Lift Every Voice - Oral Histories - Deborah Roberts

DR: Yeah, actually I do. Actually I do and I’m really quite surprised by that. The people, I just was telling someone this today, three years ago the people I thought were the most important people in my life as artists are no longer in my life and I have a whole different group of people. And it’s so weird because I thought these people would be my friends forever. And it’s so totally different because once the work moved, your sense, your broader sense of who you are opened up. I went to Chicago for a whole month to really push my work. And I realized once I was gone and away from certain influences, I realized all I talked about was race. And I may have talked about that today. I may have been here too long. That my whole existence was what I didn’t have and it was because of my race. And, “We wasn’t being shown in certain galleries because of our race. We wasn’t du duh duh duh.”

And so when I went to Chicago for a whole month and really started pushing my work and started going to dinner parties and talking with other people from different walks of life, yeah, we still affirmed our Blackness, but it wasn’t the major thing. And there are so many other things out there. Once I started seeing that broad scope and I realized that I was bogged down into this Blackness. That is what happened in the Black arts community right this moment. It’s going on right now. It’s that we’re so concerned about not getting opportunities because we feel like people don’t understand our work and the different types of work that we do. We never turned the spotlight on ourselves and I think that’s a harder spoon to swallow. Because hey, you’re not doing the work. You got to put in the time.

One thing I realized is that art is a lot of hard work and you can’t be a now and then artist. Either you are an artist or you’re not. And people can tell that, who know about art, can see when you work and when you don’t work. And so, yeah, I’m still doing things. Yeah, I’m still painting pickaninnies, but it’s more than just that. My work is slowly moving toward feminism, which I am getting very excited about. And I want to tell the story, a woman’s story—not a Black woman’s story, not a Hispanic or Asian, but a woman’s story. How we are perceived as woman and how feminism has helped and hurt us through our art. So that’s my vision and I can see that five years down the line now and before I didn’t.

CC: What has sort of precipitated that shift for you?

DR: The only difference between Black women and white women is a degree. And that’s about it. And the same issues that we face, they face too. There is no difference. I mean, it’s just you know. It’s a racial difference because society has set that up, but, you know, we have weight issues. We have issues of fair pay. We have issues of being marginalized. I mean, childcare—all of these same things just by being women. And how we are perceived through society and how that it’s men in ties who are deciding what clothes we wear and when we wear them and what size we should be and why we’re wearing these clothes, what foods we should eat to try to fit into these clothes. And it’s just not women. So I want to move my work more toward that. And the race issue will always be there. That’s not going to change in my lifetime, but I do want to hit a broader audience and a more collective voice. Because right now I’m speaking in one tone and I want to, I want to speak in a symphony, you know? I don’t want to be a solo symphony. I want to sing a choir. And I think that a choir tends to project a louder, you know, voice.

Disclaimer:
“Oral Narrative as History.” Students received class credit for this work, and were under the supervision of Dr. Martha Norkunas, director of “The Project in Interpreting the Texas Past.”

Every effort has been made to transcribe the audio recordings exactly. On occasion a word, or phrase, was difficult to hear and this is indicated by a question mark in brackets.

Interviewee:
Deborah Roberts

Interviewer:
Clare Croft

Date of Interview:
February 8, April 4, 2006

Place:
Deborah Robert’s home, Austin, Texas

Recording Format:
Edirol digital recorder, Uncompressed wave file

Transcriber:
Clare Croft