be white men, but when we hear that word, they are not the image that comes to mind. Whites have created a society in which negative connotations stick to everyone but them. Another example: a white man can routinely bully and elegantly threaten others, in both his personal and professional life…but never be thought of as a “thug.” Meanwhile, all a black man has to do is choose a style of dress that we don’t like, and he is labeled a “thug” to the point where it limits his life chances.

On the other end of the spectrum, one finds Barack Obama and the countless black men whose existence is seldom acknowledged in mainstream media: black lawyers, black soldiers, veterans, and entrepreneurs, for example. If these men cannot be ignored, they are discredited (“he got that position because he is black”). Why? Because they expose the central myth of U.S. culture, that white men are the best the world has to offer.

Unfortunately, admirable people of color can also be understood as exceptions who confirm the worthlessness of others. You have heard it a million times from americans of all hues: “Just look at ____. Now, there are no excuses.” How did so many come to believe that the main thing that people of color do is make excuses? The ease with which people utter and accept this comment proves the success of the campaign to malign anyone who isn’t white. While everyone is busy making sure that non-whites don’t get away with making excuses, we ignore all of the systems put in place to prevent anyone who is not white and/or heterosexual and/or Christian and/or middle-class from attaining what the nation claims is within everyone’s reach.

But as I said on Dyson’s radio show, I am not invested in speaking the truth because I hope it might change white people’s minds. I am much more interested in keeping people of color from believing the lies that are meant to destroy them while making them feel ashamed if they notice that they are under siege. (Accusations of “playing the race card.”) To the extent that we buy the dominant portrait, which makes white right and everyone else wrong, we are in trouble.

Too often, I hear conversations on race among blacks that revolve around how “the white man doesn’t have to keep us down because we are doing it to ourselves—all these single mothers, deadbeat fathers….” Listening in, one would think that even we don’t know any examples of black mothers who are also wives and fathers who prioritize family life. Sure, images of single mothers and deadbeat fathers saturate mainstream discourse, but we are letting that dictate what comes to mind for us, too.  [And this is to say nothing about the fact that being a single mother isn't shameful!!] 

These conversations remind me of when then-Senator Obama chose the occasion of his address to the NAACP to insist on the necessity of “teaching our sons…to realize responsibility does not end at conception; that what makes them a man is not the ability to have a child but to raise one" (July 2008). He said this as if he does not know plenty of black men who are doing precisely that. He said this as if that’s the most powerful message he could bring to the NAACP. Really? Well, we don’t do any better when that’s how we talk about the race, too.

In contrast, lynching plays evince an understanding of the importance of speaking the truth about black communities that the rest of society is working so hard to ignore. The plays foreground representative figures that help audiences think together about black identity and citizenship. Because my book follows the conversation that blacks were having in the early 1900s, one chapter focuses on the black soldier, another on the black lawyer, another on the black mother who is also a wife. Imagine that! These authors actually placed a spotlight on the people they knew in their communities, not just those who saturated the mainstream: buffoons and mammies, rapists and whores.

According to mainstream assumptions, mobs targeted African Americans because they represented an evil that would destroy society: black men were supposedly rapists who cared nothing for stable domesticity and black women were said to be whores incapable of creating it anyway. In this climate, black playwrights most consistently depicted what national discourse denied existed: loving black homes. As they recorded and contributed to the community conversation, they placed a spotlight on the black soldier, the black lawyer, and the black mother/wife, so bringing the black pimp and coward into the genre constituted a major revision. Today, we seldom bother to talk about those who make us proud before focusing on those who don’t.

These tendencies have political implications. What is our current community conversation? What are we speaking to power? Do we talk about our own communities as if they contain no responsible men, commendable women, or adorable children? If so, is that the truth? Again, the mainstream denies that we have loving families, but we should pause before regurgitating those messages. Too often, we say these things as if we are the only admirable black person we know—and as if judging the presumed majority of the race will confirm how admirable and “objective” we are.

Having seen this pattern more often than I would like, I think we could take lessons from the playwrights. They preserved the truth that society’s myths disregarded, thereby affirming for African Americans what they hopefully already knew about the race. Doing so was (and remains) crucial because blacks are not magically impervious to the messages of american society; we are as vulnerable to national rhetoric as others, so we need to equip ourselves and each other to withstand the attack on our self-conceptions.

Today, no less than in the lynching era, the doctrine of white supremacy/black pathology insists that blacks are not worthy citizens of the nation because they are not even meaningful members of their own families and communities. Let’s not be the loudest supporters of those lies.

