My experiences of the theater are no different from my experiences of the world at large, which is that it’s very difficult to navigate in a racist and sexist world. Sometimes I think that theater thinks it’s somehow immune to being complicit in the intrinsic racism of our world. What I’ve seen over the course of my career is institutional racism and sexism at every level of the American theater. And that saddens me.

I hear so often from white men in the theater, “Oh, we don’t know what to do because all of the black people get the opportunities.” But you have only to look at the numbers. And it’s shocking.

Every second of every moment of my career is touched by some degree of a kind of racism that is just pervasive in the landscape of America. This moment, where the world is blowing up, comes out of a pent-up frustration about the way we as people of color have been navigating the world. It is frustrating to me and, I will presumptuously say, most other African-Americans or people of color in my industry.

I could list off some anecdotal “this thing happened and that thing happened.” I will say that I feel it around marketing. I feel it around reviews. I feel it around opportunities. For years — it’s a little bit less, because I’ve asked my agent to address this — but for years, it was a given that if I was produced, it would be in the [company’s] smaller theater.

It’s every production at every institution — with an acknowledgment that even within those institutions, I have been supported and nurtured and given an artistic home. Because that’s the [expletive] of racism in our country. The people that you’re working with love you, often. And you love them, often. And the country is entrenched in institutional, societal racism.

Many of us have been pushing toward this moment. Of course all lives matter, but that’s not what I’m talking about. We’re talking about the black house on a street in a line of houses, and that black house is on fire, and has been on fire for 400 years, and needs our considered attention, resources and intervention to put that fire out. I mean the fire of racial injustice.

The message I want to say to my black brothers and sisters, whose heritage is rooted in racial injustice and who have been on the front lines of this struggle for 400 years, from my great-great grandfather, to my great-grandfather, my grandmother, my mother, but also people like Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee and the work of the Negro Ensemble Company and New Federal Theater: I want to honor their commitment.

To my white friends and colleagues: I want their help to create a more just world. My experiences have led me to know that if white citizens were honest with themselves, they can remember incidents where moments of racism entered into the atmosphere and they didn’t say anything about it.

Sometimes it could have been on the golf course, it could have been in a rehearsal hall, it could have been a corporate meeting. But now, when we have the ears of the world, there has to be a discussion, a dialogue. And especially for Broadway, it has to be a dialogue and it can no longer be one way. There hasn’t been enough listening with my well-intentioned white friends.

There needs to be more diversity in the theater. There needs to be more diversity of storytelling. Money should not always lead the discussion. We need different voices at all of the tables, and I think we can do that.

A couple years ago, I wrote a treatment for play that started with a scene in Minneapolis in which a police officer killed a young black man, and then the city started burning. At the time, I was like, “That would never happen in Minneapolis.” I mean, certainly police violence has, but not the city on fire. And now here we are. But I think people are listening. I see people taking care of each other and the community mobilizing. That’s not getting reported, but I’m heartened by the ways that people are showing up for each other.

More and more, I think we need to focus deeply on racial healing and attend to the most vulnerable. We’ve known this for some time, but I’m so glad that more folks throughout the country are starting to understand that Minnesota is a crucible of so many deep inequities for black Americans: housing, jobs, health, policing, incarceration and detention, just sector after sector.

I’m really interested in how Penumbra can lend the tools of our practice to help solve some of those inequities in really meaningful partnerships with people on the front lines of that work. That’s the work I’ll be commissioning, that’s the equity work we’ll be doing. That’s how we’ll serve the community.

I come from a tradition of making art by, for and about black folks, and certainly everyone’s welcome. I was given an opportunity to be loved and to be trusted and to try and test and fail and given cover in a way that I think a lot of other people haven’t. But right now, we’re seeing artists of color who have been proximate to white-led theaters start to organize.

I haven’t grown up proximate to that whiteness and white power and that leveraging of money, so I haven’t experienced the kind of abuse that these brilliant artists have had in white theaters. And there is a tension, a generative tension, I think, between folks who are kind of embedded within and caring for legacy institutions and those working as free agents.

