Unperforming Racism: Performing Lynda Barry's The Good Times are Killing Me

Bonny McDonald
Instructor in the Department of Communication
Louisiana State University

I am about to perform in the final round of Prose at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana in 1999. I survey the audience: the classroom is brimming with people— Black 1 people. The situation is the first time in my life I am the racial minority. I am eighteen. I don't have the wherewithal at this moment to wonder how it is my life has always been so...white, but I find myself I feeling exposed, strange, awkward in my own skin. I am performing a firstperson prose in which the "white trash" seventh-grade narrator tells the story of an interracial friendship. It is Lynda Barry's true story, and it echoes my own story of tense race relations in public schools in southern Louisiana, though I haven’t given that history much thought…yet. I have never performed it for a group of Black audience members, and I find myself deeply selfconscious, aware of the careful eye contact I make with the twenty or so people in the audience before I begin as if to say, “Hi, there! I’m totally not racist!” At the time, that’s how I think of myself—“totally not racist”—and yet I have a semi-subconscious sense that I don't know how to work this audience like I do a “typical”—that is, for me—a white audience.

I had the joy of performing a ten-minute cutting of comic artist Lynda Barry’s The Good Times Are Killing Me all over the country as a first-year student competing for the University of Texas at Austin’s forensics team in 1999. Barry tells the semi-autobiographical story of Edna Arkins, a young white girl who tentatively befriends the first young Black girl to move into her neighborhood. The two become friends amidst a tense racial setting, presumably in the early 1960s, sneaking their time together outside of the suspicious eyes of Edna's poor white family, until social pressure to fraternize in same-race groups at school tears them apart. As Edna explains, “I already know [Bonna] won’t be caught dead talking to no little honky girl this year, and the same goes for her from me only backwards using the word I won’t say” (Barry, 1988, p. 44). The performance of this piece marked a significant turning point in my life, initiating my awareness of race politics, my conception of white privilege, and my ongoing process of unlearning racism. The book moved me when I read it, but the lifelong impact the text had on me unfolded in repeated live performances before the sort of small, intimate audiences we encounter at forensics tournaments.

I want to document my experience as part of a broader interest in how the performance of literature may operate as a transformative social force. I argue that it does so largely due to its invitation of a hyper-self-conscious investigation of the performer’s relationship with the audience by way of a text, a sort of whole-body attunement to the audience during a literary performance. In making micro-adjustments to accommodate an audience, the performer becomes aware of—and thereby may begin to adjust—her affective relationship with a given audience in a way that spills over into her everyday life. I focus here on a particularly profound moment in which I performed for an audience comprised mainly of Black persons—this was not the only moment I experienced epiphanies about race and racism during the run of this prose, but it is emblematic of many.

“My name is Edna Arkins” (Barry, 1988, p. 1), I begin. I have practiced the process of connecting with an audience: breathe, center yourself, make extended eye contact, react to the audience’s reactions. The eyes do not pry or push; instead, they must empty. Like a hand that grips a stone must let it go to grasp another, the body must drain its expectations to meet a stranger, a listener, an Other. A woman in the front row smiles invitingly at me; I start my story off for her, looking only at her, not at the crowd my eyes consolidate by their color. Her smile bounces off my face; my frown reflects in hers. I reach out to someone else, moving slowly from face to face, looking for openings, seeking connection, finding places where we seem to know each other and where we don’t. I allow space for folks to react, and I reflect the quality of their reactions as I proceed through my narration. Edna explains right off the bat that “In the beginning of this street it was mainly a white street…the houses went White, White, White, White, Japanese, White, White” (Barry, 1988, p. 2). I notice quickly that despite my apprehension, this narrative finds a particular traction with this audience. They are interested. Folks nod knowingly, smirk, humph, lean in.

I grew up in the Deep South in an educational environment infused with racial ignorance and white supremacist structures. As part of Louisiana’s latest half-hearted stab at desegregating the public school system, I was bussed for a special program nearly an hour from my home into what I understood to be “The Hood.” There, my overwhelmingly white middle school cohorts and I received special treatment (highly qualified teachers, expensive resources, nice facilities) in an otherwise failing school with an otherwise 99% African-American student population. The situation was a recipe for racial tension, the reasons for which I was wholly ignorant at the time, not understanding why students whose school I just invaded might be angry about it. In the narrator’s unselfconscious blabbering style, Barry foregrounds a kind of white ignorance of Black culture and the complicated history of race relations akin to my own, at least as a youth. Edna describes one of her first meetings with Bonna in her signature innocently ignorant tone:

Bonna’s records had a screaming sound that I had never heard before... There would be a man screaming; and I really mean screaming, and then all of these people would scream back. She said the man’s name was James Brown and told me that the song he was singing was called ‘Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ I had never heard of being proud of being a Negro so I wondered was this a joke song or what? (Barry, 1988, p. 48-9)

The audiences I encountered at speech tournaments, including this one, operated under the assumption that I was performing this script in good faith—that I was, in fact, commenting on the main character’s ignorance as if I didn’t share it. Actually, I did share it, and this performance gave me the opportunity to act—and therefore find—that out.

