The Comedy of Errors
The Acting Company
By Joan Starkey assistant
Dramaturgy Report
Black American Politics and Culture of the 1980s
dramaturg
Introduction
In compiling this research, I find that the prominent theme of the Black American 1980s is a harrowing tug-of-war between two extremes. Black culture thrived with an ever-increasing presence in entertainment and art, while the wage gap between Black and white Americans increased. Black politicians were elected to office at an unprecedented rate, while lower-class communities continued to rely on themselves for support. President Ronald Reagan showed reverence for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while doubling down on President Nixon’s devastating War on Drugs initiative. Legislation both advanced and did irrevocable harm to Black civil rights. Like The Comedy of Errors, the story of Black history in the 1980s is deceptive and dual in nature; bursting with both shame and pride.
This report begins with a compilation of (admittedly lengthy) excerpts from various voices of Black scholarship that identify the major, defining topics of the Black 1980s chronologically. Secondly, I include a consolidated timeline highlighting individual achievements, events, and legislation of the period. While this is by no means a thoroughly exhaustive dive into Black history, I hope it will provide key historical touchpoints and resources for further exploration that will strengthen the vision and context for this production of The Comedy of Errors.
PART I: Voices of Black Scholars
In my key source “Roundtable: Defining the Black 1980s,” editors of The Journal of African American History ask scholars about the parameters that define the decade. To begin with an early topic from 1976, N. D. B. Connolly writes about the significant Supreme Court case Washington v. Davis:
One might consider Davis the anti-Brown decision. Under its ruling, back came [White Americans’] ‘hearts and minds.’ Defendants now had to evidence somehow the bigotry left unspoken by individuals and institutions accused of committing racist acts or crafting racist policy. In 1974, the standard of ‘intent’ had already helped defang school busing guidelines (Milliken v. Bradley). With Davis, intent became the national standard on whether one could rule against racism in a variety of arenas. Within a year, ‘discriminatory intent’ was being applied to questions of racist zoning in real estate. Soon came court decisions defending racism in voting (Mobile v. Bolden, 1980) and racism in the application of the death penalty (McKlesky v. Kemp, 1987). Add to these rulings the decision that came down only two years after Davis, Bakke v. the Regents of the University of California (1978). This further gutted antidiscrimination law, making affirmative action in hiring practices and admissions elective rather than required. In tandem, Bakke stalled certain institutional paths to racial progress, and Davis ensured the rolling back of previous breakthroughs, including the Civil Rights, Voting Rights, and Fair Housing Acts.
With the recent rollback of affirmative action for university admissions, the phrase “discriminatory intent” from Washington v. Davis sounds all too familiar. This decision from the late 1970s failed to recognize the discriminatory intent built into policies themselves and left Black America without strong government support.
Thus, Black folks continued turning to each other for that support. However, the devastation and moral panic of the HIV/AIDS crisis showed the limits of such social support. Jafari Allen, who identifies “HIV/AIDS as a constitutive center of the long Black 1980s,” writes:
As the 1980s dawned, the police state codified as the welfare state was systematically diminished. Enter AIDS, the first published reports of which appeared in 1981 (although scientists have learned that the virus had been around for at least ten years). Largely ignored at first, by the mid-1980s, Black activists (many of whom were infected or affected by HIV/AIDS), had become among the leading experts on education and prevention without the support of Black ‘community’ institutions. Joseph Beam parsed the political position of Black gay people—and therefore at that time also the discussion of AIDS as anathema to ‘the Black press, the Black church, Black academicians, the Black literati, and the Black left.’
This “unmasking of the previously stable notion of political cohesion within ‘the Black community’” reminds me that intersectional thought, through which we think about the intricate layers of Black women and Black queer identities today, would not be introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw until 1989. Thus, issues of misogynoir and queerphobia remained rampant in Black culture and politics in complicated ways.
