ReaderRecommended: 'Harris presents us with scene after scene exposing the violence—mental and physical—perpetuated on African Americans in our racist system. Some of the scenes are raw and realistic, others tempered with a kind of bare-knuckled comedy.'
, and performed by a sharp ensemble of nimble actors—one of the characters breaks the fourth wall and pointedly tells “non-Black” audience members, like me, that we are welcome to watch the show, but it has not been written for us. And then for the next hour or so, Harris presents us with scene after scene exposing the violence—mental and physical—perpetuated on African Americans in our racist system. Some of the scenes are raw and realistic, others tempered with a kind of bare-knuckled comedy.
As a white critic—doubly removed from the emotional core of the material, by my race and my profession as observer/reporter—I have to admit that I have no idea if the scenes in this show successfully hit the hearts and minds of the African Americans in the audience. I can only say that parts of the show, dedicated to the memory of Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones , moved me deeply.
But that doesn’t matter. It was not written for us. Then again, as Harris makes abundantly clear, it is in a way about us, but not in a way we frequently want to see—or acknowledge. Some of the more trenchant scenes in the show reveal uncomfortable parallels between the attitudes of old-school White racists and those of white people who consider themselves more enlightened, but who in our own ways, consciously or not, play a role in a racist system.
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