Column on Selma and Guess Who's coming to dinner

With the events in Ferguson, race matters. We often feel at a loss at how to even begin to talk about matters. Art can be a vehicle toward finding a place to discuss matters in a safer way. Toward the end of the month, Kevin Costner has a new movie, Black and White on a mixed race child custody proceeding.

Recently, I witnessed two works, Selma, the movie with Academy Award nominations on events of 50 years ago that led to the Voting Rights Act and the play Guess Who’s Coming to dinner at the St Louis Rep Theater at Webster University.

For me, Selma was seen with the lens of my youthful memories of the Selma terror, readings about it as an adult, and now as I near retirement age. Even if the voting rights Act has now been diminished, ask a young person that African-Americans were kept from voting and look at their incredulous reaction. It was good to hear Martin Luther King’s soaring rhetoric as we near another of his birthday celebrations. The film shows his greatness, along with his doubts, fears, fighting depression and anxiety, and his deep faith and prayer life, and yes, his failings. King learned over time that demonstrations needed a focus, and he learned the hard lesson that a violent response by the authorities improved his standing within the broader political community.

In some ways the play seems locked in a distant past, with passé opinions. On the other hand, as it is kept in the 60s, we also realize how little we have moved on deep-seated reactions to each other in almost two generations. Still we struggle with the line between public acceptance and private prejudices. At times, the laughter at lines or situations was a bit uncomfortable, at other times, it seemed free and maybe freeing. At times the racial fault lines will not be closed. At other times, the shared human, not racial, shared human experience allows the characters to see each other as human beings, racial human beings, but human beings nonetheless.

In the play, one of the characters notes that we had come so far in the by the late 60s, but in some ways things had grown worse. Surely that comment has us push toward continued progress in our own time, most notably a president who was the product of a mixed race marriage. At the same time, so many social indicators have slid even further back. At times, it seems that race is not the deciding element but part of the dense network of relations of society. How much is poverty itself, class bias itself as much an issue as race at times? Looking back, I am so pleased at so much of the progress we have made on race in my lifetime. At the same time, I am so frustrated by the seemingly frozen condition of the underclass, black and white in the intervening years.

Dialogue in itself will not solve intractable issues. Art works may enlighten but will not move the political, social and economic dials very much. At the same time, if we remain frozen in our positions, if we do not even become aware of other perspectives, our racial morass shows little signs of movement. Stereotypes persist in part due to our ignorance of other information or perspectives. In conflict, we flee toward them. All races would do well to be armed with information and become more capable of nuance and care, instead of throwing accusations at each other. Religion is often a support for the worst in social life. Yet, the words of Genesis 1 continue to echo through the years: we are made in the image and likeness of God. How do we live out that clear mandate?