“AIDS & Minorities in Philadelphia: A Crisis Ignored.” Bebashi, https://www.bebashi.org/about-bebashi-2/
“GMAD Calendar November 1989.” Rodney Christopher Papers, The Center, https://gaycenter.org/archivecollection/rodney-christopher-papers/
It is with these foundations of inconsistent government and community support that I turn to one of the first major events of the Black 1980s. Elizabeth Hinton writes:
The Black 1980s… begin when President Jimmy Carter visits Miami three weeks after the gruesome rebellion in May 1980. The violence in the ‘Magic City’ was sparked by the acquittal by an all-White jury of four police officers, some of whom confessed to savagely beating thirty-three-year-old Black insurance executive Arthur McDuffie to death. When Carter met with local officials and Black leaders at the James E. Scott Community Center in the Liberty Square housing project, he informed them that the federal government was not going to provide any relief to the people or help in rebuilding the community. Black Liberty City residents proceeded to throw rocks and bottles at Carter’s limousine as it pulled away. Black people had mobilized to elect Jimmy Carter in 1976; without the Black vote, he likely could not have carried the presidency. Carter’s demonstrated indifference to the plight of Black Miamians signaled a turn in national Democratic politics away from even a rhetorical commitment to social welfare, all while continuing to take Black voters for granted.
With fifteen deaths, the Miami riot became “the worst in the nation since Detroit in 1967” (according to the Black Past Timeline —more from that later). The story of this riot is one we see over and over again in American history. Sparked by police brutality, protesters move to the streets to demand justice and are punished, their pleas unanswered. Just as the wounds dealt by police brutality haunt all of American history, Black folks of the 1980s see no exception. “Justice for McDuffie.” Zinn Education Project, https://www.zinnedproject.org /news/tdih/miami-riots-begin/
The 1980s saw a significant rise in the election of Black government officials– namely, men. N. D. B. Connolly writes:
Masculinist representation of leadership proved especially prominent in the electoral arena. The ascension of big city mayors such as Harold Washington of Chicago (1983), Wilson Goode of Philadelphia (1984), and David Dinkins of New York City (1990) belonged to the same political energy swirling around the respective never- and not-yet- presidents Jesse Jackson (1984, 1988) and Nelson Mandela (released in 1990 and president of South Africa by 1994). Elections promised, at minimum, political brokering and Black elite visibility. For some, that seemed ample reward for the shift ‘from protest to politics.’
Did this shift change the trend of tragedies unanswered? In the case of Atlanta mothers in 1981, the answer is no. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes:
The mysterious murders of Black children in Atlanta, known as the ‘City Too Busy to Hate,’ began in July 1979. By June 1981, twenty-nine young people, mostly children eighteen and younger, disappeared and were later found to have been murdered… The concentrated Black political power not only could not stop the murder of these Black youngsters; it was also reluctant to fully embrace the kind of investigation necessary to assuage the fears and concerns of Black parents. In fact, the brutal disappearance of Black children helped to illuminate the widening class chasms, not only in Black Atlanta, but in all of Black America… ‘It’s not a matter of race, it’s a matter of class.’... There was also the perception that the deaths of poor and working-class Black children were symptomatic of a growing underclass that would require the kinds of political and economic interventions that neither Black nor White elites were interested in investing in.
The Atlanta case illustrates the most crucial factor of the Black 1980s: class divide. A Black elite was rising, and they did not take lower-class communities with them. For numerical data on this growing divide, I turn to a Joe Feagin article from 1986:
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities ‘Falling Behind’ report identifies very clearly what that semislavery system means for blacks today. The economic effects of persisting institutionalized discrimination are evident. The report documents the point that in terms of real disposable income all categories of black families, from the poor to the affluent, have lost ground since 1980, while 60% of the white population has made significant income gains. Thus the hoary black-white income gap has actually grown during the Reagan years. Both Urban Institute data and Census Bureau data support the conclusion of an increasing black-white income gap. The report also documents the high unemployment and poverty problems of blacks today. It notes that 36% of all black Americans, and nearly half of all black children, fell below the official government poverty line in 1983. And the extent of black poverty has worsened since 1980. In 1984, the black unemployment rate was 2.5 times that for whites, a ratio up significantly from 1980. The total black unemployment rate was still 16% in 1984. Within the worst-hit group of U.S. workers, the long-term unemployed, nearly one-third are black. These data show there has been a significant deterioration in economic conditions since 1980.
Why did this economic deterioration occur, and how did it coincide with similar social/ideological change? We must examine the Ronald Reagan administration.
“Ronald Reagan Campaign Button.” The University of Chicago Press, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1 086/725827
On Reagan’s impact, Elizabeth Hinton writes:
During the Black 1980s, the carceral state became the most thoroughly implemented social program in low-income communities. In many ways, this continued the long post–Civil Rights era trend toward mass criminalization and welfare retrenchment. But the Reagan administration accelerated this tendency, kicking a half million Americans off the welfare rolls, depriving one million people of their food stamp benefits, and removing nearly three million previously eligible children from school lunch programs. It even proposed classifying ketchup as a vegetable for school lunch programs, and policymakers wasted billions on a ‘Star Wars’ space-based system to intercept enemy missiles that didn’t work. Questions policymakers and officials had debated through the 1970s about whether drug abuse should be criminalized and about whether homelessness, mental illness, and disability should be treated by social workers or by the police ultimately came under the punitive arm of the state. Meanwhile, The Cosby Show’s depiction of an uppermiddle-class Black family had enormous crossover success among White audiences and further promoted prevailing discourses of cultural pathology and ‘personal responsibility.’
