{"id":142450,"date":"2021-10-29T10:47:06","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T14:47:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=142450"},"modified":"2024-07-08T14:58:55","modified_gmt":"2024-07-08T18:58:55","slug":"professor-offer-a-history-lesson-in-redlining-american-racism-and-a-challenge-to-the-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2021\/10\/29\/professor-offer-a-history-lesson-in-redlining-american-racism-and-a-challenge-to-the-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Professors, inspired by a Bates play, offer lessons in American redlining and racism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From Assistant Professor of Theater Cliff Odle\u2019s perspective, the artifice of theater is often the best way to expose the truth of the human condition.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the case of the play The Luck of the Irish<\/em>, which he and his students spent the first part of fall 2021 mounting, it\u2019s also providing a history lesson in redlining, American racism, and a challenge to the audience, to ask their own questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTheater works best when it is that sort of mirror, not so much to answer questions, but ask them and ask them consistently in a way that stays with people,\u201d Odle said during a recent campus panel discussion about racial justice and housing inequity, inspired by the student production. \u201cAnd so there’s a lot of questions here to ask.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Luck of the Irish<\/em>, a 2013 play by Kirsten Greenidge, alternates between 1950s and present-day Boston, and focuses on two families and their conflict over a house. Located in a majority white upscale neighborhood, the house had been occupied by the Taylors, an upwardly mobile Black family. It\u2019s their home, and they paid for it, but there is a dispute over its ownership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The Luck of the Irish<\/em> underscores systemic American racism by telling a story about two families, one Black and one white, and their intergenerational conflict over the ownership of a house. From left, characters Joe Donovan (Luke Allen \u201822 of South Paris, Maine), Lucy Taylor (Bora Lugunda \u201825 of Kinshasa, Congo) Patty Ann Donovan (Caroline Cassell \u201824 of Woodstock, Vt.), and Rex Taylor (Associate Dean for International Student Programs James Reese). (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

At the time of the purchase, Boston neighborhoods were kept segregated through redlining \u2014 a practice where the federal government would refuse to insure the mortgage on a house due to perceived risk \u2014 and myriad other racist practices, so the Taylors paid the less-wealthy Donovan family to ghost-buy it for them. Decades later, the Taylors’ granddaughters can’t find the deed to the house is missing, and the Donovans insist that the house belongs to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt’s a story about people dealing with these things and how these things affect these individual people,\u201d Odle said. \u201cThis particular play comes out of a long tradition of plays about African Americans looking for space, looking for a place to belong.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The story is also a representation of what scores of Black families have gone through historically: a system that works against their fundamental human right to house and home.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Faculty from Bates and Bowdoin College came together the week before the play\u2019s Oct. 28 opening to discuss the history, legacy, and ongoing impact of racist practices such as redlining. Sponsored by the Department of Theater and Dance, the session was organized by Visiting Assistant Professor of Theater Elizabeth Phillips and Diana Zhou ’23 of Shanghai, and moderated by Phillips.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Representing a range of disciplines and interdisciplines \u2014 from philosophy, economics, and theater, to Africana studies, rhetoric, and film and screen studies \u2014they challenged the audience and each other to ask questions about what we, as a society, could possibly do to fix the inequities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jessica LaVoice, an assistant professor of economics at Bowdoin, provided a brief overview of the history of redlining in the U.S. Research has shown that, among other harms, redlining effectively and systematically reduced the ability of Black Americans to gain wealth, solidifying racial wealth disparities in American cities during the Great Migration of the 1900s. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Assistant Professor of Theater Cliff Odle, director of the Bates theater production of The Luck of the Irish<\/em>, photographed at an Oct. 27 dress rehearsal. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

For example, by the 1940s, Black homebuyers had to pay up to 28 percen<\/a>t more for a home to move into a primarily white neighborhood, but once they became owners, their home value would decline by 10 percent, eroding Black wealth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These housing injustices, LaVoice said, were of course only part of what Black families suffered. \u201cI don’t want to oversimplify the complexities and the interactions between all these different sources of discrimination and injustices across many other aspects of American life,\u201d LaVoice said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Theater\u2019s Role<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

For Odle, the theater and the arts can offer the beginning of a solution by opening eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhat I do is I impersonate people that don’t exist. I tell people to be people they’re not, I write stories that don’t exist,\u201d he said. \u201cWhy do I do this? Well, the artifice of course, is in order to expose the truth of the human condition: who we are, where we are, why we are.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Luck of the Irish<\/em>, like the iconic 1959 Lorraine Hansberry play A Raisin in the Sun<\/em>, \u201cdeals with this idea of belonging, this idea of home ownership, something that we all kind of take for granted or have taken for granted,\u201d Odle said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cNow we have generations that are in a situation where they’re not doing as well as their predecessors,\u201d Odle continued. \u201cI think my generation, Gen X, was one of the first to really not do as well as our fathers and mothers. I’m not \u2014 I can’t afford a house.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And as his fellow panelists pointed out, the effects of housing insecurity go beyond not having a \u201cplace\u201d to be; they also affect the social experience of the individual, and can depend on not just race or social class, but also factors like gender.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Dress
At left, Lucy Taylor (Bora Lugunda \u201825 of Kinshasa, Congo) talks with Patty Ann Donovan (Caroline Cassell \u201824 of Woodstock, Vt.) during a dress rehearsal of The Luck of the Irish<\/em>. In the play, the Taylor family, unable to buy a Boston home in the 1950s because of racist real estate practices, asks the Donovan family to “ghost-buy” a house. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Paul Schofield, an assistant professor of philosophy, said he believes that “if you are housing insecure or if you’re experiencing homelessness, you’re excluded from society and from participating in our major social institutions in ways that are different from simply not getting your fair share of the pie.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cAdditionally, I think it’s significant that those who are housing insecure often are unable to afford the social bonds that you would expect people who have a stable household to form,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThey’re often separated from their families and their friends and their children, and those who are Black disproportionately are separated from their children. Black women often have their children taken away from them at a much higher rate,\u201d Schofield added.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All Systems Are Not Go<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Charles Nero, Benjamin E. Mays Distinguished Professor of Rhetoric, Film, and Screen Studies, said that the systems supporting the inequities can \u2014 and need to be \u2014 challenged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think it’s important to know that white supremacy is created by and sustained by public policy. And so it is public policy that must constantly be critiqued and addressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

