Serious in Detroit-Rev. Wright

In contrast to CNN commentator Soledad O'Brien's comments that his speech was not serious, Rev. Jeremiah Wright was serious in his address to the 2008 Detroit Freedom Fund dinner on Sunday, April 27th. Ms. O'Brien mistook Rev. Wright's use of humor--a tried and true technique employed to communicate and educate an audience--as the gist of his remarks.

In fact, Rev. Wright was deliberate in continually pointing out the very serious and significant perspective that Black American cultural styles of learning, expression and view points differ--but are not deficient--from that of White Americans.

Rev. Wright pointed out that the NAACP and the Black Church have historically worked in concert to address the white-dominated attitudes and the nation's laws that saw Blacks "treated as less than human or treated as second class citizens," he said.

The examples that drew humor--the difference between Africans and Europeans in rhythmic timing while clapping, singing, or stepping in college marching bands--helped to set up his more serious point, that is the distinctions between Black American religious tradition, our relationship to God as a liberator and deliverer, not only from this earthly life but a Saviour while we are in this earthly life. A deliverer from the physical bondage and social oppression Black suffered historically and that we contend with today.

Elitist

Elitist?

What about President Bill Clinton? His fascination with the Kennedy aristocracy, shamelessly exploited during his term in office, was over the top, embarrasing really.

Remember the photo of President Bill Clinton standing next to Jacqueline Kennedy, sailing off Martha's Vineyard. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Ted Kennedy, standing on deck in the background, stared awkwardly away from the romanticized "first couple."

The Bluest Eye

Lydia Diamond’s adaptation of the novel, The Bluest Eye, is an emotionally concentrated play in one act developed from the novel that first introduced readers to its author Toni Morrison in 1971.

Morrison’s novel, which has become a classic widely read in academia, lays bare how social steriotypes and attitudes about beauty crippled the spiritual, emotional and social well-being of Black girls--and Black people.

BookTalk discussion of The Bluest Eye

At the center of The Bluest Eye, both the novel and Lydia Diamond’s successful adaptation, is the phenomenon of racial color—more precisely how skin color in American society is used to perpetuate a racial caste system in which dark-skinned little girls, and boys, quickly absorb the message that they are ugly, undesirable and worthless misfits.


Facilitator Kerry L. Beckford and Margaret Penn

This is the message that young Pecola Breedlove, the central character, has absorbed in the mid-1940s of her small Ohio town. In an early scene of the play, Pecola sits slightly off center stage with legs crossed, hands clenched, head tilted upward and eyes closed, pleading to God to make her invisible—or to give her precious blue eyes, like the adorable Hollywood child star, Shirley Temple. At the foundation of that prayer is the hope that people, Black and white, will see her, look at her, affirm her humanity.


The unfolding scenes portray how Pecola’s mother, father, friends and the community each act out their own pain, contributing to Pecola’s debilitating end. Photo: Playwrights Richard Fewell and Lydia Diamond talk at Hartford Stage

Director Eric Ting carefully choreographed innovative staging including utilizing linen sheets to create walls and devising a riveting scene that showers water upon an actress in a crucial moment in the play.


The Bluest Eye opened its CT run in Hartford in February 2008 and continued its run at Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven, through April 20, 2008.