Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstruct Racism

The current socio-political climate in the United States sheds a critical, glaring light on the racism and white supremacy which has been part of the fabric of this country since the seventeenth century. Barack Obama’s tenure as president resulted in a major increase in white hate groups, hate crimes, and unrelenting violence against innocent Black men and women by police. In response, people of different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations, religions, ages and classes have taken to the streets in protest, and increased decades long efforts to organize against racism and for a more empathetic, just, democratic society. Social change about racism must begin with acknowledgement followed by open, focused, critical dialogue.

Still Hanging: Using Performance Texts to Deconstruct Racism, referencing both the resilience of Black people in the face of institutionalized racism and systemic oppression, and the fact that Black people continue to be literally and metaphorically lynched in 2020, is designed to use the power of lived experience specific performance texts as frames for engaging faculty, students and others interested in beginning to deconstruct racism and construct an anti-racist way of being.

Bryant Keith Alexander, Ph.D. (1998), is Professor and Dean, College of Communication and Fine Arts, Loyola Marymount University. He is author of Performing Black Masculinity (Alta Mira, 2006), and The Performative Sustainability of Race (Peter Lang, 2012).

Mary E. Weems, M.A., Ph.D. (2001), is an Independent Scholar, imagination-intellect theorist, poet and author. Recent books include Blackeyed: Plays and Monologues (Sense, 2015) and Writings of Healing and Resistance: Empathy and the Imagination-Intellect (Peter Lang, 2013).