There’s a phrase I’ve been sitting with: trauma porn.
Trauma: defined by the American Psychological Association as an overwhelming experience that causes lasting psychological harm.
Porn: defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as material that exploits its subject for sensational effect.
TRAUMA PORN: the repeated, decontextualized depiction of suffering designed more to provoke consumption than to provoke care.
It’s often used as a critique, to call out stories or images that sensationalize suffering—particularly of Black, Indigenous, and other historically oppressed people. But somewhere along the way, the term itself has gotten flattened. Weaponized. Misused to silence rather than sharpen our understanding.
We’ve reached a point where even our own stories, our testimonies of survival, our truth, and resistance—get dismissed as trauma porn before they’re even heard. A play about the Little Rock Nine or Ruby Bridges? Too painful. A film about enslavement? Haven’t we seen enough? But here’s the thing: it’s not the content that makes something pornographic. It’s the container. It’s the space it lives in, the intention behind it, the audience it’s made for, and the systems that distribute and consume it. When I say the container makes it pornographic, I mean that the problem isn’t the story of pain. It’s the ecosystem that only makes room for our pain.
We don’t call Holocaust stories trauma porn, even when they focus intensely on violence, starvation, and mass death. Why? Because those stories are institutionally validated. They’re taught in schools, funded by governments, and framed as essential memory. The pain is treated by most of society as sacred, necessary, and urgent. Black pain, on the other hand, is often treated like spectacle—titillating as entertainment, consumed for emotional stimulation, and occasionally offering fleeting guilt, but rarely demanding complex thought or reckoning.
This double standard isn’t accidental. It’s the result of narrative scarcity—a system that offers us one slot, one grant, one commission, and tells us to make it count. Tell your story, but make it digestible. Make it palatable. Make it useful to those who hold power. So, we argue among ourselves: “Why can’t we tell stories about joy?”, “Why must all of our stories feature our pain?” And my answer is: we can. We should. But we must be allowed to tell both joy and pain. The problem isn’t the presence of trauma in our storytelling. The problem is that trauma has become the only portal through which we’re allowed to enter.
That scarcity leads to painful decisions. In a culture that only gives us one seat at the table, we begin to self-police. We critique each other not out of malice, but out of fear of being reduced, misread, and consumed. But when we call stories about the enslavement of our ancestors or the civil rights movement “trauma porn” without nuance, we risk silencing our own histories and stories of our complete existence. We deny ourselves the power of remembrance, the space to grieve and witness, and the right to place our experiences in the lineage of human dignity. And, perhaps more insidiously, we contribute to a system that withholds funding, platforms, and visibility from the very stories that could liberate us—simply because they don’t conform to the emotional expectations of white comfort.
This is all made worse by the brutal math of representation. Despite the vast diversity of our population, a McKinsey study found that less than 6% of writers, directors, and producers of U.S.-produced films are Black, and that 87% of TV executives and 92% of film executives are white. And that’s just one piece of the picture. Latine, Asian, Indigenous, Middle Eastern, disabled, queer, and trans creators remain drastically underrepresented—on stage, on screen, and behind the scenes. Add to that the consistent underfunding of organizations led by people of color, women, LGBTQIA+ folks, and other systemically excluded leaders, and the truth becomes undeniable: the scarcity is manufactured. It’s systemic.
It’s not about talent.
It’s about control.
And it’s not just about what gets made—it’s about who’s watching. The meaning of a story changes based on the room it’s told in. A story about state violence shared in a Global Majority-led healing circle lands differently than the same story played for a mostly white identified audience. One may open the door to community care; the other may end with applause and nothing else. The audience, the intent, the structure—it all shapes the story’s power.
This is where the role of our cultural institutions becomes impossible to ignore. Museums, film studios, theaters, opera houses—these are the containers. And they’re complicit. These institutions prop up the illusion that trauma porn is real not because the stories are false, but because they keep funneling us through the same narrow lens. They might program Kehinde Wiley’s latest show and pat themselves on the back for progress, but how many of them have a permanent, meaningful collection of global majority artists? How many can say they consistently program BIPOC creators—not just when it’s safe, not just after tragedy, not just when the optics are convenient?
