First talk by Dr. Ian Smith on white lies. #RaceB4Race Quoting Glaude & Kincaid, the lies of erasure of the treatment of Black Americans and the importance of white people, England. 1/

Hamlet's whiteness lies at the core of an unexamined lie--naming the lie may help us reckon with & confront the lie that distorts our reality, erasing the assertion that white lives matter more than the lives of others. 2/ #RaceB4Race

"Hamlet construes action as having a color too." <yes!> Every soliloquy reflects whiteness as needing black action. Claudius called "a moor" (!), and violence "as locatable within a specific black population." 3/ #RaceB4Race

Smith notes Hamlet's rec to the Players to play Dido & Aeneas (implying a particular son-father dynamic embedded in Marlowe's play & fantasies of blackness & race & violence & empire stories) [my summary of Smith's observation] 4/ #RaceB4Race

The use of the term "sable" to describe Pyrrus means for Hamlet (& Shax), that Pyrrus' violence is *raced* in blackness. 5/ #RaceB4Race

The senile old [white] man Polonius is a highlighted type. So too is the type of the violent black man, with which Hamlet attempts to identify. "Black in his look & bloody in his deeds." Cites also Shax's Aaron the Moor, ruthless killer. 6/ #RaceB4Race

The degree to which this idea of the violent black man is being normalized by English theater is disturbing. [should be paid attention to!! --Ed.] 7/ #RaceB4Race

[Just GASPED at Smith's re-reading of memento mori as the akin "Remember the Moor"!!! --Ed. ] 8/ #RaceB4Race

The erasure of blackness, or race as a critical epistemology must be rethought as esteem in Hamlet is maintained as a "literary hero." [urgent need of CRT reading of these plays] "Hamlet tests our capacity to...remember the moor." 9/ #RaceB4Race

The Shax Industry - what has been the effect of more exposure of the field to CRT? How will this work change the teaching & writing of Shax's embeddedness in this racializing practice? How will critics remember the Moor? 10/ #RaceB4Race

The popular circulation of the violent black man in American hip-hop representations is to be analyzed as well. "Hamlet...stands as a precursor of the white consumer" of black violence to be consumed. [!!!] White appropriation goes back! 11/ #everythingbuttheburden #RaceB4Race

Imagining the actor putting on/taking off the inky blackness of violence/black-face. A white man seeking to bolster his courage without any consideration of Black Lives. As a white male consumer, Hamlet's investment in blackness is "entirely self-serving" & entertainment. 12/

Hamlet enacts "racial tourism." [boom! --Ed. ] 13/ #RaceB4Race

Learning to read oneself through the process of reading tests, discovering who we are in relation to others. This must include critical race reckoning [and by implication, not tourism. --Ed. ] 14/ #RaceB4Race

Now Dr. Adrienne Merritt. [ yes! ] 15/ #RaceB4Race

"I was taught white German studies." A "hard thought/admission." Presence as often the sole non-white scholar in the dept came with pressures of alienation & pressures for "optimal performance." 16/ #RaceB4Race

The non-naming of German studies as "white" continues to obscure, erase non-white Germanic societies & histories. White Xtian European imagination in Medieval hero romances. Superiority of fairness, wonderfulness, beauty. 17/ #RaceB4Race