Diversity

Benjamin called the crowed at Carapace

This room of 500 mostly white old people, and um,

sorry, 200,

This was during his Carapace origin story, set in 2012, before the move. He was nervous for his friend, Niki Chisholm, when she got on stage.

As an event that skews liberal, and is specifically designed to give voice to people who might not otherwise be heard, I would think there would be better minority representation at Carapace. However, several participants have observed that the crowd is very white.

David:

I’d say,

middle-aged to older white people

is the majority of the audience with

students and

younger people,

some younger people thrown in.

Cris felt that there was more of a mix:

You’ve got a

wide spectrum of ages.

A wide spectrum of backgrounds and

race and gender and

sexuality

I counted people in October:

At 7:05 I counted 46 people in the room, apparently there for Carapace. 20 of those people appeared to be in the 20s-40s age range (mostly 30s and 40s). There were four people of color. As people came in later I added them in. All together there were 61 attendees, 30 people in their 20s-40s, and 5 people of color.

I got the sense that the October show was a little more lightly attended than may be usual, so I’ll try to do some more counts. Also, I was making assumptions about people based on what I could see about them, so my numbers could be a little off. But, I don’t think I could have been so far off that you could not still draw the conclusion that the community is mostly white.

I want to circle back to the end of Benjamin’s recounting of Niki’s story:

Momma would say, “think fast!”

and then she’d throw her tittie at you.

And you had to catch the tittie

‘cause it was $600!

The room of mostly old white people,

lost it!

He was worried about how Niki would feel in front of the room of old white people. He was worried about how the room would receive her. But they loved her.