Pirate's Cove

Cancel culture hasn’t disappeared: it’s just not making the news as much with all the other bad news. This one is rather ironic

Texas Wesleyan Cancels Play After Students Say Use of Slur Is Harmful

Texas Wesleyan University halted its production of “Down in Mississippi,” a play about registering voters in the 1960s, after criticism from students who said racist epithets in the script could contribute to a hostile, unwelcoming environment. Its author said he was using that language to represent the reality of the period.

The play by Carlyle Brown, a Black playwright based in Minneapolis, focuses on the efforts of a movement that led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial discrimination and protected Black voters. The plot, which is set during the Freedom Summer campaign, centers on three student activists as they travel from New York City to the South to register Black voters.

In telling that story, the playwright included a scene in which a white character used a racial slur, repeatedly, to refer to Black people, opening up a controversy on campus that also spotlighted a larger rift in American society over discussions of race and the portrayal of the struggles of people of color in media and the arts.

That’s right, this was written by a Black playwright, who was trying to capture the spirit of the time, the language of the time, the interactions of the time, to give it authenticity. Leftists will often say that art should be provocative, like when they’re burning the American flag or putting Jesus in a urine jar. Leftists will often use negative epithets towards whites. Blacks will use those same epithets constantly in their music, videos, and interactions. Here’s the kicker

Two students who were not part of the production, and were described as a Latinx woman and a Black woman, heard about the scene through word-of-mouth and submitted bias reports to the university’s administration Sept. 23, said Chatashia Brown, the university’s assistant director for student diversity and inclusion programs.

So, they weren’t even part of it and hadn’t heard it? Huh. BTW, most Latinos find Latinx to be offensive. Cancel the NY Times for using the word.

Their complaints prompted administrators of the university, in Fort Worth, Texas, to host a “listening session” Sept. 29, which had been previously scheduled as the opening night of the play. Students, actors and members of the university’s faculty and staff joined the open forum, as did Carlyle Brown.

Black students said that the explicit language in the play would further aggravate problems on a campus that they said did not cater to the needs of its significant population of students of color. As of fall 2021, 58% of students at Texas Wesleyan identified as Asian, Black, Latino or biracial.

“They wanted to kind of come in and be able to see the story and understand its impact without being triggered by it,” Chatashia Brown said.

They hear and use the words themselves. It’s just a play. A representation of the time. SJWs can’t abide by people Offending them.

The students who expressed their concerns said that the repetition of the racial slur, spoken about a dozen times in the play, would have caught them off guard and negatively affected their mental health. They worried that the play could lead other students who are not Black to feel more comfortable repeating the slur.

So, don’t go see it. If a few words offend them like that, they are too soft to be in adult society. Further, as many have noted, this kind of idiocy reduces the notion of real mental health issues.

The playwright said that his intentions were for the performance to be historically accurate. To him, the past shouldn’t be sanitized — and he said that the racial slur was used provocatively, for audience members to feel the impact it has had in real life. The scene portrays one of the play’s three students, who is white, showing the Black student how he would be treated on their journey. Training sessions like the one portrayed were common at the time and were intended to help people understand the severity of the behavior they could face.

So you have an activist being cancelled by other SJWs. And, the school simply cancelled the play. Period.

Read: Friendly Fire: Texas College Cancels Play After Bias Reports »