“Public policy takes place at local levels, national levels. And we have to be present, or at least encourage presence at all of those levels with no guarantee of a win.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Redlining and Reparations<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Michael Murray, the Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics, studies federal policy around low-income housing. He pointed out that the benefits of economic and social status are passed down through the generations, and so is the harm: sustained socio-economic inequity including education.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Racial
Michael Murray, the Charles Franklin Phillips Professor of Economics, makes a point during the Oct. 19 faculty discussion about the history, legacy, and ongoing impact of racist housing practices such as redlining. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhen you look at racially segregated cities in the U.S., African American children end up with less education than in less racially segregated cities. So the housing discrimination is translating into shutting down the education channel for managing to accumulate wealth over the generations.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But what about when a government has both created and historically maintained the policies that built those inequities?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contemplating that painfully twisted reality, Murray had to compose himself for a moment. \u201cThere’s a legal principle that when government harms citizens, the government has an obligation to remedy those harms,\u201d Murray said. \u201cWe need to be looking for suitable remedies.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But how can we as a society can repair the damage done by centuries of racial segregation, economic, and social inequity, and by systems built and sustained on the exploitation of groups of people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s the type of question that Susan Stark, an associate professor of philosophy who works in moral psychology and social philosophy, has pondered \u2014 specifically, what reparations for institutionalized racism might look like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cUsually when we’re talking about reparations, we’re talking about actions that we all could take today, or our government can take today in order to repair wrongs that were done in the past,\u201d Stark said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That means taking moral responsibility for something that happened long ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But many people can’t wrap their heads around that. A familiar refrain heard among white Americans is that while \u201cmy ancestors may have hurt your ancestors, I didn\u2019t hurt you today, so I don\u2019t owe you anything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Racial
Susan Stark, an associate professor of philosophy who works in moral psychology and social philosophy, makes a point during the Oct. 19 faculty discussion about the history, legacy, and ongoing impact of racist housing practices such as redlining. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Indeed, said Stark, peoples’ ordinary thinking is “that I am only morally responsible for the things that I have control over, things that I do. If there’s an earthquake that happens far away, I’m not morally responsible for the occurrence of the harm that resulted from the earthquake. Because I didn’t cause it, I didn’t have anything to do with it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Race and Responsibility<\/h5>\n\n\n\n

The issue of reparations opens a whole new discussion about race, responsibility, and, not surprisingly, identity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Looking at the many cultures and ethnic groups harmed and disenfranchised by American colonization, genocide, racial segregation, and historic social and economic inequity, the responsibility for reparations would land on white America. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

But you need to define \u201cwhiteness\u201d to define who bears responsibility. And defining whiteness can be \u201cslippery,\u201d according to Nero.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt is the very elasticity of whiteness, which is by design how whiteness defines itself. Is whiteness race? Is whiteness ethnicity? Whiteness is everywhere and nowhere, simultaneously,\u201d Nero said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI wonder about how something like that figures into a discussion about who is white and who has responsibility,\u201d Nero added. \u201cAnd whether or not even the capacity to do that is an indication of just what whiteness is. It is to name whiteness, and to specify whiteness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Photographed during an Oct. 27 dress rehearsal of The Luck of the Irish<\/em>, Mr. Donovan (Professor of French and Francophone Studies Kirk Read) and Mrs. Donovan (College Registrar Mary Meserve) claim they are the rightful owners of a home in Boston that they ghost-bought in the 1950s for a Black family. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The surge in popularity of DNA tests and ethnic heritage mapping has introduced another complication to the conversation, and that is who can \u201cclaim\u201d Black or Indigenous heritage, and therefore perhaps divest themselves of the responsibility of making reparations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI’ve had friends who are like, \u2018Oh, I’m 3 percent black,\u2019\u201d Odle said. \u201c\u2018Therefore I suffer too.\u2019 And there really does need to be a definition of what this sort of whiteness thing is, and who, and how your experience in this sort of thing sort of plays into it because it is kind of a slippery thing.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But when this \u201cslippery\u201d whiteness has been the cultural default for creating laws, housing, and privilege for generations, defining what it is proves tricky, Nero said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this conversation, it\u2019s vital that whiteness not be the focus of the conversation, according to Stark.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI think the important thing is to figure out a way for white people to take responsibility for the wrongs of the past, without somehow centering themselves,\u201d Stark said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why it\u2019s so important that the conversation around racial justice and housing inequity include different voices, from different backgrounds. And why a play performed on a college campus in Maine might generate that essential conversation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI will go out on a limb and say by itself, a play, or the arts in general, isn’t going to change things,\u201d Odle said. \u201cExposure opens up the possibility for change, and that is what we need. We need audiences that are not the same audiences, audiences that don’t normally go to see theater, audiences that know normally don’t normally go to see art. Those are the audiences that we need to come in and see this, because those are all the audiences that can become those change agents. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cArt is not going to do it by itself. It’s not designed to do that, but it is designed to get people to think, is designed to get conversations happening. It’s designed to open up doors that people will hopefully go through.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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