More on The Cosby Show later; this excerpt touches on the cultural ideology of Reaganomics, which promoted individual strife over structural support. This created a blame-based attitude towards the lower class which the materialist focus of the 80s further compounded. Bill Fletcher Jr. writes:
Reaganism ushered in a full-blown attack on the notion of the ‘collective’ and the ‘common good.’ This even infected progressive African American communities. Increased attention on the development of nonprofit organizations as the principal instrument for bringing about change: entrepreneurialism rather than politics (or even economic democracy) as the root, that is, a version of Booker T. Washington’s thought. We also saw an increased emphasis on individual political actors rather than the central importance of the need to build organizations and collective action.
Moving from the political to the socio-cultural, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor leaves us with provocative questions about the intersections of Black culture and Black politics:
Over the course of the long Black eighties, there is the highest Black unemployment ever experienced in the United States, the advent of the War on Drugs, and the unleashing of unprecedented levels of violence in working-class African American communities. How do we situate these simultaneous events: rebirth in America alongside Black poverty, deprivation, and the reemergence of discourses of Black cultural deficits; the popularization of punishment realized through the expansion of prisons and policing; and policy-oriented recrimination centered around retrenchment of the welfare state? How do we understand the apparent conflict between the country’s most popular figures, including Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, and Michael Jackson, and the economic and social unraveling of working-class and poor African American lives through the pursuit of punitive public policies and more general efforts to shrink the role of government in mitigating the effects of poverty and inequality? How did the formal concessions to colorblindness help to facilitate the efforts of the federal government to reinvent itself militarily after the failure of the United States in Vietnam? How did the formal resolution of the ‘race’ question in US society create a new day, or ‘morning,’ in US society given the historic role in the twentieth century of racial oppression undermining the professed noble intentions of US military intervention? What role did the new Black political class play in articulating or narrating the continued hardship of African Americans even in a new era of colorblindness?”
How do these questions about welfare, policy, policing, and hardship relate to our vision for The Comedy of Errors?
In my introduction, I identified dissonance between two extremes as a central theme of the Black 1980s. This is exemplified in the story of Jacqueline Smith, told by N. D. B. Connolly:
The Black 1980s makes me think, for instance, of Jacqueline Smith. In 1988, Smith, a Black woman, was evicted from her home of eleven years in Memphis, Tennessee. She lived in the Lorraine Motel, room 303. Three doors down and two decades earlier, on the balcony of room 306, Martin Luther King Jr., had been shot and killed.11 Her eviction happened because the Lorraine was slated to become an $8.8 million civil rights museum. Smith, apparently, lived in the way of history. In a sense she still does. As of this writing, Jacqueline Smith still can be found keeping a vigil across the street from the old Lorraine Motel, protesting her eviction and the attendant gentrification happening today in the shadow of what is now the National Civil Rights Museum.
“Jacqueline Smith outside the Lorraine Motel.” BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-uscanada-43562269
“Jacqueline Smith was evicted from the Lorraine Motel, along with her possessions.” BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43562269
“Jacqueline Smith's signs change but her position does not.” BBC, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-uscanada-43562269
While Black political disenfranchisement remained steady, Black cultural viewership and advertisement skyrocketed. Elizabeth Hinton writes:
In the 1980s images of African Americans were produced and marketed to the world on a scale never before witnessed in United States history. Multinational corporations created images of African Americans as cultural icons while at the same time reproducing narratives of Black pathology. The 1980s are the decade when Black entertainers and athletes Black celebrities explode as dominant, powerful, global figures and become objects of mass consumption. In 1984, Michael Jackson released Thriller and Michael Jordan started playing for the Chicago Bulls, and that changed everything. Thriller remains the best-selling album of all time, and Jordan is the most famous athlete to ever live. The Air Jordan ‘Jumpman’ logo (produced in 1988) has been reproduced on billions of separate articles of clothing that can be seen in all corners of the world. The Cosby Show also premiered in 1984, with enormous crossover success among White audiences, which (re)opened the door for Black shows on prime-time network TV. At the same time, however, the depiction of families like the Huxtables and the rising popularity of Black figures promoted discourses of ‘personal responsibility’ then being peddled by the Reagan administration. If these famous African Americans could make it in American society through talent and hard work, why couldn’t the millions of African Americans who were unemployed or poor? And popular TV shows like America’s Most Wanted (premiered in 1988) and Cops (premiered in 1989) reinforced this idea of Black criminality and pathology.
