U. Portland Thanksgiving Play Mocks White People’s Social Justice Performativity

U. Portland Thanksgiving Play Mocks White People’s Social Justice Performativity

The progressive left has not gotten the message that most of the country has moved on from this garbage.

The College Fix reports:

U. Portland play mocks whites’ social justice performativity

A University of Portland theater featured Native American playwright Larissa FastHorse’s “The Thanksgiving Play” this past week, a supposedly “witty” take on white people’s social justice performativity.

According to The Beacon, the performance is set in Portland, Oregon, itself (one of the most progressive cities in the country) and features “four well-meaning white characters” who attempt to make “a woke but not-too-woke Thanksgiving play for children.”

Director Phillip Guevara, a U. Portland adjunct who teaches “movement,” said the play is about “white people grappling with genocide … erasure, white supremacy, misogyny” and “pretty much what you would expect when you hear, ‘Well-meaning white people trying their best to put on a Thanksgiving play.’”

Professor Andy Christensen (pictured), who according to his faculty page is a “fiercely curious artist-educator who specializes in emergent forms of immersive and site-informed theatre that explore the intersection of place and time,” said the performance “poke[s] fun at white people’s performative sense of social justice” that ultimately ends up causing harm.

“[S]ometimes it is harder to navigate than overt white supremacy because it’s still about trying to make sure that people can see themselves as good white people, rather than about honestly questioning the notion [of] whether you can be a good white person in a system of white supremacy,” Christensen said.

Specific examples of this performativity — anti-racist bookclubs, placards “denouncing racial prejudice,” and “listicles of favorite Black-owned restaurants” — come via a linked article by Kay Kingsman, a seemingly looking-for-any-excuse-to-be-offended black woman.

The article also notes Native American land acknowledgments … which, ironically enough, are regularly used by the university’s theater department as part of its policy of “representing and uplifting marginalized groups.”

More recently, in order “to give back to groups subject to historical injustices,” the department also began offering free play tickets to Native Americans.

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