Fighting racism
 
"This isn't acting class," says David Diamond, artistic director of Headlines. "This work is not about fantasy, invention. It's about truth." Published: The Globe and Mail, March 30, 1991, FOCUS BY DEBORAH JONES, COLE HARBOUR, N.S. 'IT'S a damned nigger!" The bellowed insult from the stage sends shockwaves through the school gymnasium. Three hundred noisy high school kids hush in their chairs, dumbfounded. Even white bigots don't say such things outside their homes. And for two years, since a snowball fight between whites and blacks at Cole Harbour District High School got so out of hand that it made national headlines, references to race here have been self-conscious and ultra-polite. But the raw words, uttered by a white father after he learns his daughter's beau is black, are part of three disconcerting plays about dating between blacks and whites. The performances at the school are led by two members of Vancouver-based Headlines Theatre, a troupe that is using an eight-city tour to explore racism at Canadian high schools. In all cases, the emphasis is on youth participation - as audience and as playwrights. In schools across Canada, from Whitehorse to Winnipeg to St. John's, students have developed provocative plays from their own lives, with help from the Vancouver troupe. "This isn't acting class," says David Diamond, artistic director of Headlines. "This work is not about fantasy, invention. It's about truth." In Cole Harbour High, the plays - and especially the words "damned nigger" - cause deep embarrassment in the audience. The students, who are as much a part of the play as the handful of teens on stage, squirm and avoid eye contact. Some laugh. Many are galvanized into action: they rush to the stage to replace the actors, inserting themselves and their solutions to the race problem right into the play. A quiet-looking girl steps up to confront the bigot whose words astonished the audience. Taking the place of the actress playing his wife, the intervener abandons the original wife's passivity and tells the father that his racist attitude is harming the family. The father stonewalls. Subtly, the play encompasses feminism. A burly boy walks on stage to replace the 16-year-old girl playing the man's daughter. When the father - another student - answers the phone and learns that the caller asking for his daughter is black (he knows the young man), the new boy snatches the phone out of the father's hand and argues with him. This is serious stuff for the students. After all, it was they who chose to develop the theme of interracial dating. "It is a really big issue," says student Shelli Meleck, one of 25 students who acted in the plays. "While nobody will say it out loud in the school, it's really frowned upon," says Mr. Diamond, of interracial dating. He has spent about a week working with the students on issues of racism. Several students explain that it's fairly common at the school for white girls to date black boys, but almost unheard of for black girls to date white boys. THERE is more to this tension than just racial discomfort. Halifax County, in which Cole Harbour High stands, lies on the outskirts of the Halifax-Dartmouth metropolitan area. Urbanization has caused the area's traditional rural citizenry of labourers and fishermen to be swamped by middle-class families and poverty-stricken single parents. A few black families are interspersed in all these neighbourhoods. At Cole Harbour High itself, Nova Scotia's biggest school, there are 130 black students to more than 1,650 white students, a relatively high number of blacks for schools in the province. What really makes the pot boil is that the majority of the black students are bused in from an area known as the Prestons, a cluster of four black communities - segregated in all but name - where residents struggle against discrimination and where unemployment rates top 80 per cent. When children from the diverse neighbourhoods reach Grade 10 and meet at giant Cole Harbour High, black kids find themselves with white kids and poor kids find themselves with rich kids - often for the first time in their lives. Principal Angus MacNeil says the results are interesting - and challenging - for the school's 95 teachers and administrators (10 of whom are black). In January, 1989, the challenge got out of hand. On a snowy Monday, a white youth threw a snowball at a black teen-ager outside the school's Grade 10 building. The underlying cause was students' disapproval of dating between black boys and white girls, says Mr. MacNeil. The next day, as many as 50 people joined in a free-for-all between black and white and young adults who were hanging around outside the school. Four people were treated in hospital for minor injuries. Later, fist fights broke out among 150 students. A public meeting drew 1,500 people. The school temporarily closed. During the fracas, local and national media joined police at the school, and Cole Harbour District High School became a national symbol of racism. Schoolyard brawls, often for racist reasons, "happen at most schools across the country, but the news doesn't happen to be there," reflects Mr. Diamond, who says he saw less racial tension at Cole Harbour than at other schools he's worked with on the tour. "Cole Harbour has a reputation and it's really struggling against that reputation." Says student Karen Morash, "You can't say the fight was good. It was an awful thing to happen. But people woke up and saw what a problem we had. Since then we've had human-rights conferences and black-history week and a lot of stuff has been discussed and it's getting better . . . because we're talking about it." Mr. MacNeil, whose two daughters attend his school, is angry at public attitudes. "People say to me, 'how do you go into that zoo everyday?' This is not a zoo. This is a good school, there are a lot of good things going on here." A healthy school spirit is reflected in provincial championships Cole Harbour has won recently in sports, chess and music, he says, as he hurries out of his office to catch the students' performances in the gym. Copyright Deborah Jones 1991 About this website: Text and photos by Deborah Jones except where otherwise noted. Please contact me for reprint rights. All material copyrighted ../About.htmlshapeimage_1_link_0
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