Misguided anti-racism campaign cancels college Sondheim production
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 uses the N-word while talking about Abraham Lincoln, whom he assassinated. It comes at the end of a soliloquy full of the familiar bilge about the noble lost Southern cause. It is intended to shock the audience, which it does. No substituted euphemism could have the same effect. It is an ugly moment, and it is historically accurate. 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 magical thinking. Some unspecified Black persons are allegedly going to suffer some unspecified harm because somewhere on the Northwestern campus, someone is uttering a vicious word? Does anyone really believe that? Or is there just some satisfaction (or, in some cases, safety) in joining a solidaristic ritual of people together saying they believe it?
One of the persistent follies of the political left is confusing symbolic actions for real ones. Real racial subordination consists of decaying neighborhoods, bad education, joblessness, mass incarceration, poor health and violence — real violence, not hurt feelings because of vicious language. These injuries are not ameliorated by a requirement that any literary depiction of racism must make it appear less nasty than it is.
It is, of course, easier to engage in this kind of performative virtue-signaling than to address the causal processes that are actually destroying the lives of Black Americans. We need our best minds, the kind of students who attend Northwestern, to think hard about that. One strategy that is guaranteed to fail is relentless self-examination by whites — what John McWhorter calls “willfully incurious, self-flagellating piety, of a kind that has helped no group in human history.”
After this sorry episode, one wonders whether the theater program at Northwestern will ever dare again to portray racism on the stage. It will likely turn, instead, to safer topics. One of the central ways in which oppression maintains itself is by keeping people thinking about something else.
This is a disaster both for education at the university where I teach and for the effort to actually do something about the genuine evils that Black Americans suffer in American society. In its small way, this misguided campaign has contributed to systemic racism.
Andrew Koppelman, the John Paul Stevens Professor of Law at Northwestern University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.”
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