Has Anyone Noticed That Romeo Is Black?

Romeo is black. And no one cares. While this might be big news in America, no one in London is making any fuss about Adetomiwa Edun in Romeo & Juliet, playing through August 23 at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre. Here, it’s just damn good theater. No nuance, no emotional triggers playing on Edun’s ethnicity.

I admit that I was excited and skeptical about it, feeling very American in my belief that this was astonishing news and curious about how the Globe Theatre’s audiences would respond. I watched with a grin, caught the Bard’s lines flying and peeped that black man kissing a white woman on stage, out in the open for the Globe to see. And my perception of racial politics, which is a vicious mixture of pride, historical memory and fear, ebbed and flowed, but never washed up onto the stage.

Today, like in any other theater, there is always opportunity for race to play center stage. But not in this production of Romeo & Juliet. After the play, I walked out into the London night feeling like they had triumphed over me, the naïve American who wanted those winks because I was used to American entertainment playing to our perceptions of race. But I was denied that quick satisfaction and found the true essence of Shakespeare.

The writer's African-American-community-organizer/activist sensibilities made him think that a black man playing Romeo, in England, was important. But it ain't.

I would note that the guy who played the prince in last season's Metropolitan Opera production of Cinderella was also black; but I don't recall any articles over here in the Racist States that even mentioned his skin color.

ML/NJ

Fair point about consensual relationships, BUT to say that an interracial relationship is really the white women going after the black men is contradicted by the not consensual relationship of rape where it’s the black men going after the white women. So in the Mel Brooks context the black man saying “where’s the white women at?” is the stereotype supported by data. And in the modern era, the white men going after the black women because that’s what their slave holding grandaddies did is contradicted by the data.

For example, read this crap by a black Duke faculty member
http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=660
Rape and the Black Woman

By Mark Anthony Neal

When a young black woman was allegedly raped, sodomized, robbed and beaten by members of the prestigious America’s Duke University Lacrosse team exactly a year ago, it was initially treated as little more than another case of “(privileged) boys gone wild”.

As word began to spread about the specifics of the case, various communities mobilized to lay claim to its significance. These groups include Durham, North Carolina residents with long-standing grievances against the University, activists rightfully protesting yet another incident of alleged sexual violence related to a college campus, members of various black communities who wanted to highlight the racist implications of the alleged assault and of course those who felt that too many people were rushing to judgment about the alleged rapists, well before the true facts of the case were established.

At the center of all of these claims and allegiances is the body of a young black woman, who in many ways has been continually assaulted, by the inability of the various narratives surrounding the case to take serious the realities of racialized sexual violence against women of color.

[snip]

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