Earlier this month, the Charles H. Wright: Museum of African American History in Detroit hosted a theater event called FACING OUR TRUTH: TEN MINUTE PLAYS ON TRAYVON, RACE AND PRIVILEGE. The Trayvon in the title is Trayvon Martin, the black teenager who was killed in Sanford, Florida back in 2012 while visiting his relatives in a gated community. It consisted of six ten minute plays, each written by different playwrights, with actors and actresses, mostly black college kids, from Wayne State University. I missed the first two plays.
I was in the lobby of the museum looking through pamphlets of the event from the day before, which was the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s death. Pictures of him still circled the lobby. Dr. William F. Pepper, the former attorney of the King family, had been there to speak about his book: THE PLOT TO KILL KING: The truth behind the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The book argues that King’s death was a government-sanctioned murder and that the culprit, James Earl Ray, was only just fall guy in the conspiracy. Someone to take the blame to make it seem as if King’s death was caused by a lone wolf, rather than being engineered by a greater power.
An important point of the book is that MLK was assassinated. He didn’t just die, he was killed. It seems a simple and obvious stance, but part to the reduction of King’s legacy and the sanitizing of his ideas starts from changing the nature of his death. To say that he simply died rather than being robbed of his life, which removes accountability from his killers and the society at large. The crime then falls on the natural world. Then he can be repurposed into cliche: MLK died for a better world, he died for the ideal of unity, for his dreams. He’s the non-violent docile ideal that everyone, especially African-Americans should aspire to. It becomes so satirical and whitewashed that even the FBI can tweet about him with no shame.
Dying is the natural end of life, with no one is to blame but time, but to be killed is to be victimized. Killing someone is a brutish act, the commitment of the worst of sins, and to be killed means that there’s a killer, a “who” and a “why” behind the robbery. In acknowledging that, the life that was taken must also be seen in all of its complexity. Since Dr. King was killed, his life as a person, his radical legacy, the person who killed him, and the society that demonized and abused him because he demanded human rights, have to be reckoned with.
The same reckoning applies to the deaths of so many unarmed black people in the United States. If Trayvon Martin dies, it is an accident, an avoidable and regrettable event removed from this country’s history. When he is killed, it’s an indictment of an oppression that never ended.
The first play that I saw was SOME OTHER KID, written by A. Rey Pamatmat. It consisted of three friends: a black boy and girl and a white boy. It dealt with the issues of privileges between classes, races and sexes and the dangers of being just another black kid. Towards the end of the play, the black boy revealed that his white friend had feelings for the girl, then he left for the store to buy candy and a drink. As the two remaining characters discussed the open secret, they were interrupted by the sound of a gunshot. They ran outside to discover the dead body of their friend, there was no killer to be seen.
Next was THE BALLAD OF GEORGE ZIMMERMAN by Dan O’Brien: a folk opera of the last few minutes of Trayvon Martin’s life. The idea was to explore the often murky nature of truth, of what actually happened the night of the killing. Zimmerman’s lines were taken from his court testimony and Martin’s lines were in the form of rhetorical but provocative questions. Zimmerman would ask Martin what he was doing out so late at night, and Martin would respond by asking why he couldn’t be out like everyone else.
The third was COLORED by Winter Miller. It dealt with stereotypes and privilege. The play presented an interaction between four women, two white, two black, on a train with three young black male performers. The boys wore brightly colored shirts, red, pink, yellow. They performed, dancing and singing, then asked for donations, the two white women obliged, one of the black women, a business woman refused on the grounds that she only gives to people in need. The boys berated her, with the one in red concluding by calling her a welfare queen. The last woman sat in silence throughout the whole encounter, pretending to be unaware of what happened.
NO MORE MONSTERS HERE by Marcus Gardley took a comedic route to address a white woman’s fear of black men. It starts in a doctor’s office, where the woman was diagnosed "Negro-phobia”: the fear of young African-American men by her black doctor. He prescribed her a magical hoodie that would make her look like a black man to everyone else. She was to spend three days in that condition.
On the last day of the experiment, she is shot by a masked man who then reveals himself to be the doctor. She storms off, admonishing him for putting her through such inhumane trauma.
