Joshua Harmon is a playwright who can make you squirm … depending upon the rock-solid confidence in your liberal “openness” to the “other.” The Silverthorne Theater Company’s production of his play “Admissions” lays bare the hypocrisies of many of us on the liberal left through satirical comedy. His brilliant and provocative play is also a commentary about wealthy Americans who have been found guilty of buying admissions for their kids at “go-to” universities that guarantee their future entry into the world of the elite.
Silverthorne’s excellent production takes place in a progressive New Hampshire school where Sherri, head of admissions, boasts of having increased the proportion of students of color to 18%. The crisis comes when her son, Charlie, finds that his place at Yale has been deferred while his best friend, Perry, has been accepted. Perry, with a white mother and biracial dad, is classified as black and is accepted. This leads Charlie into a hysterical rant against all forms of “discrimination.” His parents are equally appalled but are even more horrified when a penitent Charlie decides to expose the advantages enjoyed as a privileged white man.
This was the first class in my five-day, life-long learning course on racism that began a week ago Friday. Next came Daniel Brown’s superb My Turn column in the Recorder four days later on April 26 entitled “Everyone on earth is a ‘settler.’” Brown shed some light into my general belief that “Indigenous peoples lived in a state of reverence with the natural world.”
“As far as that supposed harmony with nature,” Brown writes, “Indigenous people did respect the natural world but not as much because they were more spiritual than us but because they knew that if they didn’t, they would be dead.” Dan’s column, like Harmon’s play, pushed me to consider my beliefs about what I now see as incomplete understanding of people not like me.
The next day, on April 27, in another My Turn column, Tom Weiner wrote that “It is most important to mark the moment and acknowledge” the significance of Ketanji Brown Jackson becoming a Supreme Court Justice.
That it took so long for “a Black woman to become a justice of the highest court in the land,” Weiner wrote, “is a commentary on our nation and its history and has zero to do with Judge Jackson’s worthiness, or that of the many Black women who could have filled the role heretofore. She is supremely qualified.”
“What is the meaning of the fact that, only after being a nation for 233 years, has it been possible – by a 53-47 vote — for a Black woman to be confirmed? Our history tells the story.”
Weiner points out that “When Black men finally got the right to vote in 1870, women did not. The right was constantly under threat for both men and women when the latter finally got the right to vote in 1920 after having been excluded, by design, from the white women’s suffrage movement.” That last sentence, for me, also communicated the fact that all women were considered “less than” and that Black women were even more “less than.” The discrimination against all women continues at all levels of society today.
“Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to be confirmed to the Supreme Court on Aug. 30, 1967” writes Weiner, “faced similar racism and was asked absurd, minutiae questions. Of the 22 senators from formerly confederate states, 16 voted against him. This year, 18 voted against Judge Jackson.”
On the same day in the news section of the Recorder, was the Associated Press story headlined by “Harvard pledges $100M to atone for role in slavery.”
Harvard President Lawrence Bacow released a report detailing many ways the college benefited from slavery and perpetuated racial inequality. It “found that Harvard’s faculty, staff and leaders enslaved more than 70 Black and Native American people from the school’s founding in 1636 to 1783. It cautions that the figure is ‘almost certainly an undercount.’ Enslaved men and women, served Harvard presidents and professors and fed and cared for Harvard students,” researchers found. “Moreover, throughout this period and well into the 19th century, the University and its donors benefited from extensive financial ties to slavery.”
Much closer to home is Deerfield historian George Sheldon’s documentation that traced the ownership of slaves living in Deerfield from as early as 1695 into the late 18th century.
Do you think we will ever become a nation in which … “all men [and women] are created equal?”
“Connecting the Dots” is published every other Saturday in the Recorder. Greenfield resident John Bos is also a contributing writer for Green Energy Times. He wishes we could all respect the earth on which we live. Questions and comments are invited at john01370@gmail.com.