They are not laughing with you, they are laughing at you…and you told them they should…

Keith Hamilton Cobb

I went to see this play at New York’s Public Theater…

A people’s perspectives and attendant behaviors can be diluted, leashed perhaps, but never truly altered.  Perspectives can be softened for a time if the social energies of the moment urging the contrary are intense enough.  Behaviors can be shamed into hiding, sometimes.  But if the culture that shaped them is as old as America itself, wrought with so much purpose, and with still so much work yet unaccomplished that it was designed to do, what we are will always make itself obvious eventually, once again.

Having been beaten into an irritable stasis of minimal racial awareness by the cudgel of political correctness, white people are restless.  When finally given express permission to laugh at broad, deprecatory caricatures of Blackness again they gasp it in and out deeply, desperately like a distressed diver near drowning finally breaking the surface.  The glee is communal.  Bones, Tambo, and Interlocutor are alive and well gamboling about as if behind a glass, specimens of a bygone era, where any threat their Black bodies might pose is only to each other.  Safe and seated at a distance their patrons cackle.  They travel home talking of “Black joy”—a state of being they wouldn’t recognize if it slapped them in the head, and yet one that The Public has commodified and sold them for the past couple of years—of celebration, and feeling  satisfied they have done their part in honoring the burgeoning of new Black voices in the American Theater.  But the joy is wholly theirs.  Theirs and perhaps that felt by the lauded and applauded.  To them, it looks like love, or at least acceptance, when what it is in fact is a celebration of Black people in their place once again, “making us happy, making us laugh, owning the ridiculousness of their very existences (not that we haven’t always known) dropping their threatening postures, being perfectly likable again, harmless…and then there’s the Hamlet thing…we’ll allow their pretenses of depth and erudition now and again. It’s amusing. Now there’s a clever nigger…”  The theater critics all fell in line, like white supremacy capitalizing on white guilt. And despite the past  several years, despite Black Live Matter, and We See You White American Theater, despite every effort of the ancestors, nearly no one will speak to the harm that the self-serving white and moneyed continue to do with our complicity while swearing allyship and awareness.  Does no one see this but me?

And who has sanctioned this coonery for public consumption but the Pulitzer Committee?  I’m not sure where in the food chain it sits, but virtue signaling with clearly neither diversity nor inclusion enough to know playwriting from pandering and, with its self-salving, sanctioning all to approve, to engage, saying, “It’s fine to laugh at them, it’s a comedy after all…and then there’s the Hamlet thing…” Interesting how you can attach Shakespeare to anything in America, even a coon show, and somehow render it appropriate for public consumption, like ownership bestowing its blessing.

If a white playwright had written this bacchanal of shallow racial stereotypes, they would have been summarily canceled by the minority Black theater-going community and all of their professed white allies beating their breasts with indignation.  In the least case, the play would have never garnered the consideration of the Pulitzer Committee, nor seen production under the auspices of The Public Theater.  In this climate of phony racial awarenesses and the bad faith championing of EDI initiatives, a white playwright could have only been pilloried.  But what a gift this African American playwright has given them, perhaps not even knowing it…

For me—as I am by all age-old, unabating, truly unique American racism—I am heartbroken by the violence being perpetrated here all in the guise of good, clean fun…just like it used to be…and the introduction of it to a whole new generation who can laugh while still believing they are much more broad-minded than the generations before them, believing they are only joining in the celebration they were sold.

The American minstrel show is alive and well, and now it is acceptable again.