Can I Be Woke?
I recently read a snippet in a news magazine about a University of Michigan music professor who showed his class a clip of Laurence Olivier in Othello. Olivier, being white, had darkened his skin for the part. The professor was promptly faced with a student protest demanding that he be fired for failing “to create a safe environment.”
I do find blackface highly offensive. But these students wanted this man’s head on a platter even after he apologized—and that struck me as an over-reaction. Am I simply not “woke?”
So I asked my grown daughters a hypothetical question: If you were a director faced with hiring an actor for a Black role, and your only choices were a Laurence Olivier caliber actor who is white, or an African American actor who couldn’t remember his lines or stage directions, which would you choose?
The younger daughter, who teaches English to speakers of other languages, said she would hire the Black actor. Our bigoted national history requires that we go out of our way to provide opportunities for people of color, at least until the races reach true equality across the country. “You’re talking about affirmative action” I said. And we had a brief chat about the historical pros and cons of affirmative action policies in the U.S.
I then posed the question to my older daughter, who is a theater professional—teaching at “uni” in Australia, as well as writing and producing plays for public consumption. She said she would never hire a white person to play a Black part under any circumstances—because the overall effect for the audience would be false. She also said it sounds as if both sides in the University of Michigan debacle missed an important teaching moment—but noted we can’t really draw any conclusions about what happened because we don’t have the details. She was, of course, correct.
So I researched the incident and learned from the New York Times that “…the Chinese-born Professor Sheng was a survivor of the Cultural Revolution, during which the Red Guards had seized the family piano.” Further, “As a teenager… to avoid being sent to a farm to be ‘re-educated,’ he auditioned for an officially sanctioned folk music ensemble.” Later he earned music degrees, a MacArthur Genius Grant, and was twice a Pulitzer finalist. So the man has some credentials. And has experienced some institutionalized pain.
None of this exonerates him. He certainly could have at least supplied a “trigger warning” prior to showing the film clip. But likewise, if the students failed to talk about it on the spot, they missed the chance to enlighten their professor. Of course, I wasn’t there. Maybe that detail was left out of the news stories.
Since I dabble in words, I asked my daughters if I am “allowed” to write the conversation of a Black character in a story, particularly a “main” character. (After all, Shakespeare was white. He wrote Othello.) The younger said it’s best to have it reviewed by African American readers before publication. The older said, essentially, “Go for it. But if you do it badly, you will pay the professional price.”
I am in agreement with my daughters. But at the same time, I recognize that we all grow up with norms that make their mark upon who we are. What makes us “woke” today is different than it was three or four decades ago. I have marched for civil rights and to protest war. Sometimes there is no other way to be heard. But other times a conversation can turn a head. So please, if I have said anything offensive, calmly let me know. Be somebody who woke me up.