Josh Smalley, TCG staffer
The arts have played an essential role in my life—it was through the arts that I began to understand that racism wasn’t simply a single act of hatred, but a system inherited from the past that bleeds into our daily lives here and now.
In college I read the play “We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South West Africa, From the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884 - 1915” by Jackie Sibblies Drury. It’s about a troupe of actors who are creating a theatrical lecture on the little-known German genocide of the Herero and Namaqua people between 1904 and 1907. I distinctly remember having a revelation as I read the play’s climax. I won’t go into spoilers, but there was a moment as the characters were rehearsing the presentation together, some as Germans and others as the Herero, that the reality of this historical atrocity of mass racist and colonialist death broke into the present instant the characters were acting it out, and this hit me right in the gut.
I realized that I am not separate from the past, that I am a part of the historical arc of this global, political, systemic force of white supremacy. And at the end of the day, it’s not enough that I make sure I am not hateful or biased towards my People of the Global Majority friends and colleagues. Instead, I need to be actively healing myself and other white people of this sickness of the mind, actively advocating for the rights and power of People of the Global Majority, and actively changing the direction of our local, national, and global history that has been poisoned by this idea that some bodies are more worthy than others.
Thanks to Drury’s words on a page, I began my journey of deepening, of stretching, of healing, and of action in the service of others. I am forever learning. I am forever grateful.
