Word: blackly
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...only hitch in this family's freedom is a white liberal, Tillich ("I've seen Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," he say. "Twice!" ), who arrives on this morning to murder some "black bastard" who knocked up his daughter. Tillich is rather upset to discover that the black boy he had expected to kill is now white. And, as he and the family play some explosive power politics during the course of the play, the family gradually arrives at the conclusion that "black is beautiful" after...
Indeed, I suspect particularly uptight whites in the audience will search for a black in the theater- and wait for him to laugh before they do the same. This is because many whites simply don't know how to react to blacks as people yet. When most liberals hear the black-cum-white characters in Horovitz's play putting on Butterfly McQueen accents, a sign lights up in their minds saying "Racial Stereo-types. . . Gone With the Wind. . . Racist" -and the liberals freeze...
...that is the whole point of the play. Race relations in this country have still not advanced past the point where most whites can conceive of blacks as anything other than types, whether they be "good types" or "bad" ones. Blacks are placed in a "Stepin Fetchit" box or a "Stokely Carmichael" box or a "white" box or a "Sidney Poitier" box. The thing is that no black- or no human being, for that matter- ever fits into any box. As Morning's family changes its voice from an Amos'n' Andy inflection to a John Lindsay or Wilson Pickett...
...exactly the kind of communications impasse he is dealing with that spawns the rhetoric that leads to real racism, law-and-order candidates, blacklash and violence. It is no surprise that his play ends with a grotestquely scary and ecumenical ("Kill the white man! Kill the black man!") chant of murder...
...advanced but their mutual exclusiveness can be extremely puzzling. It is fair to say that the Boston electorate is quite conservative, law-and-order oriented, and votes in candidates that go along with it. But no one can determine why Bostonians would sweep Hicks, an outspoken anti-black politician, into office with an amazing plurality, and give second place to Tom Atkins, a liberal black from Roxbury who finished a badly beaten 16th in the primaries...