If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a play running right now in New York City that’s controversial and provoking. “The Slave Play” (which I have not seen) questions the intersection between black and white, male and female, slave and free, running from the 19th century into the 21st. From the reviews and news stories I’ve read, it’s deeply discomforting to just about everyone who sees it, and everyone who sees it and talks about it seems to have highly individualized reactions to it. Just reading the reviews and the following comments makes me uncomfortable. I don’t rest easy with depictions of human interactions that depend heavily upon these themes and the words used to describe them, and when I read the reviews of people I support who are demeaned by the imagery and text of the play, I am reluctant to myself offer my own body and mind for the interrogation of such an experience. Mark that down as my weakness—I admit it.
And for some people, that discomfort is too much to handle, even when they are simply a spectator of the play that they chose to attend, even when no one is directly speaking to them, to put them on the spot.
According to this article, (and from several videos I’ve seen from people who attended and recorded the event), a white woman at the talkback needed to tell the playwright and others on the stage for the talkback that the play made her feel bad in a bad way, and that she wasn’t that bad, and that she had her own issues to overcome, and that the play dismissed them, and that she has done a lot of good work her whole life, and…
Now, I’m honestly not trying to minimize her own pain and discomfort. I think it’s real. I think that everyone has experiences in life that are demeaning and degrading and hurtful, that no one is exempt from them, and in just about every case we feel that it’s unfair to experience them. And dear God it is most important to get that across when confronted by our actions in other areas—not only are we not a bad person, we’ve had to deal with some serious bad stuff ourselves, and that needs to be recognized!
This woman was provoked so much that she needed to let the playwright know how she was affronted by his writing and tone and message. My life hasn’t been a picnic even though I’m white!
She was a spectator. Yet she felt as if she were somehow on the stage herself and the actors were interrogating her.
I suppose we can mark this down to “white privilege” and “white tears” and “white fragility”—all things that bedevil us white people for reasons whose explanations are beyond the scope of this essay.
But I wanted to highlight something here that I thought was a good thing about this public mess. It is a good thing to be provoked this way. This provocation and reaction, these emotions spilling out into public, these are the first signs of change—the sense of personal and corporate moral culpability in unjust situations and systems, the sense that my own awareness of my own unfair disadvantages are shared by others, and that perhaps others might have it worse & that I might need to grow in my empathy and understanding.
I’m thoroughly glad to see how viscerally she reacted–this hit her where her safety and her self-assurance has most protected her.
Of course, I also feel very badly for the people on stage who were subjected to her eruption. I do not think that anyone needs their back to be the bridge to another’s healing. And it seems that this is yet another predictable situation of a Black creative group needing to be more respectful of the white donors’ feelings and prestige. “Understand my feelings. You might have it bad what with being formally disenfranchised both personally and as a group, but I also had a bad experience.” I don’t wish this unkindness of this public display on anyone. No one deserves to be such a target, and no matter what you think about the work of Jeremy Harris (the writer) and the rest of the production team and even of the thesis of the play itself, it’s an unkindness to be so abrasive and rude in public to people you don’t know. This was a voluntary experience. It was not Mandatory Proletarian Re-education Time.
This was a good example of what we need in our lives to bring about change from what we were to what we need to be. Until we reach that place where we say “My god, what have I done? What have I spent my life upon?” we cannot really begin to unwind ourselves from systemic & personal white racism. Until we experience something like this unpleasant provocation that makes us both think and feel, we won’t begin to see.
White people don’t like being disturbed. We imagine that the reliability of our inclusion into comfort means that we’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. When the most solid thing we trust—that whiteness will protect us and prosper us—is shown to be nothing more than a house of cards, and we see that collapse in front of us—we are not far off from the first steps that will lead us into freedom, if we choose to see the collapse as the victory over lies versus the loss of all that we depend upon. If we live in castles on clouds, and depend upon them to be there when we need them—that fantasy is going to disappoint us if we don’t see it as a fantasy.
And honest talk here: Whiteness destroys white people, too. It’s incredibly destructive to everyone around us, but we are also damaged and made to be less human and less free. Whiteness disconnects us and isolates us, makes us feel impinged upon when our stories are not centered, when others are attempting to tell their stories. I feel for this woman who, in her own pain and own existential fear, cannot find it in herself to connect with others who also have their stories and pains and experiences, who cannot understand that her pain does not trump the pain of another.
It is difficult to have this moment of pain and the sense of loss. But I assure you, unless we go through it, we will never overcome our own isolation and our own terrible loneliness even when we are surrounded by five hundred other white people just like us.