The Thaumaturgy Department

Authenticity and ethnicity – the theatre casting debate, by Richard Jordan (thestage.co.uk)

“What happens if, at the end of a search, the actor may authentically fit the role but not be the best actor….”

“If theatre marginalises or categorises its actors in roles because of race or gender, then in the same way we also risk carrying that negative attitude out into the audiences. The fight must be to continue taking progressives steps forward and Broadway’s statistics illustrate that there is still much work remaining for our industry’s future in successfully ensuring that we have equality in casting, balanced with talent and inclusion. For me, that is the ‘burden of proof’ that is a responsibility for all of us.”

Apropos of centerstage’s Raisin Cycle, both Clybourne Park & Beneatha’s Place, comes this juicy bit of current events.

Transcript from episode 1 (of 3) in a brilliant series of conversations & videos from California Newsreel. Well worth the perusal. Here, they’re informing the conversation around upcoming Raisin Cycle.

In ““Now That He Is Safely Dead”: The Construction of the Myth of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)” Professor Massimo Rubboli provocatively examines the hagiography that began in the immediate aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination:

The widespread celebrations on the 40th anniversary of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 2008, provide a timely opportunity for reflections on the process through which King has been constructed as a mythical figure in the US, while having been purged of his most radical features at the same time. The process used in fact is not new. With the ultimate undercurrent to blunt the sharpest points of a protest movement, a common pattern has been established: first, eliminating its leader; then, turning him into a martyr; and, finally, transforming him into a myth. This article surveys representations of Martin Luther King, Jr., over the last 40 years and argues that the same pattern was followed in his canonization, closely tied to retrospective reflections on the civil rights movement itself. The exact circumstances of his death – like those of the killing of John F. Kennedy and of his brother Robert F. (killed two months after King, on June 5, 1968) – are still controversial (the official account of the assassination has been challenged, among others, by Pepper 2008). What is certain is that right after April 4, 1968, when King was assassinated on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, a process of canonization started to transform him into the martyr-symbol of the war against racism and racial discrimination, constructing a mythical figure, purged of the features more in conflict with the image of the incorruptible American hero.

Follow link for more from Americana Vol V, No 1, Spring 2009.

Massive and extensively cross-linked online encyclopedia of all things MLK, civil rights, and historical.

I’ve been thinking of a way to explain to straight white men how life works for them, without invoking the dreaded word “privilege,” to which they react like vampires being fed a garlic tart at high noon. It’s not that the word “privilege” is incorrect, it’s that it’s not their word. When confronted with “privilege,” they fiddle with the word itself, and haul out the dictionaries and find every possible way to talk about the word but not any of the things the word signifies. So, the challenge: how to get across the ideas bound up in the word “privilege,” in a way that your average straight white man will get, without freaking out about it? Being a white guy who likes women, here’s how I would do it: Dudes. Imagine life here in the US - or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world - is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it? Okay:

In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

follow link to read more….

Michael Lind takes stock, 14 years after his original piece on “The Beige and the Black,” of the complex demographics and even more complex framing that continues to stir up the conversation in the US.

1998 piece by Michael Lind on the changing racial demography of America, and how we envision it.