Will we reference these commercial, cultural, and artistic touchpoints in The Comedy of Errors? How do these interact with political and ideological themes of criminality, which are present in our plot?
PART II: Timeline
To accompany the sociopolitical analysis provided above, this timeline of compiled excerpts is from the Black Past Timeline. Visit their website here for the full timeline.
1978
On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court in Regents of the University of California Regents v. Bakke narrowly uphold affirmative action as a legal strategy for addressing past discrimination.
Max Robinson becomes the first black network anchor when he begins broadcasting for ABC-TV News from Chicago.
1979
The Sugar Hill Gang records "Rappers Delight" in Harlem.
1980
In January Willie Lewis Brown, Jr. becomes the first African American Speaker in a state legislature when he is selected for the post in the California Assembly. Brown holds the Speakership until 1995 when he is elected Mayor of San Francisco.
On May 17-18 rioting breaks out in Liberty City, Florida (near Miami) after police officers are acquitted for killing an unarmed black man. The riot which generates 15 deaths is the worst in the nation since Detroit in 1967.
Robert L. Johnson begins operation of Black Entertainment Television (BET) out of Washington, D.C.
1982
The struggle of Rev. Ben Chavis and his followers to block a toxic waste dump in Warren County, North Carolina launches a national campaign against environmental racism.
Michael Jackson's album, Thriller, is released. It will eventually sell 45 million copies worldwide, becoming the best selling album in music history.
1983
On April 12, Harold Washington is elected the first black mayor of Chicago.
On August 30, Guion (Guy) S. Bluford, Jr., a crew member on the Challenger,becomes the first African American astronaut to make a space flight.
On November 2, President Ronald Reagan signs a bill establishing January 20 as a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Alice Walker's The Color Purple wins the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
1984
Rev. Jesse Jackson wins approximately one fourth of the votes cast in the Democratic primaries and caucuses and about one eighth of the convention delegates in a losing bid for the Democratic presidential nomination.
In September The Cosby Show starring Bill Cosby makes its television debut. The show runs for eight seasons and will become the most successful series in television history featuring a mostly African American cast.
Russell Simmons forms Def Jam Records in Harlem.
1985
In May, Philadelphia's African American mayor, Wilson Goode, orders the Philadelphia police to bomb the headquarters of MOVE, a local black nationalist organization. The bombing leaves 11 people dead and 250 homeless.
Gwendolyn Brooks of Chicago is named U.S. Poet-Laureate. She is the first African American to hold that honor.
1986
Spike Lee releases his first feature film, She's Gotta Have It, initiating a new wave of interest in black films and African American filmmakers.
1987
August Wilson's play, Fences, wins a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award.
Aretha Franklin becomes the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio.
1988
In his second try for the Democratic Presidential nomination Jesse L. Jackson receives 1,218 delegate votes at the Democratic National Convention on July 20. The number needed for the nomination, which goes to Michael Dukakis, was 2,082.
In September, Temple University offers the first Ph.D. in African American Studies.
1989
On February 7, Ronald H. Brown is elected chair of the Democratic National Committee, becoming the first African American to head one of the two major political parties.
1990
August Wilson wins a Pulitzer Prize for the play The Piano Lesson.
1991
On March 3, Los Angeles police use force to arrest Rodney King after a San Fernando Valley traffic stop. The beating of King is captured on videotape and broadcast widely prompting an investigation and subsequent trial of three officers.
On October 23, Federal Judge Clarence Thomas, nominated by President George H.W. Bush, is confirmed by the U.S. Senate and takes his seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Julie Dash releases Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film by an African American woman.
1992
On April 29, a Simi Valley, California jury acquits the three officers accused of beating Rodney King. The verdict triggers a three day uprising in Los Angeles called the Rodney King Riot that results in over 50 people killed, over 2,000 injured and 8,000 injured.
On November 3, Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois becomes the first African American woman elected to the United States Senate.
1993
On October 7, Toni Morrison becomes the first black American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. The work honored is her novel, Beloved.