My second blog entry - Racial Diversity

 My second blog entry, as it turns out, is going to be about racial diversity. I recently attended the play, "American Son" by Chrstopher Demos-Brown. It offered, in an hour and half, an intense look into the issues of racial equity and race relations.

As a non-profit professional, I've attended several hours of workshops and seminars about this same subject that didn't have the impact or the information-content that the play had. These constructs - and race is a construct just as gender is - are best viewed on the lattice of our own human stories rather than stand-alone abstract concepts. Several of these concepts and racially destructive policies, like red-lining, are tossed off in the play - in an almost weaponized way, the truth of which is not denied, and yet used to wound or denote the wedge in race relations.

As I've stated already, I'm a genderqueer person, but I am also white, and, come off as male, so, my privilege I acknowledge in my interpretation. Still, I identified the most with the main character, Kendra Ellis-Connor, whose PhD in psychology both works for her and seemingly against the various vignettes in this single-scene play. What I related to in her, was the drive to over-achieve in order to compensate for the admitted disadvantage of inequity. I have been driven to overachieve in compensation for my "inferior" queerness, and have always come up disappointed that the achievement doesn't alleviate the inequity.

I have pondered a day or so about the characters and what they represented in how different people come to terms with and compensate for being a second-class citizen. Lieutenant John Stokes has risen to a higher level within the department and has lower-rank white officers answering to him. He arrests and books Scott Connor, Kendra’s estranged husband - who happens to be a (very) white privileged FBI officer. Both the power Lt. Stokes has been able to achieve personally and the horrible power of the police are portrayed in these interactions. All the while, indignant and dignified, chastising and regal, Kendra suffers both the injustice of her race and her sex. Her ability to run around her protagonists in logical circles in an attempt to ensnare them, ends up confusing them and enraging them instead. The power she has claimed in life as a respected college professor does her no service in this setting.

So! What is the setting? A police station at 4 a.m. in Miami-Dade County Florida. Kendra has gone to the station because someone called her number to report that a car registered to her estranged husband had been involved in an incident. Kendra knows Jamal, her son uses this car. She arrives at the police station and is met with red-tape and a string of indignities when trying to talk about her black son. Several times in the play her son is referred to as bi-racial by his father, a white man, but this is a fanciful and absurd thought in today’s reality of perception. Discrimnation, we are reminded, occurs by how we are perceived, whether that’s as black, queer or disabled. It especially occurs when we embrace who we are and celebrate it, which in fact, their son had just recently done. Whether we put on the clothes and hairstyle of the gender we embrace as our true selves or the race we embrace as our true selves. In fact, we can expect those negative reactions and the discrimination to ramp up.

The parents struggle with this fact, having tried to raise an overachiever (like mom) who was “practically white” (like dad) in order to be happy and successful in the bi-racial world they felt they had created for their family. Jamal goes to mostly white schools and ends up lamenting (we are told) that he never wanted the pressure of being the “face of the race” to the privileged white students around him.

The racial negativity the author chooses to portray comes from a rich diverse bag of both obvious and some not so obvious racial put-downs. What was clear sitting in a mostly black audience - those-not so-obvious-sleights to white folks are very obvious to the black audience, making us white folk replay the comment and reconsider it for its negative impact. Yes, some of white folks learned about some things we’ve been saying and doing that we shouldn’t.

Much is made of the tension between black youth and police when the police spot a bumper sticker on the car Jamal is in, which says “SHOOT THE POLICE” in huge letters and “with your cell phone camera” in tiny letters that can’t be seen from another vehicle.

Amidst all these differences and divides we have because of racial inequity, the author puts in a dialogue between Kendra and Scott, her estranged husband, recalling how they met. This short dialogue happening near the end, tears into our humanity in a way that only art can tear into us - the way no seminar ever could. “I remember what you said to me,” Kendra recounts tearfully, “You approached me, and a bird flew off of a tree near the porch, and you said, ‘he was just tired of being the second most beautiful thing at the party’.” In that moment we are transported to the place where we are left with only our naked humanity, and our connections as humans are the only important thing.

But that moment is fleeting, and all of this is torn away as Kendra and Scott learn that Jamal has been killed in the incident, by a stray bullet from a black police officer who fired after one of two other black youths Jamal was with, tried to flee. Killed, after they had been stopped for purchasing marijuana. Killed for merely trying to get away and posing no threat to the officer.

We all know how the promised “inquiry” will end - with no consequence to the police.

This play weaves complicated issues into a single story about one American family, with an American son who deserved a chance at the American dream. I know I learned a lot by seeing it and have changed some of my own long-held beliefs, simply because there was no truth to take that belief’s place. Now there is.