The Long Beach Opera has released a summary of an investigation into allegations that it mistreated employees based on their race and gender, with the organization saying that while it acknowledged some staff members felt unseen and unheard, there was no evidence to support the most serious allegations.
The LBO declined to release the full investigation, citing personnel issues. Instead it released a summary written by the organization itself that said there was “no evidence of tokenization, no evidence of mistreatment of BIPOC staff/contractors, and no evidence that female staff were treated differently or unfairly because of gender.”
LBO General Director Jennifer Rivera “is committed to learning from this experience and taking the steps necessary to ensure that going forward she creates an environment where staff feels respected and empowered,” the summary said.
LBO hired Aisha Shelton Adam, a Black lawyer and founder of Adam Law Investigations Council, to lead the investigation. Adam could not be reached for comment.
Rivera referred questions to an LBO spokesperson, who declined to comment further.
The investigation stemmed from the abrupt resignation of three Black employees, including the director of a production called “Stimmung” that ultimately had to be canceled just days before its opening in mid-March. The director, Alexander Gedeon, has declined an interview, but said in a March statement that his decision to resign was due to the “culture of misogyny,” “racial tokenism” and other issues at the LBO that had become untenable.
The other two employees, Elijah Cineas and Derrell Acon, could not be reached for an interview.
The summary of the report from the LBO does include new information that two additional employees, both women, have made similar allegations of mistreatment against the organization. The summary did not reveal the names of the women, but one of them, Yuki Izumihara, who is Japanese, has confirmed that she was one of them. She said in an interview with the Post that she was hired in April 2021 as a production designer for “Stimmung” for a six-month period.
Izumihara declined to speak on specific instances of personal mistreatment, but said she had both experienced and witnessed situations that were misogynistic, racially insensitive and exhibitive of racial tokenism. Izumihara said the LBO lacked a system of support for its employees to safely voice their concerns or hold the company accountable for any potential wrongdoing.
Izumihara said she had concerns early on her employment: “First thing I asked, actually, even back in April is, where’s your HR person?”
Izumihara also noted that the LBO “lacked clarity or transparency” around pay, including wages and timeline for payment.
A few days after LBO released its summary of the investigation, Gedeon, Acon and Izumihara spoke on a livestreamed discussion organized by the Black Opera Alliance, which advocates for racial equality in the opera. The three criticized the LBO for not releasing the full report, but only a one-page summary.
Acon said the full report was 21 pages, but that could not be confirmed.
Gedeon, who was hired as the LBO’s minister of culture in the fall of 2020, said that by failing to release the whole report, the LBO had fallen short of its promise of transparency.
Acon during the livestream also for the first time provided some specific details about the allegations, which had been simmering since at least December, when the three first told LBO of their intention to resign.
One instance Acon mentioned as an example of racial tokenism referenced an Indigenous People’s Day post slated to be published online by the LBO. Acon alleges that he was not consulted in the drafting of what he described as a “problematic” post until “the 11th hour” and was overruled in the end.
Having a prominent voice in that conversation should have been part of his job description as the LBO’s “chief impact officer,” Acon said, because he was tasked with being the “go-to person” on the social impact of the LBO’s programming and ensuring the company was living up to its values of equity, diversity and inclusion. But, he said, he was repeatedly undermined or excluded from those discussions.
He held a position but was not empowered, which he said is the definition of tokenism, or “when diversity of any sort, representation of any sort, is being used as currency, without the actual power, the authority, the space, the agency, for that person or that group of persons to actually execute what you’re purporting they can execute.”
The LBO said in its statement about the cancellation of “Stimmung” that the production itself, along with the 2018-2019 world premiere of “The Central Park Five,” were examples of it pushing for more equity, diversity and inclusion within the company. “Stimmung” had a fully BIPOC (or Black, Indigenous, People of Color) creative team, and “The Central Park Five” told the story of five Harlem youths wrongly convicted of rape and other charges in 1989.
LBO’s 2022 programming was slated to include three out of four productions that featured “fully BIPOC” creative teams, according to LBO. ‘Stimmung” would have been that third production, until it was canceled.
Long Beach Opera show director resigned due to ‘culture of misogyny’ and ‘racial tokenism’