Organizers of an upcoming dinner theater presentation are hoping the brutally honest depiction of slave narratives that are included will help young people change how they view racial epithets.
“There’s been a lot of discussion lately about the N-word and the use of the N-word,” said Armequin Mann, one of the event organizers. “I think if we take a look at the people who were initially given the N-word and understand where they’re coming from, maybe we wouldn’t be so inclined to use it on others or each other.”
Mann is involved with a program called “Call Me By My Name” that includes re-enactments of American slave narratives and music. The June 23 event at Washtenaw Community College is being organized by SCANN, the Sevenfold Coalition Addressing Neighborhood Needs, a nonprofit community development group that works mostly in Sumpter and Van Buren townships, Milan and Belleville.
The group began in 1996 as a church-based organization, and it has since organized parenting classes, character-building programs for the public schools, food distribution, and at one point housed homeless men and helped them get jobs.
“Call Me By My Name” is a fundraiser for the organization, with most of the profits going to SCANN’s summer program for kids. That program runs for six weeks and includes field trips, health and safety classes, and arts and crafts.
The theater portion of the evening will include actors from seven area churches who will interpret scripts taken directly from interviews of former slaves that were conducted in the 1930s and ’40s.
Event chairwoman and SCANN secretary Jewel Butler said that many slaves didn’t even know they had names, which they were given solely as a means of inventory, and instead were only ever addressed in racial epithets. Butler herself was once targeted by a racial slur when walking down a street by herself in Plymouth in the 1970s. It was an experience that she said makes her feel even more strongly about educating young people about what that word really means.
“I can’t tell you how that made me feel,” she said. “I just figured they were young, and they don’t have a clue.
“Our history says you can’t use those words - it’s not for us to use. We should have more love and respect for each other than that. … We hope to influence young people, to say, ‘Look at where you came from, look at what our people went through as slaves,’ so they never have to be called that name again.”