Black Art ≠ Protest Art: A Contrarian View, Indeed

In the 2 months that my book Living with Lynching has been in print, readers have asked questions that have stayed with me, partly because I wish I had given more complete answers in the moment. One such question came from Mark Anthony Neal, Duke University professor of African and African American Studies and host of the weekly webcast Left of Black. Because I insist that protest is too limiting a framework for understanding the lynching plays that I examine, he asked why I think scholars so often use a protest literature lens. My answer was way too tentative and vague. I have very clear ideas about why this pattern persists. In short: because it has become “common sense” to think of black art as a reaction.

However, what parades as “common sense” sometimes creates a barrier to critical thinking. Michael Omi and Howard Winant have shown this very clearly regarding race in the United States. Because ideas supporting the racial status quo pass as common sense, certain assumptions and conclusions seem natural, despite not being even close to accurate. This has certainly become the case with approaches to black art.

The degree to which “black art = protest art” has become the kind of common sense that hinders critical thinking is perhaps best exemplified by the disproportionate attention that Kenneth Warren’s What Was African American Literature? has received. Somehow, it works for Harvard University Press, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The LA Review of Books, and respected scholars, such as Werner Sollors, that Warren defines a vast body of literature as simply a “response to the disfranchisement of blacks in the south, which set the stage for the consolidation of Jim Crow segregation.” Warren claims that resisting oppression was the only reason that countless literary works emerged, and too many have accepted this as a legitimate assertion. Of course, many have done so with the understanding that this overstated rhetoric simply makes his polemic possible, but even that acknowledgment (and the recognition that Warren's stature gives him cultural capital within the publishing industry), does not fully explain the solemnity with which this book is being engaged. I therefore humbly submit that an important reason for this book’s existence, and people’s willingness to have earnest discussions of it, is this: most in the United States accept as common sense that black artists who embrace that identity can only respond.

The tagline for Mark Anthony Neal’s show Left of Black is "A Contrarian View of Blackness," and thinking about his question has reminded me that a similar perspective produced Living with Lynching. I argue that lynching plays were not so much responses to white-authored violence as they were efforts to preserve community insights. These playwrights worked to equip African Americans to continue to believe in what they already knew about their communities, that they were made up of men and women who lived according to the standards that the nation claimed to respect. Even though these dramas acknowledge that the mob is a threat, they are not about convincing white people that racial violence is wrong. Contrary to what so many believe, not everything that black artists, philosophers, and even activists do is about white people.

Unfortunately, this is an argument that americans seldom hear and that few feel empowered to make. In fact, while writing this book, I kept encountering people who not only had trouble accepting my claim, but they also feared for my career because I was making it. With my best interests at heart, one colleague warned, “Well, we’re talking about lynching, Koritha. Can you really say that it’s not about responding to whites?”

There is no doubt in my mind, though: blacks who lived and wrote in the midst of mob violence do not simply teach us about anti-lynching efforts; they teach us a great deal about lynching itself. If you want to understand lynching, you cannot just look at the evidence that perpetrators left. You also need to pay attention to what targeted communities had to say. And one of the things that they said, if we will only listen, is that mob violence was a response to black achievement.

The plays show that African Americans were busy minding their own business, and sometimes, this led them not only to survive but also thrive in the “Progressive Era.” When they achieved certain kinds of success, white supremacists reacted violently. So, the literature preserves evidence of black community activities, but because those activities beckoned the mob, most scholars now claim that the art itself was a response to the mob. Not so! And, as my book demonstrates, lynching playwrights were not the only ones who made this clear.

I allowed myself to be tentative and vague regarding these issues on Left of Black, and I am haunted by what I did not say while being interviewed. So, I will now be bold enough to reveal the loftiest goal I had while writing this book. I hope that Living with Lynching will do for the study of lynching, racial violence, and the Jim Crow Era what books like John Blassingame’s The Slave Community (1972) did for the study of “the peculiar institution.” Blassingame’s research, and the work of those inspired by it, made it unacceptable to teach slavery using only documents produced by slave masters and other whites. Historians began recognizing that understanding the institution required new methodologies that allowed them to engage the perspectives of the enslaved.

If readers are at all convinced by what I present in Living with Lynching, it should be very hard to claim that you understand racial violence unless you can see black art as much more than protest.

Grappling with Midwestern Memories: A New Lynching Play

American dramatist Charles Smith has given the nation a new lynching play of remarkable nuance and beauty. The Gospel According to James was commissioned by the Indianapolis Repertory Theatre as a way of engaging the state’s history—specifically, the lynching in Marion, Indiana that James Cameron survived, later founding the Black Holocaust Museum. The show ran at IRT from March 22 to April 10, 2011. From May 14 to June 12, 2011, the same cast and crew will bring it to life for Chicago audiences. Though inspired by racial violence in the Midwest, The Gospel According to James focuses on the role of memory in all accounts of history.