We saw it clearly after the tragedy of George Floyd’s murder. Every institution released a statement. Every nonprofit promised to “center BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, and marginalized voices.” But as soon as the smoke cleared, the season announcements looked just like they did before. The one show meant to check every box, stuffed into February after the box office goals were met. One show to carry the burden of representing everyone else. And that show? Often given the least resources, the shortest run, and the biggest expectations to bring in those audiences that don’t normally come to the theatre or opera. To desegregate the audience for a month—but it never works. Those audiences might heed the call and come to the one show at the big, very well-funded theater, but will they feel compelled to return to the next show? No. Because the next show wasn’t made with them in mind. Because the rest of the season doesn’t see them. Because they weren’t invited into a relationship—just a transaction. They know when they’re being courted for optics, when the invitation isn’t rooted in care, and when the culture of the space wasn’t designed to hold them beyond that brief moment of “diversity.” So they don’t come back. Not because they didn’t enjoy the story, but because they weren’t actually included in the vision.
And also because they also want to see their complexity performed on stage. They want to see themselves portrayed with the same depth, nuance, joy, melancholy, absurdity, beauty, and contradictions that white audiences get to witness in the stories that overwhelmingly reflect their lives. Stories that don’t have to justify their existence through struggle or crisis, but are allowed to simply be.
When I was running a theater, I was told: “It’s a numbers game.” If the season opens in August or September, then the organization has to make most of its money by January. The February slot—Black History Month—is rarely allowed to take risks, rarely expected to perform, because the stakes have already been met. That slot becomes symbolic. Safe. Disposable.
And yet, that’s the space where we’re often told we should be grateful to have a voice.
In my first season at OSF, I directed How to Catch Creation by Christina Anderson. A play that centered Black identity, Black imagination, and Black joy—not as a reaction to pain, but as normative, as everyday, as something that didn’t require justification. It flipped the status quo on its head so thoroughly that audience members regularly came up to me and said things like, “Wow! These characters could’ve been played by anybody—even white people!”
And I’d say, “No. The playwright intended for these characters to be Black, and they are having a Black experience.”
But here’s where it gets deeply, disturbingly clear: what those audience members were really saying was that because the characters weren’t suffering, weren’t struggling, weren’t explaining their trauma, they must not have been really Black. That the only way to recognize Blackness was through its pain. And if there was beauty, pleasure, domestic intimacy, sexual desire, intellectual exploration, artistic legacy—then suddenly, it didn’t register as Black anymore. Suddenly, it looked like whiteness in a black face.
Because we’ve all been conditioned—through generations of media, education, and pop culture—to associate Blackness with survival, and whiteness with emotional complexity. Even our sitcoms began with struggle. The theme song to Good Times (1974)—composed by Dave Grusin with lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman, all white and Jewish songwriters—set the emotional tone for how Blackness would be framed for mainstream audiences:
“Just lookin’ out of the window / Watchin’ the asphalt grow / Thinkin’ how it all looks hand-me-down… Good times.”
This wasn’t irony. It was a narrative blueprint. It told viewers, before the first laugh track, that Black life begins in lack and hardship. That joy, if it appears at all, will be conditional, fleeting, or comic relief. Scholars like bell hooks, in her 1992 book Black Looks: Race and Representation, and Herman Gray, in Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness (1995), have described this phenomenon as narrative conditioning—the repeated reinforcement of limiting portrayals that shape what audiences believe about themselves and others.
And it’s important to remember that Good Times was also revolutionary. It was Executive produced by Norman Lear and co-created by Mike Evans and Eric Monte—a Black screenwriter who helped transform American television by writing Black characters with enough richness and complexity that their stories could no longer be confined to the margins. Both The Jeffersons and Good Times were spinoffs of white-led sitcoms (All in the Family and Maude, respectively), a direct result of Monte’s insistence on authentic Black voices in mainstream media. So even as the theme song reinforced a narrative of limitation, the very existence of the show—and Monte’s contributions—disrupted the idea that Black stories had no place at the center.
That tension—the collision of representation and control—is the root of the problem…but I digress…
We’ve all been duped. We’ve been deeply conditioned by centuries of media, education, and cultural hierarchy to believe that the only people who are allowed to live full emotional lives, who are allowed to move through the world with both complexity and ease, “joy and pain, like sunshine and rain” are white people. We’ve been trained to see emotional wholeness as a white attribute (I also want to take this moment to shout out Frankie Beverly & Maze for these lyrics—written for all people but were sung for my people in 1981).