DRESSING by Mona Mansour & Tala Manassah was the last play. It was divided into three acts: a mother pleading with her son to wear nicer clothes before he left for school, the mother receiving a call that her son had been killed and the mother packing up his room, including the clothes that asked him to wear. At the end of each act, she gave a monologue about her fears, grief and in the end, the naivety in thinking that she could protect her son from the world.
During the Q&A session afterwards, the actress who portrayed the mother, a senior at Wayne State University, was asked how she was able to inhabit the emotional state needed for the role. She said that she had a young son of her own, and she imagined him being killed in the same manner, something that she already fears herself. Her response added to the dread and anxiety that I felt while watching the plays. The killing of Martin was not a fantastical event, it’s a possible future for black children. The imaginative work needed for the actors and actresses to take on the role of Trayvon or his mother necessitates the access the fears that are with them every single day. It felt as if they were preparing for their own versions of the story. Their familiarity with such a story was counteracted by the white actress from NO MORE MONSTERS HERE answering the same question by saying that she had to work hard to play the role, and even after the work, she knew that she could never truly understand the trauma.
In the real world, there’s already a sickening theater for the deaths of unarmed black people. The actors and actresses change, but the essential structure and mechanics remain the same:
A news report comes out, sometimes accompanied by pictures and video. The individual who did the killing defends themselves with readymade excuses: that they feared for their lives, that the person that they killed pointed a weapon at them or at least reached for one. It’s later revealed that item in hand wasn’t a weapon. It was a cellphone, some toy, a soldering iron. The media prints the police statements as truth, finds the most denigrating picture of the dead and publishes articles about any troubles that the dead might have had before their life was stolen.
There’s public grief by the parents and family of the deceased, protests by black people and calls for America to confront its systematic racism. Sometimes the individual is charged for the killing, a lot of times they aren’t. If a trial happens, it’s the dead who are tried for their own death. The individual responsible for the killing is usually acquitted.
Before one of those plays can conclude, another starts. The day before I visited the museum, Saheed Vassell, a mentally ill black man, was shot and killed by police in Brooklyn. A month before that in Sacramento, Stephon Clark was shot and killed in his grandmother’s yard. A week before Clark, Danny Ray Thomas was killed in Texas.
Some weeks ago, my friends had a conversation about their phone covers where they admitted that they bought really bright covers, pink, orange, red, so that the police won’t mistake their phones for a gun. I commentated that it didn’t matter what color the covers were, and they agreed, but it was a still a step that they had to take.
Art is necessary for comprehending suffering, for coping and for relating to others who suffer in the same way, and for making the world understand that you are in pain. There needs to be plays, books, and paintings about Trayvon and other deaths like his. But at the same time, that art is exhausting and reductive. It’s always the victims who have to get on stage and scream about their pain in an effort to plead for their humanity. They have to scream, otherwise the world will pretend that nothing is wrong. Yet even after the display, the pain is so foreign to the audience, so degrading, that the world remains skeptical. When black people are policed out of a Starbucks, and there’s video showing that they did nothing wrong, it’s still suggested that they must have done something to deserve it. Only death can act as hard evidence of injustice.
That reduces the oppressed in another way. The authentic experience of that group is then confined in death and trauma. To be a black writer, you have to write about race, killings, and police brutality. Black actors and actresses have to play slaves, drug dealers, and athletes who exemplify the rags to riches story. Stories of joy, happiness success and love are deemed unrealistic. James Bond can be portrayed by by white men of different backgrounds, but he just can’t be black. To see a successful black society in Black Panther is radical.
I was actually invited to watch the plays by the actress in SOME OTHER KID, who I met at another play that was held at Detroit’s Hilberry Theater. We had been there watching STUPID FUCKING BIRD, a play about the disappointment of love, art, and life that was adapted from Anton Chehkov’s The Seagull.
There was one character portrayed by a black actor in STUPID FUCKING BIRD, Doyle, a brilliant writer who was the lover of the main character’s mother and the object of lust for a younger woman. I enjoyed watching Doyle prance around and talk about lofty things. I was happy to see him admired and fawned over by all the other characters. Yet throughout the play, I was scared that he was going to be killed. I loved seeing a black character freed from the reductive stereotypes, but I couldn’t help but feel that he was going to be robbed of his life and never allowed to die on his own. Because that’s how it seems to be in life and in art. Before one of those plays can conclude, another starts.
