The Colorblind Leading the Blind (part 1)

What has really blown my mind about the drama unfolding at Lakota East is how the Native American angle has been neglected.

You may or may not have heard about the recent hullabaloo at Lakota East high school in the Cincinnati suburb of West Chester/ Liberty Twp. It revolves around a play called “Ten Little Indians.” After students had already spent months rehearsing it, the play was abruptly canceled by administrators because the local chapter of the NAACP raised concerns about the title and the book on which the play was based. The original Agatha Christi novel was originally printed with a title that I’ll awkwardly call “Ten Little N-words.” (Using euphemisms like “N-word” seems kind of juvenile to me, but I don’t want anybody to try to cancel this blog, so there you have it.)

It should be noted that the NAACP has maintained through all of this that they never suggested the play should be canceled. They said they only wanted to make Lakota East aware of the history behind it.

The play was called “Ten Little Indians.” And the school district is called “Lakota,” for crying out loud. Not only did no one think about how Native Americans might be offended. Somehow, even when racial concerns were raised, they were still all about how it might offend black people. Doesn’t the “CP” in NAACP stand for “Colored People” – meaning their concerns extend to all “non-white” minorities and not just black folk?

Before I dig too deep, let’s get the easy stuff out of the way. Does anyone really think “Ten Little Indians” was an intentional slight against anyone? I don’t. The original title of the book is racist, and Agatha Christie did use plainly racist language in some of the things she wrote. But the play itself doesn’t seem very offensive. On top of that, free speech is my bread and butter as an up and coming journalist, so censorship is always unsettling to me.

Approaching issues like this requires people of good will to do something far more courageous than sanitizing the past for our children. As we educate we have to own up to the fact that racism is an inescapable and inherent part of a large number of "classic" works that we revere. For centuries, white supremacy was the status quo in Western culture – not a radical view held by a few. Discussions about racism need to be a routine part of the way we treat a lot of western literature. You can’t read “greats” like Agatha Christie or Mark Twain or Hume or Kipling or Hegel or even the Constitution of the United States without running into racist language. (And it isn’t just the white writers. You can’t tell me some of the “classic” literature the Nation of Islam produced didn’t include some racist language too.) Being well educated requires seeing offensive content. Let’s just hope we raise our children well enough to be offended when they see it.

And doesn’t the NAACP chapter president Gary Hines look at least a little bit shady for trying to pressure Lakota into using diversity training that his company, GPH Consultants, just happens to provide? Even when the concerns are valid, someone else needs to start taking the lead in discussing them.

But that’s just the shallow end of the in-ground pool.

~ Geoffrey Dobbins
Vice President, UCABJ
Lakota West Class of 2002