So when Black, Indigenous, Asian, Latinx, Arab, or other global majority characters are portrayed as complex, whole, joyful, contemplative, messy, erotic, flawed, brilliant—when they’re given the range we all deserve—we’re told they’re “occupying white space.” Because apparently, being fully human is a category designated for white people only.
That is how deep the rot goes.
When non-traumatic expressions of life by nonwhite people are seen as exceptional or even accidental—when our very existence in art is filtered through a colonial lens of permission and projection—we are no longer seen as real. We’re seen as allegory. As performance. As deviation from the norm. As Primrose Paul writes in her essay “The Promise it Makes: Art and the Afro-futuristic Future,” published in FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, Issue 24 (2023), “the cultural marketplace becomes a very effective place for ideological domination… domination can now occur culturally, with the click of a button.” Her framing reveals that these distortions are not incidental—they are systemic. They are embedded in the infrastructures of arts institutions, philanthropy, and mass media, where even our liberation is often expected to appear as spectacle.
But we are the norm. We always have been. We just haven’t been the default in the containers built to hold story, power, and capital. That’s why I say again: it’s not the content. It’s the container. It’s the white gaze. It’s the false economy of narrative scarcity that forces us to choose between pain or invisibility, between stereotype or silence.
And for the performers of these stories—the actors, singers, dancers, storytellers—who are also segregated by how convincingly they can perform our trauma, they deserve better.
They deserve to be more than vessels of pain. They deserve more than the chance to audition for the one role in the season reserved for the “issue play.” They deserve to be invited—welcomed—to perform The Magic Flute, The Marriage of Figaro, and The Central Park Five. They deserve the right to embody legacy and freedom and rage and whimsy and romantic disaster. They should feel that stepping into those roles is an expression of their brilliance, their scope, their artistic rage—not a ghettoization of their talent.
They should not be treated as specialists in grief.
They should feel at home in a play that depicts their ancestors’ enslavement or internment, yes—but also in a play that asks them to bring their global majority body, voice, and lived experience to Willy Loman or Helena.They should not have to explain why they’re playing Chekhov or Shakespeare, Sondheim or Suzan-Lori Parks.The notion that certain stories, certain styles, certain stages are only for some bodies? That’s the lie. That’s the legacy of exclusion we’ve inherited and must reject.
Because what does it say to generation after generation of performing artists who are still being told, subtly or overtly, that their genius only matters when it’s tied to their pain? That their cultural capital peaks when they cry on cue? What does it do to a young soprano of color who is told her voice soars, but only when singing songs of suffering? What does it do to the Black actor who’s offered roles to perform every version of “the help” but never Hamlet?
This industry has created a caste system of artistry, where access to range is hoarded, and where full emotional expression is treated like territory that must be earned—not granted—based on proximity to whiteness.
But we know the truth: access is not a privilege. It is a necessity.
The right of every artist to explore the full spectrum of human experience.
The right of every audience to see that range reflected back.
The right of every story to be held in a container worthy of its weight.
So let me speak directly to the field—for those in positions of power, those building seasons, curating collections, choosing grants, writing curriculum, awarding residencies: we already know what narrative abundance looks like. You know it. I’m just here to remind you.
And yet—so many institutions refuse to do it. Not because they don’t understand how, but because they are terrified of being rejected by their donor base. They are afraid their core audience will feel alienated, or worse—take their money elsewhere. When the DEI movement began to ripple through the American theater, there was a lot of talk about how most organizations “couldn’t afford” to make meaningful changes. And I approached that claim with genuine curiosity. What exactly is too expensive about telling the truth? About changing the canon? About desegregating the season?
What I came to understand—after many conversations, and through my own experience running multiple institutions—is that what they really meant was: we cannot afford to lose white wealth. The idea that wealth is inherently tied to whiteness is so deeply embedded in nonprofit arts systems that anything which threatens that connection—whether it’s shifting the season, changing the stories, or diversifying the board—is treated as too risky to attempt. Even when institutions perform inclusion on the surface, underneath it all is the unspoken mandate: don’t upset the donors. Don’t let them notice the change.
