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Student playwright takes on racial tensions at College Park
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College Park (Map, News) - Benjy Fogelman recalls walking by a black University of Maryland student who asked his girlfriend, “What’s going to happen when someone hangs a noose on your doorstop?”
Flushed with embarrassment about what he had overheard, Fogelman, who is white, desperately wanted to tell the black student that not all whites are racist.
Racial tensions flared last semester when someone hung a noose outside the black cultural center on the College Park campus.
Fogelman, 20, a junior theater and English major, knew he couldn’t heal the years of pain minorities have suffered at the university and elsewhere but he wanted to at least stimulate a conversation about it.
So he wrote a play based on interviews with students and professors on their reactions to the noose-hanging.
Students continue to self-segregate in dining halls, and many black undergraduates think their white classmates just don’t understand how racist jokes and discrimination still plague them.
Some white students admitted that they didn’t see what the big deal was about, while black students vented frustrations about e-mailed apologies and other hollow gestures that don’t fix the underlying racism felt at school.
Fogelman used some of the taped conversations as the basis for the monologues black and white characters will perform tonight and Friday in his play, “A Whitewash: A Reaction to the U.Md. Noose Incident.”
One character, portrayed by Mai Stann-Wilson, a junior African-American studies major, says the university doesn’t do enough to prevent minority students from flunking out.
“Many of our basketball players don’t graduate,” said Stann-Wilson, 22.
“They make money for the school and then leave.”
Police still have no suspects in the noose-hanging, said Paul Dillon, a campus police spokesman.
If you go ...
» What: “A Whitewash: A Reaction to the U.Md, Noose Incident”
» When: 7:30 p.m. today and Friday
» Where: Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center
kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com
