Today I slept until 9:46. It felt decadent. Now, knowing that I have to get up at 4:00 am tomorrow is going to come as a bit of a shock given tonight is the Superbowl, but I probably won't watch: in part because of work, and in part because of apathy.
So work is doing a play by a woman named Lorraine Hansberry, part of the Harlem Renaissance, named A Raisin in the Sun. It was written in 1959 and is about a family's ordeals of integrating their dreams into a reality that doesn't seem to have a place for them.
Now, this play is about a black family. I know this sounds cliche but I hate labels like black, white, European, rich and poor because they all create distance in our brains between us and the people we are talking about.
I think I have mentioned this before but over the summer I saw an exhibit in Oslo called The Places We Live, and it had a really hard effect on me. It quite literally shattered the ideas I had about how people live. The photographer, Jonas Bendikson, spent time in slums of Jakarta, Nairobi, Mumbai, Caracas and did a photo exposition along with essays and interviews. I read the book constantly and I can't say enough about it. It is beautiful and a wonderful proof of the power of photography. But I am losing the plot here.
So the play deals with a Black family. After every show the theater conducts a moderated audience conversation called a talkback which is an opportunity for the audience to say what they liked about the show and what it made them think about. One of the thing that is so startling to me is the amount of distance that people have created when they talk about the suffering of other cultures. It is as if placing a modifier in front of the word people (e.g. black people, Hispanic people, Indian people, white people) somehow takes the relationship out of the equation. Last night I heard a man say the words, "Black families suffer sometimes, but what are we going to do?" I wanted to run into the discussion and say, "How about not let that happen? How about work together to foster and encourage that everybody gets ahead? How about we stop thinking of them as 'black people' and start thinking of them as people."
My friend Stinkyfj60 started a blog yesterday saying he was thinking about writing a big post about racism sometime soon and I would love to read it when it happens. I wonder if his experiences out west are the same as mine as here?
I think I am just shocked and saddened by the way people react sometimes and how the defense mechanisms we have kick in when we need them too. I don't think that people are bad, I think that we do these things subliminally and can't control it sometimes.
So work is doing a play by a woman named Lorraine Hansberry, part of the Harlem Renaissance, named A Raisin in the Sun. It was written in 1959 and is about a family's ordeals of integrating their dreams into a reality that doesn't seem to have a place for them.
Now, this play is about a black family. I know this sounds cliche but I hate labels like black, white, European, rich and poor because they all create distance in our brains between us and the people we are talking about.
I think I have mentioned this before but over the summer I saw an exhibit in Oslo called The Places We Live, and it had a really hard effect on me. It quite literally shattered the ideas I had about how people live. The photographer, Jonas Bendikson, spent time in slums of Jakarta, Nairobi, Mumbai, Caracas and did a photo exposition along with essays and interviews. I read the book constantly and I can't say enough about it. It is beautiful and a wonderful proof of the power of photography. But I am losing the plot here.
So the play deals with a Black family. After every show the theater conducts a moderated audience conversation called a talkback which is an opportunity for the audience to say what they liked about the show and what it made them think about. One of the thing that is so startling to me is the amount of distance that people have created when they talk about the suffering of other cultures. It is as if placing a modifier in front of the word people (e.g. black people, Hispanic people, Indian people, white people) somehow takes the relationship out of the equation. Last night I heard a man say the words, "Black families suffer sometimes, but what are we going to do?" I wanted to run into the discussion and say, "How about not let that happen? How about work together to foster and encourage that everybody gets ahead? How about we stop thinking of them as 'black people' and start thinking of them as people."
My friend Stinkyfj60 started a blog yesterday saying he was thinking about writing a big post about racism sometime soon and I would love to read it when it happens. I wonder if his experiences out west are the same as mine as here?
I think I am just shocked and saddened by the way people react sometimes and how the defense mechanisms we have kick in when we need them too. I don't think that people are bad, I think that we do these things subliminally and can't control it sometimes.
VIEW 3 of 3 COMMENTS
niobe:
zups:
you don't know how I feel every time I read your blogs, I'm glad to meet a person like you, with real opinions and a really altruist mind. 