“Misguided Anti-Racism Campaign Cancels College Sondheim Production”
From Northwestern law professor Andrew Koppelman (The Hill) (this is the unexpurgated version that I received by e-mail, so I’m including it instead of just linking to the Hill version):
John Wilkes Booth was a racist murderer, but that apparently wasn’t the worst thing about him. The worst thing was that he used “the N-word.”
Isn’t that a bizarre thing to say? Not too bizarre, evidently, for the social media campaign that pressured a Northwestern University theater group into cancelling its production of Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical “Assassins.” The cancellation was part of a misguided effort to fight racism, and it is a window into how counterproductive such efforts have sometimes become.
“Assassins” is a deeply ironic depiction of America’s presidential assassins, attempted and successful, and their place in the national imagination. It flopped when it first opened on Broadway in 1990 but has since been recognized as one of Sondheim’s major works.
At one point in the show, Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln, calls his victim a “niggerlover.” It comes at the end of a soliloquy full of the familiar bilge about the noble lost Southern cause, and it is intended to shock the audience. It does. No substituted euphemism could have the same effect. It is an ugly moment, and it is historically accurate. But racist murder is an ugly thing.
Theater is a potent medium for showing us the truth of what people do to one another. Iris Murdoch wrote that the best art “shows us the world, our world and not another one, with a clarity which startles and delights us simply because we are not used to looking at the real world at all.”
The objections to the show, as reported by the Daily Northwestern, included claims that “using that word in that statement is a form of violence,” a “racist action” with “nothing else to defend it,” “disregarding of the humanity,” that “reflects a failure to consider the lived experiences of Black students.”
The theater group eventually capitulated to the pressure, cancelled the final weekend of performances and released an official statement: “We are profoundly sorry for the harm we caused. Art should never come at the expense of the safety of Black and POC communities. Because of our actions and inactions, it did.”
This is magic
Article from Reason.com
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