And this is part of the problem with the whole limiting idea of “trauma porn.” Because what institutions are really doing is curating stories for white comfort—deciding which versions of our lives are “acceptable” enough to stage without causing unrest in the box seats. That’s not narrative justice. That’s narrative containment.
Narrative abundance looks like programming that doesn’t perform inclusion but practices it—through resources, relationships, and risk. It’s honoring that not all our stories are meant to soothe or explain or inspire. Some of them are just meant to be. To take up space. To tell the truth. To imagine otherwise.
Culturally specific theaters like National Black Theatre in Harlem, Golden Thread in San Francisco, Celebration Theater in Los Angeles, Teatro Vista in Chicago, East West Players in Los Angeles, and El Teatro Campesino in San Juan Bautista—and so many more, too many to name in a single essay—have modeled this abundance for decades. They have long centered global majority artists, produced work rooted in community, and cultivated generations of talent across race, gender, sexuality, and discipline. And yet they remain underfunded, undervalued, overstretched, and under-resourced—often operating without the personnel or infrastructure to match the scale and impact of their contributions. These institutions are routinely poached by predominantly white institutions (PWIs), which treat them as de facto incubators for “diverse” talent—Black, Brown, queer, trans, immigrant, Indigenous artists—without returning resources, visibility, or sustained support. The artists they nurture are often forced to migrate toward PWIs to access the funding, infrastructure, and exposure needed to sustain their artistic practice, while the culturally specific institutions that shaped them are left in a constant cycle of extraction without reinvestment.
We are here. We have always been here. And we will not shrink.
It means saying yes to grief and joy, to grief without joy, to joy without trauma. It means making room for the sacred and the mundane. It means trusting that our stories deserve to be told—all of them—not just when it’s safe or salable, but because they are true.
Because narrative abundance isn’t just about what we see—it’s about what we believe is possible. It’s about undoing the lie that only certain people get to be whole. That only certain bodies get to be complex. That only certain lives are worth watching unfold.
And this work—this insistence on narrative abundance—isn’t just an artistic imperative. It is a political necessity. We are living in a moment when those in power are actively attempting to rewrite history in real time. Since 2021, over 40 U.S. states have introduced or passed legislation restricting how race, gender, and history can be taught in public schools (PEN America, 2023). More than 1,500 books have been banned from school libraries, many written by and about people of color and LGBTQ+ communities (ALA, 2023). Across the country, politicians aligned with 45 are pushing a narrative that aims to whitewash the past, erase structural harm, and cast the mythology of post-racial America as fact.
They are trying to sell us the fiction that once lived only on in fiction: Books, Film, TV. The fantasy of the “good old days”—of polite neighborhoods, colorblind (colorless is more like it) meritocracies, and bootstraps—was always a story written by and for the dominant class. And now that fiction is being legislated into policy, curriculum, and public memory. Fiction cannot stand up to lived truth.
And when it does—when manufactured narratives overwhelm lived reality—the consequences are catastrophic. In Weimar Germany, a nation destabilized by economic collapse and cultural disorientation turned to propaganda to restore a mythic national identity. The Nazi regime didn’t rise on brute force alone—it rose on the manipulation of image, language, and story. As Susan Sontag observed in her essay Fascinating Fascism, “fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death.” And as Hannah Arendt warned in The Origins of Totalitarianism, totalitarianism thrives not only on violence but on the systematic replacement of factual truth with seductive, fabricated myths.
This is not alarmism—it is pattern recognition.
History teaches us that authoritarianism does not begin with violence. It begins with a story. It begins with the control of what is remembered and what is allowed to be known. That story is then repeated, taught, legislated, and embedded until it becomes harder to distinguish fiction from fact, propaganda from truth, memory from myth.
When a nation starts banning books, it is not safeguarding its children—it is safeguarding its power.When it criminalizes memory and punishes educators for telling the truth about slavery, colonization, gender identity, or Indigenous genocide, it is not protecting public discourse—it is curating collective amnesia. It is laying the groundwork for state-sponsored fiction.
