Racial segregation is alive and well in London’s West End theatre district, where the producers of a new play thought it would be good and proper to put on performances exclusively for black people. (Or “black-identifying” people only, to be precise.)
Slave Play, starring Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington, will open for a three-month run at the Noel Coward Theatre in June. It came under heavy criticism after announcing two “Black Out nights,” aimed at creating racially homogenous crowds that would be “free from the white gaze.”
Jeremy O Harris, the show’s playwright, said the nights would allow theatregoers “to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe.” Did he consider how excluding white theatregoers might make white people feel? Or, indeed, how black theatregoers would respond—not least since Harris assumes that black people would support this form of racial segregation?
Would Harris welcome a white public figure to call for ‘White Out nights,’ to allow white people “to feel safe with a lot of other [white] people in a place where they often do not feel safe?” Probably not.
Racial segregation is outlawed in Britain, which is why it doesn’t take much imagination to consider such thinking being applied to other everyday settings—schools, public transport—with disastrous results.
To get around laws against racial segregation, tickets were taken off general sale and made purchasable only through a unique code. Writing in Spiked, Thomas Osborne noted that “white—or indeed Jewish or Asian—Londoners will not be explicitly turned away at the door. But producers have tried to make it abundantly clear that they are not welcome for these two performances.”
Osborne added that the affair struck at the heart of “the great paradox of modern identitarianism.”
For all that the woke love to rage at the West’s racist past, they are the ones doing the most to try to revive its most regressive ideas. They are totally committed to dividing the world by race and viewing us all as racial beings.
The same paradox has been on display before in other London performances and even in educational settings.
After the government intervened, rather weakly describing the “Black Out nights” as “concerning,” one of the performances “vanished” from the production’s website, with the Mail describing the production as being in “chaos.”
Without realising it, Harris made matters worse still when he defended his reasoning by saying “black audiences and white audiences respond to things differently,” and “people have to be radically invited into a space to know that they belong there.”
The producers of the play said more details about the “Black Out nights” would be released “soon.”
London West End Theatre in Segregation Row
Photo: Photo by Eamonn Wang on Unsplash
Racial segregation is alive and well in London’s West End theatre district, where the producers of a new play thought it would be good and proper to put on performances exclusively for black people. (Or “black-identifying” people only, to be precise.)
Slave Play, starring Game of Thrones actor Kit Harington, will open for a three-month run at the Noel Coward Theatre in June. It came under heavy criticism after announcing two “Black Out nights,” aimed at creating racially homogenous crowds that would be “free from the white gaze.”
Jeremy O Harris, the show’s playwright, said the nights would allow theatregoers “to feel safe with a lot of other black people in a place where they often do not feel safe.” Did he consider how excluding white theatregoers might make white people feel? Or, indeed, how black theatregoers would respond—not least since Harris assumes that black people would support this form of racial segregation?
Would Harris welcome a white public figure to call for ‘White Out nights,’ to allow white people “to feel safe with a lot of other [white] people in a place where they often do not feel safe?” Probably not.
Racial segregation is outlawed in Britain, which is why it doesn’t take much imagination to consider such thinking being applied to other everyday settings—schools, public transport—with disastrous results.
To get around laws against racial segregation, tickets were taken off general sale and made purchasable only through a unique code. Writing in Spiked, Thomas Osborne noted that “white—or indeed Jewish or Asian—Londoners will not be explicitly turned away at the door. But producers have tried to make it abundantly clear that they are not welcome for these two performances.”
Osborne added that the affair struck at the heart of “the great paradox of modern identitarianism.”
The same paradox has been on display before in other London performances and even in educational settings.
After the government intervened, rather weakly describing the “Black Out nights” as “concerning,” one of the performances “vanished” from the production’s website, with the Mail describing the production as being in “chaos.”
Without realising it, Harris made matters worse still when he defended his reasoning by saying “black audiences and white audiences respond to things differently,” and “people have to be radically invited into a space to know that they belong there.”
The producers of the play said more details about the “Black Out nights” would be released “soon.”
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