What do you do about RACIAL RESPONSIBILITY?

Yesterday afternoon I hooked up with my really good friend Said. We met at the arch of Washington Square Park, we walked over to the West Village for a dish of Penne with broccoli and zucchini at this Italian foodie on the corner of Carmine near 6th Avenue, we walked back to Washington Square Park and sat among the squirrels and the students and the perverts and the insane woman who was wiping mustard on the trees and who had a whistle that would put a Yankees referee to shame.

And we talked about race. Well, race and responsibility. Well, I talked and he listened.

A few weeks ago a fellow writer, black, was explaining the reasons why theaters won't produce plays written in a certain black aesthetic; he was explaining the only plays that theaters are willing to produce are plays that have white characters, or gay characters, or self-deprecating black characters. And I listened for about three seconds and then I said this: Why do people have such a hard time dealing with black people as human beings? The operative word being "BEING". Which, in my opinion, means alive and active. Why do people have such a hard time allowing black people to show vulnerability, to be sexual in any capacity, to question religion, to hate their parents, to love their pets, to want to travel to somewhere besides Africa? Why is black defined as simply a state of being that only and ALWAYS acknowledges social and political marginalization and the history of slavery as the source of eternal victimization? And if for whatever reason one decides to drift away from that acknowledgment and decide to what... question their grandfather's parenting, decide to read something other than Malcolm X, then their black card is revoked.

I don't disagree that a lot of theaters find that musicals and plays with music are bigger money-makers than plays that examine the complexity of present-day human life within the wide range of blackness. There is much truth to that. But to question the authenticity of blackness because one courageously explores the horrors of emotional abuse, their love of the Brady Bunch and Lost In Space, or even their perverse adoration of President Bush... is, in my opinion, unfortunate. And to use a word my mother often used, "stifling".

I told the fellow writer that I'm far more interested in writing from the truth of how I've lived and been shaped by all things, and that I hope the audience, no matter what race, will find comfort in my consciousness and go home and ponder the wide truth about who and why they are what they are.

Said listened and thankfully understood my point of view as we stood on the corner of University and 14th Street saying our goodbyes.

See, I was not raised to define blackness as the limit to which I can live my life. On the contrary, my mother raised me to define blackness as the great launching pad to spring forth from and embrace and battle ALL that's within this world!

Until next time,

Keith