We’ve seen it before. In the Jim Crow South, in McCarthy-era blacklists, in Nazi Germany, in apartheid South Africa—when truth becomes a threat to power, power retaliates with control over culture. The arts become sanitized. Archives become locked. Curriculums become censored. And artists, educators, and truth-tellers become targets.
This is what makes the American theater—and every cultural and educational institution—more than a stage, a gallery, or a classroom. It makes them battlegrounds for reality.
So now the question is: Will we become accessories to the revisionist project—or will we resist it? Will we continue to chase ticket sales and patron comfort while the story of who we are is being rewritten behind our backs? Or will we reclaim our responsibility as stewards of memory, imagination, and complexity?
Because if we don’t hold our ground—if we do not tell the full truth, even when it is inconvenient or unmarketable—the old fictions will return. Shined up. Repackaged. More dangerous than ever. They will come back not just in political speeches but in program notes. Not just in school boards, but in season brochures.
And here is where I must return to the language of trauma porn—because the most dangerous fiction of all is the idea that our stories of survival, uprising, joy and grief are somehow shameful. That they are “too much.” That they are only valuable when repackaged for white consumption, or only valid when stripped of rage, power, or context.
To call our stories “pornographic” is to participate in the lie that our full humanity is not enough.
It denies that our struggle holds value to us—not just to the systems that exploit us or the audiences that pity us. It denies that the trauma of enslavement is also the story of revolution, resistance, joy, spiritual invention, love, and dreaming forward into a future we’ve always and continue to deserved to live.
I am here because my ancestors dreamed my future.
I have a responsibility to remember their past.
Because if we don’t hold our ground—if we do not tell the full truth, even when it is inconvenient or unmarketable—the old fictions will return. Shined up. Repackaged. More dangerous than ever. They will come back not just in political speeches but in program notes. Not just in school boards, but in season brochures.
And I see this happening in real time. Right now, I’m in the process of directing The Central Park Five opera by Anthony Davis, with a libretto by Richard Wesley. It’s a work that confronts the horrific miscarriage of justice inflicted on five Black and Brown boys—ages 14 to 16—who were branded as rapists, vilified in the press, and sent to prison for a crime they did not commit. They were later fully exonerated when the real perpetrator confessed. But the damage was done. And the trauma remains.
What’s astonishing—and infuriating—is that even as we work to stage this story with honesty and care, the label of trauma porn still hovers. It has come up in conversations about the emotional toll on the performers, and about one character in particular—45, who inserted himself into this tragedy. In 1989, he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the return of the death penalty to punish these boys. Today, the Exonerated Five are in the midst of a defamation lawsuit against him, as he continues to refuse to acknowledge their innocence.
His behavior was, and remains, egregious.
And yet in our cultural spaces, we’re still more likely to question whether telling this story is too much, rather than questioning the systems that made the story possible in the first place.
We are still in the habit of labeling the depiction of Black trauma as pornographic—not because of the story itself, but because so few of our institutions are prepared to hold the full spectrum of Black life. Spaces that rarely show us in joy, in vision, in genius, will always flinch when faced with our pain. Because they haven’t done the work to hold us in our wholeness.
But this story—this opera—is not pornographic. It is urgent. It is history. It is resistance.
And it’s a reminder that the problem has never been our stories.
The problem has always been the container.
Because trauma is not the problem.
Exploitation is the problem.
Erasure is the problem.
Narrative scarcity is the problem.
So let me say it clearly, one more time:
The story is not the enemy. The scarcity is. The container is. The gaze is.
And the way forward is abundance.
Stop acting like the bear isn’t already watching you.
Stop acting like you didn’t help build the cage.
Stop acting like you didn’t hand the bear the key,
then look surprised when it turned on all of us.
You empowered it, out of fear, comfort, self-preservation.
And now you want distance from the damage
without giving up any of the power.
You hold the narrative.
You always have.
We are no longer interested in your performance of change.
We are no longer waiting for your grant cycle,
your programming slot,
your curated invitation.
We have been building without you,
loving without you,
remembering without you,
and dreaming beyond you.
We can no longer wait. The time has run out.
Because we will not shrink ourselves
to fit your crisis.
We’ve always been the architects.
Because we are the foundation of truth.
You are a vision, Nataki Garrett. Truly a gift to orbit this world with you.