The arts section, no less, of a recent New York Times carried two stories on American racism at its roots. There was an admiring review of a new play, Underground Railroad Game, a kind of comedy whose “smug and familiar humor,” wrote critic Ben Brantley, “winds up exploding in our face, like a poisonous prank cigar.” Underground does, at least, have one foot in the present: two flirting students—one white, one black—who try to explore America’s slave past and fall into an abyss.
And so the popular arts weigh in on our national conversation on race. This conversation is going on all around us and it’s a messy thing. It can be shrill and it can be silent. Colin Kaepernick spoke up by sitting down, and other athletes followed his example. When three Nebraska players knelt for the national anthem before a game against Northwestern last Saturday, their state’s governor, Pete Ricketts, called the gesture “disgraceful and disrespectful.” Said Ricketts, “Generations of men and women have died to give them that right to protest.” (Which is a reason why they shouldn’t?)