As Smith says in the author’s note, “[the play] is not about the lynching. The lynching is only the starting point.” Therefore, from the moment that he began facing the challenge of writing about this violent event, Smith had been sure about one thing: “I knew that I did not want to reproduce the lynching on stage.”

In this way, his work resembles the earliest black-authored lynching plays. Scripts about racial violence written in the 1910s and 1920s—such as Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel (1914/1916), Alice Dunbar-Nelson’s Mine Eyes Have Seen (1918), Mary Burrill’s Aftermath (1919), and Georgia Douglas Johnson’s A Sunday Morning in the South (1925) and Safe (1929)—refuse to describe, let alone portray, physical violence.

Adding to this tradition, Smith creates a fictional meeting between the black man who escaped the mob’s wrath and the white woman who had been with him that night. It is now the early 1980s—more than fifty years after the double lynching of Cameron’s friends Abe Smith and Tommy Shipp. James Cameron (André De Shields) asks Mary Ball, who now goes by “Marie” (Linda Kimbrough), to speak to a man who wants to make a documentary about the events that changed their lives. Marie is not at all interested in this project.

Still, the play unfolds as Marie and Cameron share what they remember about the events that led to the mob dragging the black teenagers through town. As they tell their stories, 16-year-old James Cameron (Anthony Peeples) and young Mary (Kelsey Brennan) appear downstage, along with the others involved. Mirroring the audience, the mature characters watch their younger selves in each other’s versions, sometimes learning details that they had no way of knowing in their teens. More crucial to the playwright’s purpose, though, they often disagree with each other’s accounts even when they had been privy to the exact same information.

The Gospel According to James confronts its audience with the impossibility of knowing exactly what happened that night. Indeed, the play suggests that (pace some historians’ claims) facts are never simply facts; all historical narratives are shaped by perspective. And this is especially true of histories wrought with the complexities that always attend race, sex, and violence in the United States.

From the very beginning of the action, Marie repeatedly calls Cameron a liar. She insists that he knows that events did not unfold as he claims in his autobiography and in interviews. Indeed, she is sarcastic as she declares that he has given the nation “the gospel according to James.”

It is not until much later that the audience discovers why Marie insists that Cameron lied. In a moment of empathy, she admits understanding why he said that her boyfriend Claude, who died that night in 1930, had been “a good white man.” If Cameron had told the truth about how low-down, dirty, and cruel Claude had been (to her and to others), there is no way that town whites would have let Cameron live.

From beginning to end, Smith’s work maintains a palpable tension. Painful stories contradict each other as they vie for space in the world, as they compete to survive and to be remembered. The play never offers its audience the comfort that comes with feeling certain…about what happened or about what motivated those involved. And Smith suggests that this uncertainty clings to all histories. History is shaped by memory. It therefore reflects what people are willing to remember and what they insist upon forgetting.

Smith’s work also suggests that language—the medium through which we create and convey history—sometimes reveals an investment in a particular image. After Cameron’s teenage friends are murdered, Mary’s father, Hoot Ball (Christopher Jon Martin), goes home and tells his wife Bea (Diane Kondrat) what has happened. He had been a member of the mob, and using that position of privilege, he had also helped save Cameron’s life. Still, his wife is shocked to discover that teenagers were lynched in her town. Hoot immediately corrects her: “Lynched? This ain’t Mississippi. This is Indiana. They were hanged!”

After James and Marie have finished sharing what they remember about that night and how it affected the rest of their lives, they have more compassion for each other. And they ultimately agree that when people face the past, they must decide either to bear witness to their truth or shirk that responsibility by trying to forget. Marie chooses the latter. She gives Cameron a necklace, her only memento from that night, and leaves him to grapple with his memories and hers.

Alone, Cameron faces all of the people whose stories were told as he and Marie shared their memories of that night in 1930. Charles Smith leaves his audience with an appreciation of the responsibility that Cameron shouldered. Having survived what his friends did not, Cameron refused to forget; he preserved stories that help make our nation’s history. He spent the rest of his life encouraging the country to face all of its truths so that all of its citizens might heal.

Plays about Lynching in 2010: Recognizing History’s Presence

This year’s New York International Fringe Festival received applications from 800 theatre groups.  Approximately 200 shows were accepted and would be staged in August 2010.  Within the wide array of offerings, one presentation proved especially compelling:  Kym Gomes’s By Hands Unknown, which consists of seven one-act plays about lynching, many of which I examine in my forthcoming book.  Having studied these plays for many years, I was eager to see them staged for the first time, but I was also nervous.  How would these scripts fit together to make a coherent show?  They were all written in the 1920s and 1930s, when dramatic conventions were different from today’s.  Would they seem melodramatic and unrealistic?  Would they even be recognized as “good” plays?  As importantly, would the content feel relevant in 2010?

