This weekend, I went to Boston with my family. It was an extremely cold day, but I still loved exploring the city and the history it had to offer.
There are a great number of street performers in this city, and we stopped for one of them-a group of men were performing a dance routine, and, at the end, they would flip over the hunched backs of four grown men standing next to each other. Of course, they completed all of this successfully-but the whole act lasted about 45 minutes. The space between dance numbers and the final act was filled with jokes surrounding race, as the men aimed to draw attention to the fact that they were black. At first, I was the only one laughing at the jokes that they made-the other white people standing next to me seemed extremely uncomfortable with this continuous topic of race, and the performers knew that.
At the end of the performance, the men heard quite a uproar of applause after they stated, “There is only one race we believe in-the human race”. I was a bit confused to hear them saying this-I took it as them subscribing to colorblind ideology. If these performers had been drawing attention to their race during this period of 45 minutes, why were they now expressing colorblind beliefs? This situation confused me, and I left feeling somewhat confused-what did they want people to believe?