Interrogating race

As a practicing scholar-artist who has taught in higher education for at least sixteen years while also acting and directing, I have found that stories and storytelling on stage can invite young artists and audiences to reflect on the concept of race, racial prejudice, as well as their own racial and ethnic identities. In addition to matters of casting, all of a production’s design elements (costumes, set, lights, sound, music, etc.), marketing materials, program, and lobby displays contain images and information about the playwright, director, and other members of the creative team that inform audience perceptions. The stories on stage, as well as their production and reception processes, can help young artists and audiences think about and beyond race. Since theatre explores the human condition, stage productions can be a useful tool for rethinking race, especially when the analysis focuses on humanity. Historically, groups who are raced are denied humanity in the process of racialization and stereotyping. By distinguishing the concept of race from culture, the humanity of individuals and their respective groups becomes the focus. Unlike culture, which has tangible elements including belief systems and religious/spiritual rituals, culinary arts and eating habits, music, family structure, storytelling, etc., race was invented. Race is a construct based on physical characteristics that are not as easily identified or categorized as some may like to believe. Yet race has real-life consequences. Interrogating how race intersects and collides with culture, especially in the United States, due to the historical role that race has played in the country’s formation and contemporary societal structure, can broaden the possibilities for how artists and audiences tell and witness stories on stage. Productive discussions de-center whiteness and address race along with racism in its various forms. Conversations about structural racism, rather than racial prejudice, can better expose the ways race privileges some and limits others. Educators can help students understand that “white” is also a racial category, even as it remains unmarked, by recognizing the implications of their own race and cultural background before entering into any discussion about race with the students. Providing specific examples from plays that demonstrate how whiteness is promoted as the norm helps reveal how mainstream theatres have cultivated the tastes of critics and audiences. Savvy educators tend to veer the conversation away from the predictable patterns that attempt to make the conversation about race and racism easier for white people to digest, rather than recognizing the ways in which people of color historically carry the burden of conversations about race, regardless of age. Interrogating one’s own positionality within the system of racial oppression can provide a helpful model for framing a discussion that encourages students