All of these questions could be answered with a resounding yes because the directors were so creative and resourceful, and the actors executed so well.  My more detailed performance review should appear in the May 2011 issue of Theatre Journal (Johns Hopkins University Press), but I want to share a few thoughts here.  The power of the presentation can be understood with a focus on its opening and closing moments.

The show began with a single light shining on Safiya Fredericks as she recited “Strange Fruit” from memory.  Though a musician accompanied her on guitar, she shared it as a poem, not a song.  However, most people know the lines because Billie Holiday made them famous with her 1939 recording, so the audience could instantly feel a sense of familiarity.  Beginning this way drew audience members in; we were reassured that we knew something about the subject matter.  There is always comfort in feeling like one has a way in, like one is not on the outside of an experience. 

This powerfully rendered poem gave way to Georgia Douglass Johnson’s one-act play A Sunday Morning in the South, in which a 19-year-old who aspires to be a lawyer is falsely accused of rape.  The action begins with Tom’s grandmother and younger brother teasing him about having fallen asleep at 8 o’clock the night before.  They laugh, recalling that he was snoring so loudly that they thought he might choke.  Soon, officers barge into the house, demanding to know where Tom had been at 10 o’clock the previous night.  The play dramatizes the moment when his testimony, and that of his family members, is disregarded.  The officers insist that they already have the case “figured out.”   

Gomes’s choice to begin with a piece that emphasizes African Americans’ exclusion from basic citizenship rights, such as due process, proved especially poignant as the show approached its end.  One by one, the actors emerged from the shadows to recite a portion of Resolution 39, the 2005 measure in which the U.S. Senate apologized for having never passed anti-lynching legislation.  By the time that all 18 members of the ensemble cast had stepped forward, the entire resolution had been shared, and they covered the stage from left to right, directly facing the audience.  Black and white, different ages and backgrounds, each actor took responsibility for recognizing that this is a history that we all share, encouraging audience members to do the same.

Knowing that the black rapist myth emerged only after slavery ended and black men had finally won the right to vote, I was especially struck by the challenge issued by the actors’ stance.  By labeling black men “rapists,” mobs insisted that they were simply protecting white women.  The charge overshadowed the real purpose of mob violence: to ensure that blacks remained terrified—and too preoccupied with basic survival—to claim full citizenship rights.  This white supremacist strategy has remained popular and effective.  Relentlessly labeling black and brown people “criminals” has always been a way of insisting that they are not entitled to civic inclusion.  Given this history, and the many ways that it shapes the present, we must understand that serious political realities are reflected in the way that Americans feel comfortable talking about people. 

It matters that many of us speak with disgust in our voices about “immigrants” who are black and brown—when all Americans are actually immigrants.  It also matters that the word “criminal” has a hard time clinging to white offenders, even though crimes against the environment and crimes that have cheated thousands out of their life savings are widely publicized.  The nation consistently demonizes black and brown citizens, but the stakes are becoming even higher with the growth of the prison industrial complex.  As legal scholar Michelle Alexander has shown in The New Jim Crow, the privatized prison system offers incentives for creating “felons” with laws that essentially target those who are black, brown, and/or poor.  However, laws addressing crimes mostly committed by whites, especially moneyed whites, ensure that they receive mild punishment and relatively little stigma.  Meanwhile, the “felons” become an underclass that cannot vote and is otherwise ostracized and excluded. 

The reactionary, sometimes violent politics that now coalesce around labels like “immigrant,” “criminal,” and “terrorist” resemble those justified by the earlier “black rapist” myth—especially because, when actual immigrants, criminals, and terrorists are white, they are somehow not known by those labels.  Though not equivalent, the situation was similar at the last turn of the century:  hysteria regarding the mythic black rapist made the documented rape of black women by white men a non-issue in mainstream discourse and public policy.   

Because By Hands Unknown begins and ends its engagement with lynching by raising questions about basic rights, it urges us to think seriously about who comes to mind when we say “citizen” today.

More about By Hands Unknown:

A Brava Company/Chelsea Rep LAB Production

Conceived by Kym Gomes
Directed by Harvey Huddleston, Kym Gomes
Associate Directors: Carmen Balentine, Ravin Patterson
Music Director: Bruce Baumer
Costumes by Jennifer Anderson

Ensemble Cast: Carmen Balentine, Michael Bunin, Valerie Elizabeth  Donaldson, Safiya Fredericks, Kym Gomes, Matt Hammond, Phil John, Nancy Keegan, Jamil Moore, Brett Pack, Alison Parks, Ravin Patterson, Jihan Ponti, Rick Schneider, Stefania Diana Schramm, Vonetta Steward, Temesgen Tocruray, Nathan Yates