I have an opportunity to perform a piece of theatre I have admired for several years, a piece directly dealing with racism in the everyday on a bus in New Haven and within each one of us. It is a play with one actor who transforms through a singular costume piece into characters of different genders and identities. When I began the process of becoming the characters, I was immediately aware that I was uncomfortable standing on stage in my white body and playing Clifford, a young black man. Clifford decides to confront a white couple he encounters on a bus who are uneasy about his presence, and so ensues the play. The question that arose was “What right do I have to stand on stage and ‘speak’ for Clifford?” What right do I, who recognizes the words of the uneasy white couple as familiar within me, have to stand on stage and “speak” as a black man, even if my intentions are for this dialogue to become vocal and interpersonal through this play? Since Clifford is one of several characters, why am I comfortable playing a white man and a Mexican abuelita and not him? How can I deconstruct the discomfort that is in my body and even in those questions I just wrote? Why am I so unsettled? It is here where I must pause—there is no right nor wrong for this discomfort, but it demands that I recognize that the racism this play speaks about is violently ingrown in my own self. I can no longer claim to be “not part of the problem.” I need to own up.
I grew up—and was socialized—in a white supremacist society. I do not refer to the familiar Ku Klux Klan white hoods, though those must not be cast aside with the past, I mean the hoods of silence within the classrooms. I mean the systematic denial of voice to so many, the paralysis of honest dialogue between people, and the constructions of ‘race’ that keep non-white hands tied in this society. I am uncomfortable because I grew up with the unquestioned belief that I was not racist, as I excelled in honors classes with all white students in an overwhelmingly white community. I was raised to observe and practice the rule of “racism doesn’t exist if we don’t talk about it” hand in hand with “everybody’s the same ‘cause we say they are,” and didn’t question my easy acceptance of these words. I have had the privilege to remain comfortable, to only recently be driven to break things apart within myself and discover their undeniable roots. I am uncomfortable because America has an atrocious history of violence in the caricature of black people and black culture that I, as a white body, am terrified of continuing. The color of my skin ensures that I have not and will not experience the levels of violence that a young black man like the character of Clifford experiences in this society every day.
So, my rationally trained being urges, how can progress be made? How can I work this out so I can get on with playing Clifford? And I have to stop. I have to stop thinking and rationalizing and explaining. Because those rules of problem and solution, rational over emotional, ends over means, just continue the pervasion of duality: duality of me vs. the other, duality of white vs. nonwhite. I need to feel this discomfort, let it deepen and settle into my body so that I will pause before an action, or a statement, and remember that everything has a specific social and historical context, that language can be laced in a violence that is unconscious.
To feel this and to recognize this, is not to arrive at a solution, because there is no solution. There is no simple alleviation of discomfort, no convenient tonic, because the roots of the issues are thick and deep and are within each one of us in a myriad of ways. I have to acknowledge the layers of my oblivion, of my own perpetuation of such violence and how each angle of the life I am able to live refracts with those less privileged. I have to see that I as a white body have a historical and present claim on violence, and the words I use are incarcerated in this violence. I have to ask for help in learning new languages. What I cannot do is allow my discomfort to paralyze me, to let me stay in my silence and not say anything or ask questions because it feels safer. There is not a linear course to follow, but there is a responsibility to claim consciousness for my voice so that I am responsible for what I say. I cannot remain comfortable allowing violence to continue in my voice and in my life, I must constantly wrestle with my own racial identity and how my whiteness affects those around me.
I am learning from this play the importance of speaking one’s own story, and I wish to do that, to write and perform from what I have experienced. In this play, however, there is an opportunity to publicly struggle with “racial identity.” I am not standing on stage and saying “I know what it is to be black, thus listen to me.” No. I am standing on stage and telling Clifford’s story in my white body, I am telling the suburban couple’s story in my white body, I am saying “you all are racist” and “I’m not racist” in my own white body. I am speaking as a man in my woman’s body, I am speaking as a Mexican in my American body, I am speaking many stories in my one voice, and it forces the question: how does this feel? I cannot alleviate this feeling with an easy answer; I cannot excuse myself from this examination.
This play does not give solutions to the audience (nor the actor), instead it gives discomfort. It gives the visceral tension of seeing one person transform from character to character, context to context, skin to skin. It does not say what is “right,” but rather it forces the audience to feel how this settles into their own bodies, it invites them to wrestle with it. It is a confrontation of dualities—it messes with them, and it messes with us. It is in this tangled complexity where voices need to take root.
It is necessary to seek help, to search out guides. I find guidance in the words of the warrior poet Audre Lorde that speak to this responsibility. She writes,
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which we so often accept as our own… And all the other ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other. We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.[1]
[1] “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Sister Outsider: Essay and Speeches. (New York: Crossing Press, 1984) 43-44.
No comments:
Post a Comment