It was gratifying to read Adam Langer’s insightful review of the Goodman Theatre’s production of Charles Smith’s Black Star Line [February 2], confirming that we, at least, in contrast with the lack of interrogation from the Chicago dailies, had both witnessed the same missed opportunity for an enlightened inquiry into the complexity of Marcus Garvey’s Back-to-Africa Movement in the 20s.
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Marcus Garvey’s messianic mission to create a homeland for the 400,000,000 black people in Africa was a monumental challenge to the European colonialization of Africa and the oppression of blacks in a racist social system of American apartheid. Invariably, the strength and unwavering audacity of his uncompromising opposition to white supremacy was viewed, by most whites in America, as a threat to white privilege, and caused alarm among assimilationist blacks who viewed the separatist movement as an obstruction to their efforts to achieve a new social order through integration. Much of what has been documented in the play as fact, speciously orchestrated to give the allusion of truth, deals with issues peripheral to the higher aspirations of the Garvey Movement. Rather than identify the nationalist issues–not to be confused with revisiting the cliched sociology of the downtrodden Negro–that captured the imagination of more than 2 million, out of a population of 10 million, African-Americans who had been dues-paying members in the UNIA, the author chose to graft the petty issues of his personal concerns onto Garvey, creating a racial soap opera that assigns critical roles of influence on the demise of the movement to black preoccupation with hair-straightener pomades and skin-lightener creams. Certainly, a cavalier and distorted view of an Israeli icon would be considered intolerable to the survivors of the Holocaust and provoke an unconditional demand for more rigorous standards in the interpretation of Jewish history, if not otherwise vitriolic outrage. Should less be expected from the descendants of the Middle Passage who were forced into oppressive labor in this country for 400 years?
Charles Smith, however, is not the principal concern here. Mr. Smith is merely a local black dramatist who is willing to burlesque the black experience for the sake of winning approval and acceptance within a Chicago, mainstream cultural institution. Black Star Line belongs to a tradition in the American theater, from minstrelsy through the plays of Eugene O’Neill, which routinely subordinated black roles to stereotypic characterizations that corresponded with inferior or crudely developed sensibilities–immersed in violence, sexual aggression, and self-deprecation–that preserved for whites a comfortable sense of superiority. It is not uncommon to discover racial ambivalence among some blacks today who seek a reconciliation with white institutions by pandering to the views and social persuasion acceptable to whites. That the Goodman Theatre would encourage such an ill-advised misadventure is what should concern us most.
Paul Carter Harrison