I am worried how the James Brown bit is going to go over, but the audience laughs uproariously. I am relieved, but then immediately, doubly worried about the next line: the use of the term “Negro,” wondering if being proud of being Black is a joke. How can I say this in front of these people? I muster the affect of complete ignorance I have practiced for the character, but I find myself—the body of the actor beneath the character—blushing deeply, a blush incongruous with Edna’s genuinely perplexed tone. A great sense of shame rushes over me, one I must tamp down to get through the piece, but that haunts me later. I realize I am afraid of speaking about matters of race to people who are Black, that in my everyday life, I never have—not once. The discomfort I felt in this round was a great teacher for me: I had some selfinterrogation to do. Why was I afraid of telling this story to this audience? I became conscious that I had to manipulate my affect so as to communicate a sense of comfort with Black audience members—a labor I did not find myself mustering when speaking to white audience members. In effect, I became conscious of my own racism.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sarah Ahmed (2004) examines the emotion of fear as a key force in the formation of racial difference and of governance. Building off of Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks," she argues that fear “re-establishes distance between bodies whose difference is read off the surface, as a reading which produces the surface (shivering, recolouring)” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 63). She locates fear in a moment of "passing by" or turning away from the feared other or object and toward the familiar, the “home or enclosure.” She suggests that vulnerability—the openness of the body toward the feared object—feels dangerous since it is a space where the body and the world might meet (Ahmed, 2004, p.68-9). In the repeated close-contact style of performance demanded in the forensics setting, the sort of "passing by" Ahmed discusses may be impossible. To win over the audience and judges in this round, I instead had to turn toward them.

Throughout the year, the performance of the prose moved me into settings and situations that demanded my looking at people of color in new and less fearful ways and ushered me into many pivotal conversations about racism and whiteness with people of color. In one case, I had the opportunity to perform the piece for a public high school auditorium in my hometown where Lynda Barry herself was a keynote speaker and where students expressed having had similar experiences. I began to see that fear cultivated the distance I kept from Black folks and that the adults, the institutions, and the configurations of public spaces in my life had nurtured this fear in the more and less overt ways Ahmed theorizes.

Every performance of this prose was an opportunity for me to practice talking about whiteness, race, and racism; and many were a chance for me to practice talking about these topics to nonwhite persons for the first time in my life. The prose created a space for me to practice seeing other people rather than the other; the reconfiguring of fear into trust necessary for connecting with audiences of color spilled over into my ability to “turn toward” people of color in everyday life. The performance of literature formed a bridge between me and folks with whom I habitually did not engage inside and outside of competitive rounds—a bridge I slowly began to cross.

The part where I perform Bonna Willis is coming up. She teaches Edna a few dance moves in their secret basement “night club.” Suddenly, I understand that I have no business attempting the “Black” affect I have practiced for this character. Though I have performed the piece several times before, in front of this audience, I am suddenly too embarrassed to try it. I make the call in the moment to use my own voice rather than the voice I rehearsed. When I perform Bonna, I focus my attention on conveying the playful, teasing quality in the line rather than the posture and movement I had imagined as “Black.”

I learned from my forensics coaches to split my focus between (a) conveying the content of my piece and (b) developing the relationship with the particular audience to whom I was speaking. In this case, I had built some trust with the audience by right of my careful attention to each individual, and I felt I could not risk breaking that trust by performing my concept of Bonna Willis’s “Blackness.” In the moment, I sensed on the corporeal level that a cross-racial performance would be inappropriate; I later understood that the performance choice I eschewed was rooted in a wholly unexamined stereotype of Blackness.

The choice to instead focus on the intention of the line is a step toward avoiding what Daniel Banks (2006) identifies as performances of Blackness in the tradition of blackface minstrelsy (p.186). In his essay “Unperforming Race,” from whence I borrow the title of this article, he advocates instead a practice of unperforming: “stag[ing] contradictions in the discursive system of ‘race’ and raciology, revealing complexity, limitations of language, omission of history, un(der)represented populations, and contradictory subject locations” (Banks, 2006, p.192). Citing Plato and Heidegger, he characterizes such performances as poesis, “‘bringing forth’…a new understanding, a new reality, an alternative epistemology” (Banks, 2006, p.192). For me, performing Barry’s text brought forth a new awareness of my own whiteness, how that whiteness shaped my conception of Blackness, and ultimately, how my personal experience fit into the broader workings of white supremacy. My sense of unperforming racism, then, speaks to the transformations of stereotyping made possible by a process of reflexively inviting, adjusting, and complicating one's conscious and unconscious practices of engaging others in the moment of live performance.

When I performed the piece in the final round at AFA, I could barely see the audience from the proscenium stage. But by that point, I had internalized the lessons I’d learned from a year’s worth of more intimate performances. The piece has had a lasting impact on my relationships, my involvement in race politics, and my scholarly interest in critical pedagogy. When I reflect on my time in forensics as a competitor, I am often troubled by its institutionalized elitism, sexism, racism, and other isms, but this experience reminds me that the activity has many potentially transformative spaces worth cultivating.

The story doesn’t end well. Edna and Bonna are wedged apart by their friend groups and even by teachers’ expectations. I find the scene of the first day of school incredibly difficult to perform this round. In it, Bonna hits Edna. She has to: all her friends are watching, but this is not where everyone thought the story was going: bodies in the audience stiffen, faces harden. I have to work hard to show in the last moments that I understand Bonna’s action as something larger than herself, a forced hand. Edna is the victim of the punch, but she is also the perpetrator of social violence. I want to show that I know that she is responsible for what she did not do, for what she did not say, and even for what she did not understand.


1 See Toure’s (2011), argument for capitalizing “Black” and not “white” on the grounds that Black folks in the U.S. often cannot point to precise ethnic lineages due to the familial disruptions of slavery (p. ix).

References

Barry, L. (1988). The Good Times Are Killing Me. Seattle: Sasquatch Books, 1988.

Banks, D. (2006). Unperforming ‘race’: Strategies for reimagining identity. In J. Cohen- Cruz & M. Schutzman (Eds.), A Boal companion: Dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. (pp. 185-198). New York: Routledge.

Ahmed, S. (2004). The cultural politics of emotion. New York: Routledge. Toure’. (2011). Whose afraid of post-Blackness: What it means to be Black now. New York: Free Press.