Powerful show at the Orlando Fringe Festival
The thought of a white woman presenting a spoken-word performance on African-American history at the Orlando International Fringe Theatre Festival has all the ingredients of white privilege run amok, ending in a cultural train wreck. Turns out writer and performer Amy Selikoff is right on point. She is more #woke than some black people, such as HUD Secretary Ben Carson and Diamond and Silk, Trump’s minstrel show performers. The core message of “Somebody’s History: A White Woman’s Journey to Understand Race in America” is America is a fundamentally racist country. Black people have been playing against a stacked deck of systematic, legal racism since the first Africans arrived here in chains nearly 400 years ago. In a press release for the press preview performance I attended on Saturday (May 12) Ms. Selikoff, a local school teacher, is described as “totally white.” She grew up in St. Paul, Minn. “After the...