By ERALDO SOUZA DOS SANTOS

Commentary on the show “For my white friend”, by Rodrigo França and Mery Delmond

Em The bluest eye, Toni Morrison's first novel, the writer gives literary form to a reflection that is, above all, personal. It is the indignation and revolt she felt as a child in the face of one of her black friends' desire to have blue eyes that leads Toni Morrison to develop the character of Pecola Breedlove, who shares the same desire. To my white friend, a play by Rodrigo França and Mery Delmond based on the book of the same name by Manuel Soares, tells us a similar story.

Faced with the racism she suffers at school, where she is called a “smelly black girl the color of poop” by a white friend, Juninho Schneider, Zuri, an eight-year-old black girl and the absent protagonist of the play, asks for help in one of her classroom projects, as best she can. When asked by her teacher what she wants from the world, she responds that “I want from the world that I be white.”

The play, restaged on December 14th and 15th as part of the 2024 on Stage Show, invites the audience to the school meeting in which Monsueto, Zuri's father, fights for racism against his daughter to be recognized as such. Not only are the spectators treated as “responsible” for teacher Magda's class at a bilingual school of apparent renown, but four spectators are invited to follow the meeting closely, sitting (and visibly embarrassed) at desks on the stage itself.

The whiteness of the school space is provocatively represented by a completely white setting, which the books by black authors, suspended by ropes descending from the ceiling of the theater, cannot reach. The choice of having the white characters dressed in white and the black characters dressed in brown, in turn, has a less clear aesthetic effect and hints at the Manichaeism that, for better or for worse, structures the narrative of the show.

The lighting and light effects, which are more specific, contribute to the play's most inventive moments. At key moments when the actors turned their backs to the audience, the acoustics of the Arthur Azevedo Theater did not help.

In just under an hour and a half of the show, we see Monsueto and then a black teacher from the school, Valéria (played by Delmond), (trying to) teach Magda, Juninho's father, André Schneider, and the audience about racism and the anti-racist struggle. Schneider, who initially presents himself as an ally of the issue, becomes progressively revolted by the fact that his son is accused of racism and ends up being suspended. The anti-racist principles constantly enunciated by Monsueto and Valéria are interspersed until the end of the show with Schneider's racist interventions in defense of his son and himself.

More fluid, the speeches of Valéria, Magda and Schneider often contrast with those of Monsueto, who, for no clear reason in the development of the plot, tends to use more technical vocabulary to denounce the racism that his daughter suffered and suffers at school through expressions such as “imagetic perception”.

Educating whiteness

“But what do you want?”, a question asked at least twice by Schneider to Monsueto, is, in essence, the fundamental question that confronts the different forms of anti-racist struggle, if not the entire struggle.

The answer that the play offers places “my white friend” at the center of the desired social transformation by expressing the constant desire that he convert to the anti-racist principles that are constantly listed throughout the show, just as Magda does in a moment of idealized redemption of whiteness. Magda admits that she needs to “educate herself,” to which teacher Valéria happily agrees; minutes before, Valéria reprimands Magda for not having read the anti-racist books and manuals that she had lent her.

“I don’t waste energy arguing with the far right, I want to argue with that person who claims to be an ally, but contradicts himself,” said Rodrigo França in an interview from August 2023 about the play. Although Schneider is closer to the first than the second, the character of Monsueto, unlike França, finds himself faced with spending a great deal of his energy trying to convert Schneider: trying, always unsuccessfully, to demonstrate his own humanity.

In doing so, França and Delmond rearticulate, albeit unintentionally, a trope that is quite common: it is the responsibility of black people to educate white people about what racism is and how racism has led to the suffering of black people for centuries. To follow this path is to bet on the existence of a conscience or sense of justice on the part of white people and most white people – or on their “goodwill”, to use a term from França himself.

To do so, however, is to present the anti-racist struggle and the freedom of black people as a variable of the arbitrariness and pleasure of white people; to do so, however, is to ignore whiteness' investment in its own supremacy in the political, social and aesthetic spheres.

Because the aesthetics of To my white friend is anchored not in an investigation of the psychological depth as well as the depth of the intersubjective relationships of and between black people. It is only in Monsueto's two monologues with a black doll, representing his daughter, that we can glimpse a deeper psychological development of his character.

The rest of the time, Monsueto has to educate racists who don’t see themselves as racist and defend himself against constant accusations and microaggressions: “as if our lives,” as Toni Morrison says, “have no meaning or depth without the gaze of white people.”

The plot would have a greater critical dimension if, instead of taking the form of “a class on racism” (we are in a classroom, after all), it had lingered on the suffering of Zuri, who Magda considers to be a girl strong enough to withstand the racism she suffered; or if more stage time had been given to Monsueto’s suffering and his realization that “my girl was alone, without a hug, without anything!”

To my black friend

At the end, a black girl at the front of the theater rightly commented that the play was not for her, but for her white friends. Staged in the East Zone of São Paulo, for a mostly black audience and most likely linked to the anti-racist struggle, To my white friend, in fact, creates the impression, also described by Toni Morrison, that the dramaturgy is speaking “over our shoulders”: not from black to black, but from black to white.

Whether or not we agree with this approach to anti-racism, it is important to note that it is increasingly the approach that marks the production of black authors in Brazil and the approach that is most easily financed and supported by a cultural sector that is still dominated by whites. In one of his long speeches, Monsueto denounces the corporatist language that seeks to co-opt anti-racism and offer “almost a manual on how to be correct.”

At this point, the piece may be self-referencing to avoid easy appropriations, but it ultimately offers the key to its own critique: at a time when the anti-racist manual has become the quintessential form of critique of white supremacy, black Brazilian art that imitates the manual is impoverished.

*Eraldo Souza dos Santos is a postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at Cornell University.

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