Some of those folks have even been required to be gatekeepers, to keep other people of color out. And when you start to realize that you’ve been used in that way, or required to perform that role, that’s a deep wound. Our activist mothers and fathers warned us about this tactic. Larry Neal, in one of his early essays, said “The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community.”

I want to draw upon the proud moments when black artists have stood up to the American theater. Folks are drawing now on August Wilson’s critical speech, “The Ground On Which I Stand.” I’ve read that speech 40 times over my career and what I’m noticing about this most recent collective uprising by free agents, by individual artists working within regional and Broadway theaters, is that they seem to want the posture but not the prescription.

August didn’t call for integration into white theaters. He said, “Fund black theaters.” He said, “Black theater is alive and well; it’s just not funded.” I invite these black artists who have been wounded by their efforts with the Great White Way to come back home, to come and invest in our companies and to bring their wealth and their talent and their broken hearts back to these legacy institutions, where we can heal them and nurture them because we really need their help.

I differentiate between black theater and plays with black people in them. Black theater always has a social justice imperative and community uplift embedded in it, whereas plays with black people in them might actually be injurious or do harm to the black community.

If white institutions would be willing to take up the work to involve, educate and activate white audiences, that would go a long way in helping us move forward. Activate your white audiences to talk about whiteness. Say, “We are going to roll up our sleeves, and we’re going to work with our white folks to support racial equity, to fight white supremacy and anti-blackness.” That would be tremendously powerful. Whether or not they’re willing to do that work, I don’t know, because it’s hard.

In the same way, a legacy black institution like Penumbra Theater is going to lean in hard to attend to the black community and support people of color. There’s a role for everybody in the movement.

The most profound thing that we can practice right now is discernment — to be patient, wherever we sit, whether we’re an artistic director, a playwright, a producer, whether you’re white or black or whether you’re emerging or at the pinnacle of your career. Using discernment to figure out exactly what your most potent role can be. And not getting distracted by the shiny things that might get flashed in front of you.

Sarah Bellamy is the artistic director of Penumbra Theater in St. Paul, Minnesota, one of only three professional African-American theaters in the nation to offer a full season of performances. It was founded by her father, Lou Bellamy, in 1976; since taking over as artistic director in 2017, Bellamy, 42, has produced “For Colored Girls,” “This Bitter Earth” and most recently, “The White Card.”

Interview by Salamishah Tillet.

The most heartbreaking thing is people keep asking: What is the message? That is by far the most racist question of all. The message is the same it always has been, since the first slave stepped on to the rich soil of this stolen land. SET. US. FREE. That is the message.

The message is, start over the American systems that were made in hopes of keeping black people out of the picture. This includes capitalism, this includes politics, and this includes the Great White Way.

The message is, clear a space at the table, so that we can sit beside you and enjoy the benefits of the seeds our ancestors planted for this now blossoming nation; seeds that for so long, only you, the white privileged, have harvested.

I am 27, just beginning my career as an artist. I have done only one show on Broadway, but I can share with you multiple stories of the racist actions and words that have been flung at me. I simply have no interest in that. Those wounds have healed. I am more interested in preventing the master from ever beating me and my fellow men ever again.

How do we bargain? How do we start again? How do we right this wrong? We come to the table with demands. And for me, it’s about three words: communication, collaboration and care.

I would like there to be more communication between blacks, artists of color, and whites; an investment in listening, and not listening to hear, but listening to understand. A conversation is a talk where news and ideas are exchanged; not looted, not stolen, exchanged, which means to give something and receive something.

I would like there to be more collaboration. A show cannot happen without producers, writers, directors, choreographers, stage managers and actors all working together, but where is the inclusion in each of these job positions? Why is there such a lack of black and people of color producers, writers, directors, choreographers and stage managers? Why do black and P.O.C. actors so often get shut out?