We need to really talk about how high school drama/theatre departments run by white teachers can & usually are really toxic & harmful to BIPOC students.

I'm trying to write this essay & it is so hard because ya'll my HS drama teachers really did a number on me/my self esteem.

In HS often the focus is always on sports team coaches and the power/harm they can and do cause on their athletes. But folks really dismiss theatre and band directors, but I'll tell you something as someone who did both of those activities in HS...

the way some of these white band and drama directors talk to their students is atrocious. The power they hold depending on how much they like you, know you, are/are not racist can and does influence these teenagers lives and yet we don't talk about it.

We don't talk about how not getting a part or a lead role EVER can affect your chances of getting a theatre scholarship or if your band director is racist or doesn't like you just cause may never let you earn first or second chair, again affecting your chances at a scholarship

And please, don't even get me started on the way HS theatre directors often prey on the young girls in theatre productions and how these young girls fawn over and flirt with grown ass men just to get a part in a play because they know...we ALL know.

ON TOP of the fact that most of these shitty HS theatre teachers don't believe in color blind casting and INSIST on performing plays written in the 1950s by old dead white dudes thus preventing BIPOC from ever getting the lead because "they don't fit the part"

Once, my first year teaching MS drama, I was accused of wait for it "reverse racism" by a white Latina principal because the leads in my play were all Black students and most of the non Black Latinx students were in the ensemble...but like they didn't even want to audition!

What was I supposed to do? The Black kids were the only ones who even wanted to read for a part. The only ones I could hear on stage. The ones who truly wanted to be on stage.

I wanted to be a different kind of drama teacher, the kind of teacher I had never had. But even then, the system wouldn't let me do that. I left ALL of theatre for a long time...no community theatre, no teaching theatre, none of it. I'm slowly making my way back but it ain't easy