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chapter 2 The End of Race or the End of Blackness? August Wilson, Robert Brustein, and Color-Blind Casting One hundred years from today, Americans are likely to look back on the ethnic dif‹culties of our time as quizzically as we look at earlier periods of human history, when misapprehension de‹ned the reality. —Stanley Crouch,“Race Is Over,” 1996 While . . . I embrace colorblindness as a legitimate hope for the future, I worry that we tend to enshrine the notion with a kind of utopianism whose naïveté will ensure its elusiveness. . . . Perhaps one of the reasons that conversations about race are so often doomed to frustration is that the notion of whiteness as ‘race’ is almost never implicated. —Patricia J. Williams, Seeing a Color-Blind Future, 1997 When August Wilson passed away in October 2005, a major voice in American culture and dramatic literature was silenced. Lionized for his project of creating a play for each decade of the twentieth century—an ambitious feat unequaled by peers of any race—Wilson had two public personae, one developed through his dramatic writings and the other through his public speeches.His plays celebrated the black Everyman and foregrounded the musicality and rhythm in African American experience in a way that resonated with audiences of many races and cultures,while his public speeches exposed a different side of his politics,one that left many of his nonblack audiences feeling alienated. Rather than transcending to the universal with his emphasis on the particular (as supporters credited his plays with doing),Wilson’s speeches seemed to violate many of the tenets of multicultural America’s philosophy of race, which often takes a cautiously celebratory —instead of overtly redressive—stance toward the incorporation of black 32 culture and black people into American social structures. This became clear during the protracted 1996–97 debate between August Wilson and Robert Brustein over the racial politics of American theater. Taking this debate as my central text, in this chapter I will examine the ways in which discourses of color blindness affect the artistic and institutional viability of blackness as a cultural formation. Both August Wilson and Robert Brustein rested their condemnation and celebration of theatrical color blindness on understandings of blackness that were both limited and limiting. For Wilson, color-blind casting in particular placed a speci‹cally politicized notion of blackness under assault, and for Brustein, this very same politicized blackness (antagonistic,if not antithetical,to white culture) formed an interest category that had no proper place within the aesthetics of American theater, and to which color-blind casting offered a welcome alternative . Each man’s position overlooked the possibility that what we know as colorblind casting might have transgressive, rather than just transcendent, effects. Ultimately , Wilson’s criticisms of color-blind casting exposed the gap between casting decisions and the performance practices they make possible,as well as the af‹nities between representation and discursive and institutional power. As an introductory salvo, August Wilson’s “The Ground on Which I Stand” speech criticized both the aesthetic and structural biases that persist in American theater and continue to relegate non-Eurocentric works (and cultural workers) to marginal status. Signi‹cantly, he situated his critique within a renunciation of the politics of integration and assimilation of blacks into white culture, which he considered an“attempt to blot us out, to reinvent history and ignore our presence or to maim our spiritual product.”1 Wilson suggested that color-blind casting practices were little more than band-aids—cheap healing tools that covered the wound of exclusion with a neutral though not at all color-blind veneer—that formed“an assault on [blacks’] presence, . . . an insult to our intelligence, our playwrights, and our many varied contributions to society and the world at large.”2 Rather than equitably redistributing economic and artistic resources, assimilationist and color-blind policies preserved a racialized theatrical infrastructure that relied upon ‹ctions of black inferiority to justify its practices of resource allocation. Although he was not present at Wilson’s keynote address, Robert Brustein was the one representative of mainstream American theater whom August Wilson criticized directly, and Brustein very quickly responded to Wilson’s speech and its charges in an essay of his own, “Subsidized Separatism.”3 Chronicled primarily in the magazine American Theatre, a debate went back and forth in print between Wilson and Brustein, drawing in other practitioners and critics, The End of Race or the End of Blackness? / 33 [3.15...

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