When I was a student at SUNY Purchase in the late nineteen-seventies, there were two other students of color, one of whom became a treasured friend. Near Halloween, there was a knock on my dorm door (I had never been away from any length of time before). Opening the door, I found a white dorm mate in black face, sporting an Afro wig. I couldn’t take in what his costume was supposed to be–Buckwheat?–all I remember was how the alienation I felt in that place anyway came barreling down. My mouth went dry. Why did this person feel it was necessary to “share,” his choice of costume? Was I supposed to celebrate it, approve it, find it ghastly but amusing? I didn’t know what to say, and shut the door. And promptly came down with a flu which turned into strep throat and my flight home, to recuperate. (I never went back to the school.)
Years passed, and I took some Yale students to see the Wooster Groups’ “The Emperor Jones,” a piece in which the great star, Kate Valk, plays in blackface. Given my understanding of theatre-as-artifice and my relative distance from the stage, I didn’t feel at all disturbed by Valk’s portrayal–which was great–but my students did, and there expression of horror and distaste after the show said: Never again.
Later, I tried to explain to my students how the Wooster Group piece was “just,” a play, something made up, who could mean that shit that Eugene O’Neill has written so long ago. But was my long ago dorm mate another piece of theatre, a kind of performance art that achieved it’s purpose–which was to “shock” me into some kind of reaction–or just more carelessness meant to wound? What made that long ago college visit so threatening was the fact that I was “alone,” in a foreign place; I did not know anyone then who would have my back in a situation in which a young white man took it upon himself to impersonate a history too awful to look at, let alone talk about. I could not react because I was outnumbered.
And, so, I was grateful to my students for the opportunity to talk about my experience through their feelings about history, and for me, and their passion and care came back to me when I read this.