The Performance Of Race

The annual Black History Month Performance at our school was a poignant mixture of squirms and deep feels. The white girl who needed to monologue about being stifled because white women victimized black men in the past through merely a word and now therefore are victims of their own guilt also needed to do it in the privacy of her own bedroom, not facing an auditorium of happy African-American families there to see her kids who couldn’t give two cares about her identity struggles as a privileged person. The slam poet probably didn’t need to hang a noose around his neck while he talked. And three deep-voiced, talented girls certainly didn’t need to sing on three different keys for ten minutes while repeating the same lyrics over and over.

But other parts were arresting, nay, breathtaking, in their excellence. The poetry club astounded with their well-placed anger and the vibes of their vocabulary. What caught me was that, over and over, as children spoke about race, I peered into their faces trying to place them. Is that a child of mixed race, saying “Still I rise”? Is that student speaking with such conviction of Black struggles, Latino? Or no? Is the rest of the audience playing this awful game of guess who, or am I the only one? Whenever anyone was too distraught about their skin color I felt uncomfortable, wanted to tell them to snap out of it—hate the oppression, but don’t hate your own skin, white-black-brown-tan children. Love your faces, and your bright-eyed proud reflections in the mirror.

One performance topped all the others. Two students did a comedic take on a policeman stopping a boy for a DWB. They were hilarious, and had the audience roaring in their seats, as the policeman pushed the teen down to his knees and promptly blamed him for it:

“See, now you’re in the road, you got to scoot back.” Shoves him back.

“Sir.”

“You being wise?”

“I been wise.”

“Get down! On your face!” Shoves the kid down onto the stage floor. “See, now you’re in the road again. Scoot back.” Cue audience laughter. It was funny right up until, for no particular reason that we could see, the policeman called in:

“I need an ambulance, man shot three times in the back, he was tussling with me, so I pulled my gun, self-defense, I need an ambulance.”

That was our clue that he’d shot him. And beside me, someone muttered, “that’s probably exactly how it happened.”