Germans And Slavery
10/24/2012
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In Steve Sailer's Blackface in Berlin item below, playwright Bruce Norris  refused to allow his play Clybourne Park to be licensed to German theater company which doesn't have any black actors, and proposed to have the part played by a white actor in makeup.

Norris claims in a letter to the Dramatists Guild that

German actors of African descent are routinely passed over for roles explicitly designated for them in some of the largest theatres in the country. This is weakly defended as either a director’s prerogative or a matter of “artistic choice” – and yet, when questioned, no one could offer me an equivalent example of a white German actor having lost a role to a black actor in whiteface.

The total number of blacks in Germany is estimated at 500,000, which is 0.00625 of the population. That makes it statistically unlikely to find large amounts of acting talent out of that population.

And for once, this affirmative action thing is based literally on the color of the actor's skin.

Norris doesn't seem to realize that he is implicitly blaming the Germans for not having held African slaves. The Germans have behaved badly in many ways over the years (before Nazism there was Prussianism, et cetera) but this one they're not guilty of. There's a reason Germany has a very small black population, and that's because, unlike America and the British West Indies, it didn't import slaves during the 19th century.

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