The Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach was forced to cancel a popular race-centered comedy show with the deliberately offensive title “N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk,” after members of the University community objected to its material, and particularly its use of racial slurs.
The show, which has been touring around college campuses for over a decade, was meant to debut at Cal State on Sept.29. The Carpenter’s long standing executive director, Michele Roberge, called the cancellation an “act of censorship” and resigned in protest.
“By censoring this show, we’re depriving students of the opportunity from hearing a different point of view about race relations and making up their own minds about what in the news every day, from Black Lives Matter to police brutality” she told OC Weekly.
N*gger Wetb*ck Ch*nk is a critically acclaimed play written by three men who were fed up with being typecast because of their skin color that engages race relations through provocative humor. Ever since it debuted as a student production at UCLA, the project has received broad support and a raft of positive reviews — praising it for taking the contemporary conversation around identity in American culture in a new and fresh direction.
Writing for the The Los Angeles Times in 2007, for instance, Charles McNulty noted that :“Yes, racial slurs and profanity can sometimes be good for you – especially when they’re deployed to make a point about the pervasiveness of prejudice and its denigrating unabridged dictionary.”
Through this production, Michelle Rosenberg explains, audiences are encouraged to take an honest look at the role that timeworn stereotypes and racial slurs play in their daily interactions. And by turning them into grotesque and absurd blabbermouths, it seeks to deflate the prejudice behind them.
“The show is targeted for university audiences and it has won awards for the work it has done in (promoting) positive race relations, which is something I think we need a little more of these days,” she had said prior to the cancellation.
But Cal State Long Beach officials didn’t seem to agree.
University spokesperson Michael Uhlenkamp said the decision was made based on the fact that some members of the campus community objected to the material, saying it lacked educational value:
“Members of the campus community [this year] voiced concerns that the performance wasn’t achieving the goal of constructing a dialogue about racial relations.”
But for one of the show’s co-star, Rafael Augustin, the cancellation is symptomatic of a wider trend to avoid confronting subjects that would make students and staff feel uncomfortable or aggrieved:
We cannot ignore… that this occurrence also stands as critical juncture in the path of free speech on the campus of a public educational institution in perhaps our most liberal state. The same act of censorship that today may seem to protect a community may be used next time as justification to silence a community in desperate need of a voice.
The National Coalition Against Censorship has pledged to sent a letter to the university to denounce their decision to cancel the show.
