Post #4

On Instigation and Catharsis

Ok, I guess I did want to say a little something about this house is not a home. For me, Nile Harris’ work was overly brutal. It was specifically about “making black people feel bad” (a line from the show), and with none other than Crackhead Barney. So there was a lot of clowning on everybody, including and especially everybody black. There was a lot of Barney finding folks in the audience and saying the worst. Someone who identified as nonbinary was declared “undateable,” and a lightskinned black man in the audience with his white partner was proclaimed to not really be in an interracial relationship because he was too light. And so forth. To me, this kind of spectacle-based gallows humor only works if something new is revealed – some truth that no one wants to face, etc. But telling a honey complexioned person they might as well be white (like telling a rich brown person they can’t be seen in the dark) doesn’t really reveal new truths, does it? No nonbinary person is unfamiliar with the concept of being undateable. No lightskinned black person has not had to grapple with black people telling them they’re too light to belong. We don’t laugh at these things when they’re told to us by family members, strangers, teachers, movies, community leaders, and the list goes on. Why should we laugh now that its written into a show?

Or maybe we shouldn’t have been laughing.