I object to the word “boy” and quite possibly another word. Who do I object to so I may receive an apology?
OR THIS:
Upscale school revives a satire about race - Student actors confront their fear of offending people, as they depict a 1960s Southern town that can't function when all the black folk disappear - ".......... As reality sank in, whites in top business and political positions promised to restore things "as they've always been." But when one attempt after another failed, actors crying out to the lost ones seemed schizophrenic - first pleading for the nigras' return, then fuming with anger at their audacity in leaving.
Tongue-in-cheek humor came with a sharp edge. A police officer, for instance, nicknamed "two-a-day Pete" for his track record of beating blacks daily, got hauled off to an asylum. "He was unable," a friend lamented, "to stand the shock of having his spotless slate sullied by interruption."
Yet for all its satirical bite, "Day of Absence" on the stage at Noble may have reinforced preexisting values more than it sparked any new awareness.
"I watch out for things that make liberal white people feel good but don't advance an enlightenment of things," said Anne Eccles, a Lexington, Mass. mother of three, who watched her daughter perform on opening night. "I wonder if this might belong to that category.... This is an upper-middle-class, liberal environment, so of course, it didn't change any attitudes at all."
With tuition price tags of $22,700 for day students and $28,800 for five-day-per-week boarders, Noble and Greenough caters to children of professionals in Boston's upscale western suburbs. Their world, where just 6 percent of the 535 students are black, seems far removed from the 1960s "Day of Absence" Southern town, where blacks were half the population before they vanished.
This sheltered, comfortable setting compels Bob Henderson, head of the school, to make the challenges of living with diversity a regular topic at assemblies. His hope for "Day of Absence" was to get people talking about something too many on campus might take for granted: interdependence and reciprocal appreciation across racial lines.
"I guess where there's a certain amount of privilege, it's more important to do it here," he said, compared with a setting where interracial harmony may not be the status quo."....