Staff Editorial: Free tickets led to rushed discussions about race

This past week, Saint Joseph's University administrators endorsed the Cap and Bells production of "White People," a play by J.T. Rogers. University officials claimed—correctly—that the social issues presented in the play were too important for students to miss out on, deciding last-minute to make tickets free for the entire student body.

We applaud the university's efforts to promote student awareness towards issues of diversity. But the hasty promotion of this play in particular may have created more problems than the university anticipated.

By endorsing "White People" through free tickets to all students, the administration essentially turned the play into a quickly-created diversity initiative, all without consulting the play's director, Laura Pattillo, Ph.D., ahead of time. The result, even with the addition of discussion panels after each show, seemed to be a very rushed commentary on the issues of racism and prejudice. Because of the endorsement, many students were led to believe that the play would serve as a solution for issues here on campus rather than a starting point for understanding the problem of white privilege.

In addition, many administrators involved in the decision to make "White People" free for students hadn't even read the script. According to many faculty members and those involved in the play, many administrators haven't seen the play yet, either.

In the future, initiatives like the one proposed by university officials should be better planned and better portioned. It shouldn't be the responsibility of faculty members and students to create panel groups and initiatives from scratch.

Orchestration mistakes aside, the fact that a play like "White People" was shown at St. Joe's does represent an important step in raising awareness for issues like white privilege and implicit bias for students.

The play itself succeeds in addressing a number of important issues pertaining to the perception of other races by whites. Each of the characters deals with their own biases, though not always honestly. A history professor confronts the after-effects of a mugging. A washed-up beauty queen transfers the anger from a failing marriage and epileptic child onto the non-white individuals in her life. And finally, a businessman must confront the transference of his own racial views onto a reclusive son.

All speak candidly—more so than real life generally dictates—but few act so. At the end of the play, each person is presented as remarkably sympathetic and human. They have said and done atrocious things, each of them; yet all seem able to simply reflect, not to truly change.

For many students who saw the play, the intense and offensive language served as a jarring experience. But the language—with the exception, perhaps, of a few racial jokes thrown into the script—was a necessary way to convey the pure anger and hurt that is so connected to racism.

The play was, undoubtedly, a great starting point for beginning discussions on white privilege, racial bias, and racism. But in beginning these conversations, an important goal should still be evaluating the institutional and structural barriers that exist nationally, locally, and at St. Joe's itself.

Too often, discussions about racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of discrimination occur in a reactive—not proactive—manner. We wait for something bad to happen, we hold a town hall meeting or two, and then the issues die down until another incident occurs.

The need for constant dialogue and education for students, faculty, and staff on issues of race, gender, and other "hot topics" is essential in transforming our university community from one of reaction to healthy action.

Saint Joseph's University—with its homogenous demographics and notable hate crimes in recent years like last year's McShain and Ashwood incidents—needs more than conversation. This campus yearns for action.

In presenting the play as a starting ground for conversations across campus, administrators should now consider developing a university initiative that ensures that such dialogue does not simply occur in a reactionary sense but in a continual, proactive sense. Without a real effort to move our campus forward on issues of tolerance, we run the risk of ending up just like those characters in "White People"—forever reflecting and never changing.