A playwright has a message: Hate isn’t new
Two years ago, Choi Si Woo wrote an email to Rob Anderson, a Native American writer who told him he believed the world doesn’t really need black writers. Then, last December, some playwrights came to him with stories of racist encounters – in November and December 2015.
“On very little evidence, the course of the 2016 presidential election was set: Illegals had been chosen to be the face of America,” wrote Choi, who is from Korea, in a play, I Am Not This Asian Writer. “It’s a shame to admit, but I’m always surprised that racism isn’t ever really new – it’s always been there, always live and right here, always present, always present in different forms.”
The stage is increasingly peppered with plays that examine racism – such as 2015′s Dear White People or 2015′s In the Heights – that reveals how deep prejudice runs beneath certain groups and certain white people. Take back the ghetto: the way people reexamine our actions when we’re condemned to different levels of wealth, or when we’re reduced to meaningless statistics.
Read about this documentary and see more performance art about racial insensitivity in the final installment of the Race Story, a series of videos that both seek to fight racism and share stories of racism, from school playgrounds to Times Square to the business scene.
– Kirsten Lesnick, CNN
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