this new era
I recently began work at Yale Repertory Theater in Tarell Alvin McCraney's brilliant play, CHOIR BOY. But on the first day of work, administrators at the theater began the session with the reading of these three statements – drafted by the theater following the pivotal, global social uprisings spurred by the murders of Brionna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and the public and recorded murder of George Floyd. (Slide composition by Grace O'Brien and DR559)
Many theaters and corporate organizations have begun to really look at the fabric of the America that was created before this current time of our lives. It is a system that functions off institutionalized norms that maintain various kinds of inequity—some obvious and some subtle but pervasive and insidious. And these inequities had become so ingrained in our daily functioning, that many of us had become blind to them.
No! We had not BECOME blind. We had never had sight! There had never been any level socio-political landscape. Previous generations had not ever really seen and understood the full depth of the “what/how/why” of American discrimination. Like water torture, many maddening, incredibly saddening, frustrating, confusing, angering, inexplicable, and indefensible events had occurred. With each drop, the BIPOC community was more motivated to scream out to the world the many macro and micro aggressions endured daily.
And then there was COVID-19 and George Floyd.
It was impossible to ignore Floyd's murder because there were now no distractions of work or play or commitments of any sort. The world was forced to stop and awaken to the true, epic horror of being a person on the wrong end of American society. We all got "woke," like it or not. Of course, some didn't like it because it meant they had to confront the status quo that had always favored them. It had always made them feel safe, entitled, and righteous. They argue loudly against Affirmative Action without realizing that they have always benefited from a form of cultural (racial) preference. This racial preference had no name because it was simply one of the ways in which American society functioned, one of the many ways it had been set up to always favor certain kinds of people (white). But with the senseless killings of Floyd, Taylor, and Arbery and our "awakening" to the tangential and metaphoric realities associated with those lives and the lives of all persons of color (POC), America can never return to pre-2020.
Today, many individuals and corporate organizations are sworn to find ways to acknowledge the new American culture and to do better, going forward, by acknowledging the past – and even trying to do something about it.
These very powerful statements and moments of silence to accompany them that began our work on CHOIR BOY, this all-Black story of a young LGBTQ+ man, had me fighting back tears because I finally felt seen and validated by them.
It was a brief moment of Critical Race Theory (CRT). I could talk here about reasons I've heard from conservatives why teaching CRT is not a good idea, but I will leave that for another time. I'll simply say that for this country to begin to pull itself back together, the systems of the past must be acknowledged and discussed. The effects of institutional racism must be acknowledged and understood, and those systems then obliterated completely and forever.
I thank all the persons who concede that they have had the seen and unseen, large and small privileges of American systemic advantage. And I appreciate their efforts to do something about it. And I greatly appreciate the corporate organizations, especially Yale Repertory Theater, that has created this truly revolutionary language that, I believe, they are committed to, from now on, as a way of life.