What If Everything You Know About Race Is Wrong?

Posted in Articles, Arts, Audio, Census/Demographics, Interviews, Media Archive, Social Science, United States on 2015-01-16 23:49Z by Steven

What If Everything You Know About Race Is Wrong?

Texas Public Radio
San Antonio, Texas
2015-01-15

Jack Morgan, Arts and Culture Reporter


Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni

A one-woman show is coming to the Tobin Center and it’s probably unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’s called “One Drop of Love.” starring Fanshen Cox DiGiovanni, produced by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.

“How did you get mixed up with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon?” I asked.

(Laughs) “I think I met Matt when I was about 12 and Ben when we started high school together,” DiGiovanni told me. “And we did theater—we had a very wonderful theater program at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. And these two guys are such wonderful human beings.”

A year ago, DiGiovanni first produced this one-woman show for a Master of Fine Arts degree thesis performance.

“Ben came and saw my thesis performance and just said afterwards ‘I think this is really great and important and I’d like to help you get it to a wider audience.’”

Matt Damon also saw it and agreed with his friend. Thus DiGiovanni’s tour was conceived. So exactly what is One Drop of Love? It’s talking about one of this country’s most difficult subjects: race.

“I never know what kinds of experiences the people in the audience have had with race and racism,” DiGiovanni explains.

The whole show revolves around this premise.

“I start off the show as the character from a 1790 census, on which there were only three racial categories.”

In her show, she goes around her audience, linking audience members to one of those racial categories.

Walking through an audience, she names them: “Okay, white…black…mulatto…Chinese? Yes, hello…quadroon…no, I see you! An Indian…”

It’s one part history, one part performance art.

“There are people who look at me and shake their head and say ‘no, that’s not what I am!’ Which is very much the point, because that’s how the census was counted until 1970. A census worker would just go around and guess the race of the person they were looking at.”

She says race, in a sense, isn’t even real…

Read the entire article here. Listen to the interview (00:03:34) here.

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