How do we know when whiteness has been decentered enough?

So much has happened since June - are we allowed to acknowledge it?

Family Guy is one of my top ten television shows of all time (despite that I had some issues with The Cleveland Show), and last week I decided to catch up on the latest season. I quickly noticed that Cleveland sounded different.

Cleveland is black, and for twenty years has been voiced by white Mike Henry. Last summer, amidst our racial reckoning, Henry decided to stop doing Cleveland out of sense that black characters should be voiced by black actors. Cleveland is now being done by a black actor, and he’s fine. Just a little different – I had to get used to it.

Okay. We’ve come a long way from the days when black cartoon and radio characters in the media were as often as not voiced by white people.

Family Guy streams on Hulu, and I also notice that Hulu has a “Black Stories” tab in observance of Black History Month. Not advertised with any fanfare, but just there, as if to acknowledge that black people are, as part of the American fabric, here.

Okay. That works. It’s the way it should be.

Then meanwhile, in New York, the City Center Encores! team are in the same frame of mind. Encores! has specialized for a quarter century in presenting five-night revivals of old musicals unlikely to ever be seen in large-scale productions again. As you might expect, it is, largely, a very white affair, highlighting the likes of Call Me Madam and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. To some New Yorkers, Encores! is “a thing” – people pass on subscription orchestra seats in their wills. But still, the audience tilts old and white.

But now they’re going to dust off The Tap Dance Kid. Not only is it not that old – it was early 1980s – but it also frankly wasn’t that good. Hot tapping, yes – it helped to place Savion Glover when he stepped in as the lead after the first actor -- but it had a mediocre score, and few have missed it since its decent but modest run. Usually when Encores! has revived black shows – and they have – it’s been ones that were showstoppers in their day (Cabin in the Sky) or should have been (St. Louis Woman). The Tap Dance Kid? It’s a post-George Floyd gesture.

And, okay. Encores! has dusted off quite a few white shows that weren’t earth-shattering material either. Plus The Tap Dance Kid was the only musical until recently that highlighted middle-class, upwardly mobile black people. It was based on a very special kid book of the 1970s called Nobody’s Family is Going to Change which focused more on the heavy, maladjusted daughter than the show did. She’s in the show, too, although backgrounded, and in her black 70s geekiness is in fact the closest thing to myself in any Broadway musical. I’ll be stopping by, and appreciate the archaeology of bringing it back for a bit.

All of this is symptoms of what we call decentering whiteness, and whiteness has been decentered rather marvelously in our culture since last spring. An awful lot of powerful white people have really gotten a message in way they had not before.

Merriam-Webster updated its racism entry to reflect the sociologist’s syllabus, despite that this “Racism 2.0” definition confuses a great many quite mightily. I espouse this.

Barely anybody had heard of the acronym BIPOC before about ten minutes ago; it has permeated our existence with bracing rapidity. Fine with me.

The fashion is now to capitalize black but not white; I hear from at least one person a week wondering why “I” do this in my writing now, unaware that it happens in the editing (I must admit I haven’t quite gotten into the habit, although I do not oppose the practice).

The term master bedroom is becoming ever more suspect because, well, it sounds like slavery. I frankly think that’s a little silly, but then uses of master that actually relate to slavery such as the electronics master and slave board? Yeah – those have to go.

If you’re reading this you likely know I could go on. And on. Decentering whiteness has seriously happened on the level of symbols, iconography and aesthetics. It’s even in the little things. I get the feeling that there has been a quiet decision at WNYC, New York’s NPR affiliate, to feature black male announcers as much as possible. Not with fanfare – but they are acculturating their listeners to a black voice as default, to an extent that would have seemed bizarre as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

All of this looks and sounds great to me. I have some quibbles, of course. Jenny Slate (white) pulled out of doing a biracial character in Big Mouth – but how does a biracial person “sound”? I guess the idea is that someone who is of the black half of the fictional character’s makeup should get paid to voice her albeit sounding “white” … but whatever.

But the question is whether our antiracism police will allow that it means something. If what has happened since June or so isn’t enough, then what would be?

I sense that for some, the answer would be that all of the things I have mentioned are just window dressing, and that what we really need is the utter upending of “institutions.” Here, the professional “antiracists” have a right to some frustration, as there is increasing pushback against this conception of how “institutions” are supposed to transform.

For example, Boston University’s School of Theater program was presented with one of these manifesto letters last semester, suggesting changes that would have rendered the entire program a training in performed indoctrination, leaving students of all races tragically unprepared for competing in the real world of theatrical employment. Sure, the manifestors would object that this real world needs to change too, but that would take a while, and in the meantime … well, honestly, people of this mission don’t generally give much thought to timelines and pragmatics.

This just in – the Academic Freedom Committee at B.U. has shot down these demands – i.e. is responding to the misled students and mentors who concocted that manifesto with the respect that they deserve as fellow humans. For a theatre program to barely feature any plays not created by BIPOCs, to allow BIPOC students to opt out of playing characters not explicitly written as BIPOC if they so choose, etc. (their manifesto truly challenges belief in spots), is not a proposal that serious people ought give in to. B.U. has not.

Now, there are those who would see this as evidence of backlash, of whites somehow united in a conception of themselves as a body of persons who must hold on to their power, and so forth (get a swig of this conception of whites as a self-conscious body in White Fragility). Good drama, but it has nothing to do with real people on the real earth.

There’s more just in – law professor Jason Kilborn, condemned as a violent bigot for having “n*****” on an exam about an employment discrimination case, has been liberated. (Cue applause!)

Anyone who thinks the exoneration of this man is due to “white people holding onto their power” is letting good music blind them to justice and common sense. What happened to Kilborn was so blazingly stoopid that even his executioners realized they had to back down when seeing how they looked to the rest of us (social media can do good at least sometimes).

I suspect that the San Francisco school board stripping the names of dozens of accomplished people from school buildings because of sins that were considered ordinary, or as not even sins, in their time – no more George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Paul Revere (?) -- is going to stand as a similar model for what not to do nationwide.

Commonly, moderates watching the more barbarous aspects of Elect operations since June have ventured that the pendulum always swings too far at first. That is true, and I sense that we are currently seeing evidence of it pulling closer to the middle.

As in, I am quite disgusted at the excesses since June, and of course feel a certain sense of self-actualization in airing that disgust. However, as someone sincerely committed to bringing the pendulum back into the middle, I am quite heartened to see evidence of it happening. I want there to be less of what has happened at B.U. and in San Francisco -- in both places there are so many grievous tales of late -- and elsewhere. If there were less for me to decry, I would like it that way, and move on.

But I worry that our Elect antiracists will not. Whiteness has been vastly decentered in America since last spring on all levels. Have we achieved perfection? I’m afraid not – but what has happened regardless has been unprecedented. Why would anyone watch all of this and see it as mere rearranging of deck chairs on the Titanic and continue sounding the same aggrieved alarum as they were before? Who among them sincerely thinks America could operate as a modern nation with all of its institutions perverted into the narrow mission of being Antiracist Academies founded upon a commitment to never discomforting black persons in any way? Why the utter discomfort with celebrating victory?

The late, great Stanley Crouch once wrote: “One should always keep a hot poker ready for the backside of injustice, but it is important to polish the crown when you’ve damned well earned it.”

But to many these days, one is not to polish that crown in public – out of a sense that blackness is somehow insignificant when divorced from proclaiming “Yes, We Can’t.”

Here is where I sense not constructive sociopolitical intent, but an identity built around a religious style of thinking.

“How does he know they won’t admit something big has happened?” Well, I don’t – I’m making an educated guess. And on that too, I’d be happy to be wrong.