The past week flew by in a blur. Returning from a jaunt to the islands, I dove headfirst into final preparations for our end of year performance of “Twelfth Night.” The show was a smashing success to say the least thanks to the incredible efforts of a winning cast. Roughly two hundred in attendance, laughing themselves into stitches at the wily antics and shenanigans of my fantastic students, the audience lavished them with laughter and praise as they bounded their way through the performance. After two months of intense rehearsals and prep, the necessary setbacks/delays/and panic-inducing complications of organizing anything on a college campus, three cheers and a hearty brava say I! It was perhaps the weekend of drama as it were with another series of one-act performances staged on campus the following day. With everything from spouse-seeking monarchs to Cupid’s fatal arrow to the spine-tingling horror of a chilling wrong call, the variety show seemed most complete. However, with many so gems in the crown, one stone stood apart from the rest. To my surprise, a performance of a play written by a well-known Black playwright was performed… entirely in black face. For reference:
Ironically enough, the show centered on the theme of anti-discrimination experienced by a family and their ethnically diverse neighborhood friends. Truth be told, when the curtain went down, my reaction was not anger or sadness nor confusion. Rather, my first thought was-- is that actually what they think I look like? 
In a region obsessed with the near-translucent veneer of paleness, it is not at all hard to imagine that the charcoal images I witnessed on the stage were mere reflections of the primary dark-hued figure they see parading before them each day. In a strange way, I felt the utmost kreng jai not for the embarrassment I experienced, but for the creeping fear that I had somehow failed my students. Sure I’d dropped tidbits about MLK and segregation and the historical elements of the turbulent racial past (and present) of America, but did I neglect to impart upon them the significance of racial caricaturization? Did I forget the lesson on minstrelsy and Uncle Tom and memories from Spike Lee’s “Bamboozled”? Or the explanations of the pain, anguish, and resentment conjured by those very images? No I hadn’t. I hadn’t taught about the n-word or Huckleberry Finn or the coonish figures of yore. Because that simply was not relevant to them; it wasn’t their history.
What is relevant to them is the giddy humor with which many not-so-PC and taboo topics of home are lampooned here with ease. Topics they mock with ease each day such as weight, sexuality, attractiveness. I can’t count how many fat cracks or gay jokes I hear on a daily basis, often laughed at and snickered about by the very individuals under the glaring spotlight of peer scrutiny. I’ve no idea of the number of times a student told a friend they were “ooh, so ugly” or that they could “make people cry with that face.” They shrug, laugh, crack a joke themselves and move on with their day, or so it seems. There is something remarkable in that, I must admit, the ability to giggle at our differences and sweep them under the rug. The ability to avoid that proverbial question— Why so serious, na? Because if nothing is all that serious, then I suppose no one gets hurt. If it’s all in good fun, then at the end of the day everyone leaves with a smile on their face.
But in that moment, though willpower curled my lips and dimpled my cheeks, thoughts that swirled like a violent storm were another matter. Sudden self-doubt, worry, concern, and consternation over how to make this a teachable moment, coursed through me. To show them that it was wrong? To berate them for a past that wasn’t theirs? To push them into a reality they knew little of? I decided against all of the above. Because at the end of the day, the lesson was not to be learned about black face; it was about more than that. Their fingers shaking in the quintessential minstrel jazz hands as they closed their performance, they framed a picture perfect image in my mind that I’ll not soon forget. Those tarred figures reflected more than the pigment they represented, in them I saw the larger, darker, gayer, plainer peers they could have just as well been stark reflections of. “Ajarn, it’s like Michael Jackson, but in reverse!” one student exclaimed. And though I chuckled in reply, my thoughts were with those salient members of an otherwise homogenous pool. Yes, the laughter keeps the tears from coming. It likewise belittles an otherwise potentially divisive diverse reality. So while we’re on the stage, in the public eye, magnified and humorized those differences become less real. They just become funny.
I adore my students and love every minute spent with them, yet as I absent-mindedly dog-eared my program, awash with the relief that a chocolate complexion masked the rising heat searing my cheeks, it took great effort to bring my hands together in applause. Call it my hyper-sensitive cultural preoccupations with the ever-changing world of all things politically correct, despite the process of rationalization churning the wheels in my head, the knots in my stomach were inherently hard to stomach. Recollections of those jovially ridiculed individuals drifting through my mind, I couldn’t help but consider: when the curtain goes down on them, what happens to all those smiles? Does the sting that burned in me ever burn in them? Has being labeled as the fat one, the gay one, the ugly one ever left them with the sour taste of disappointment in those they call friends? Or has it ever made them wonder: Is that actually what they think of me?
