An era of supposed post-racial tensions ... Tuesday, September 22, 2009 Does race matter anymore? Yesterday, while Jonesing for a bite of some journalistic fast food, I came upon an interesting article on www.cnn.com. (Check it out here) The headline for the article was "U.S. racism 'everywhere,' says Dave Matthews." Now, I like Dave Matthews and I'd like to thank him for providing the soundtrack for most of my college years, but what's interesting to me is that out of an entire interview about Dave's new album, this is the way cnn, "The Nation's News Source" has chosen to highlight the article for it's readership. "Come on, Ken, it's obvious that cnn is cherry-picking the most controversial segments to draw attention to the interview," you might say, to which I'll retort, "Since when is it incendiary to suggest that there is racism in America?!" Perhaps we'd like to hear Dave Matthews's opinion about gravity as well. If racism and other forms of social oppression are not rampant in contemporary American society, then black people must naturally be dumber than white people and women must be 30% less competent than men who do the same jobs. It should be clear to anyone paying attention that social oppression is one of the most actively pernicious blights upon the American social consciousness; it is a disease that pervades every vein of the American circulatory system. Why is it controversial to acknowledge its existence? To belabor the point just a little bit further, I'm going to do something that I hope I will never, ever do again in this blog. I'm going to reference one of my reviews. It was a review in the Chicago Sun Times about my play, Po Boy Tango, a play about race relations between black people and Chinese people. Now, before I go on, I'd like to point out that I'm not critiquing the content of the review, I'm simply using it to support the thesis of this blog entry. It's the official position of this blog that critics are entitled to their opinions and weenie dramatists write about these opinions, but, I think it's okay here. Full disclosure, it's a mixed review, and the critic was not a huge fan of my writing. This is all beside the point. The point is, there was one line in the review that blazed out like a comet -- "... in this era of supposed "post-racial" tension, these battles [the ones between the characters in the play] seem tired ..." Now, there are a number of ways to pick apart this sentence and it's entirely plausible that I've written tired battle scenes. But, the facts are that this was a play written by a Chinese man to describe tensions that he sees between black people and Asian people and a white critic is contending that the arguments seem tired in light of the supposed era of post-racial tension that was ushered in by the ascendency of Barack Obama. Now, that is really interesting. To me, this phrase and the cnn headline are emblematic of a thread in the American zeitgeist that wants to say, "Why do we have to make this about race?" "Aren't we past racism?" "Can't we find a different playing field to suss out all of these issues?" But, if we're tired of talking about something as huge and important and unresolved as race, what else are we neglecting? Are we working so hard to bolster the image of American egalitarianism that we are offended by the teeth of social critique? What do Americans really expect and want from their theater? Now, while it is certainly true that we probably need different tools to tackle the old demons that have evolved into new demons (and it's very plausible that this is what the critic meant in her review) I think it can't be denied that more and more, Americans are not looking towards the arts for social discourse. Religion and political punditry are filling this void. The arts are expected to entertain and salve wounds. In short, we artists are fast becoming the purveyors of the opiate of the masses. How do we feel about that? This brings to mind an interaction that I recently had with some fairly powerful Hollywood insiders. I was out in LA pitching new tv series and I started talking about something that I was pretty keen on. Personally, I happen to be very excited about this particular chapter in the history of humanity. I feel that we are the first generation that is in possession of the technological resources to end poverty and fix a lot of the world's problems and research at Columbia's Earth Institute and other institutions supports this. Further, Obama's unlikely path to the Presidency made me inspired about the new paths that he might open for new leadership. So, I wanted to pitch a show that was like Friends -- it was a group of attractive, precocious Americans living out their early-20's in New York City, only, the dramatic irony of it would be that we as an audience would know that someday, one of these characters would become President, and each would follow a different path. There would be an openly gay war hero who vowed celibacy. There would be a brilliant engineer whose dream was to create a tool that would help all of humanity and he would give it away for free. There would be an Indian actress who would get a break on Broadway and then parlay her success into becoming a special ambassador to the United Nations with an emphasis on human trafficking, etc. The show would track their journeys and keep you wondering whether you just saw a moment that would propel this character into the presidency or pull him/her away from it. I thought it was very cool. The response I got was, "This is very interesting, but the market research does not suggest that our audiences are interested in these kinds of stories. The market research suggests that people are not interested in politics. They are not interested in volunteering. They are not interested in making a difference. The market research suggests that the next wave of young people are lacking industriousness. Coddled by parents who have insisted that their children are special, the next wave of young Americans can't hold down jobs. They can't handle the rigors of working." Translation: We have entered a period of American idleness that is so profoundly painful that the arts serve a crucial role in anesthetizing the wound. That's all there is room for. So, there it is. We are an idle nation that is too tired of itself to inspire itself. We have gone through an incredible financial collapse and an on-going, horrific war, all spurred by our addiction to gasoline, but, as Thomas Friedman points out in a recent NY Times editorial, not a signal major solar panel manufacturer is setting up shop in the United States. They are going to Germany and China. The answers to the problems of the future are in front of us and we are not celebrating them and leaping to the challenge. There is something very wrong, something very un-American here. So, artists, oblivion mongers, what can we be doing to better fulfill the mandate of our existence? How can we nourish a world that is so deeply in need of inspiration ... and that's what I think we are all clamoring for. The world is saying "I'm tired of hearing about race and injustice because the message doesn't inspire me to action, it adds to my already debilitating idleness. What's the other way?" I think I'll be chasing that answer for that question for the rest of my life. end of scene