By Steve Sailer
10/19/2020
From a New York Times theater review:
âCarolyn Bryantâ Review: Reliving a Lie That Never Goes Away
This stylized, two-character play finds the woman whose false accusation led to the lynching of Emmett Till bound to him, and to racist myths, forever.
By Laura Collins-Hughes
Oct. 13, 2020The Carolyn Bryant Project NYT Criticâs Pick
Itâs a question loaded with pain, but Emmett speaks it quietly, like a person so soul-weary that heâs partially numb.
âDo you know how many come after me?â he asks.
Emmett is Emmett Till, the Black boy barbarically murdered by a pair of white Southern thugs the summer he was 14, down from Chicago to visit family in small-town Mississippi.
âDo you know how many come after me?â he asks again.
In Nataki Garrett and Andrea LeBlancâs wound-lancing theater piece âThe Carolyn Bryant Project,â repetition is a means of outlining an ugly pattern â unfounded white aggression, needless Black death, the public tarnishing of the victim.
Repetition is an important element of the liturgical urge.
Now, to me, it seems funny that many people donât get the joke about the endless repetitions of the 65-year-old Emmett Till Story in The New York Times (ET has been mentioned six times so far in October in the NYT). But to a lot of people, the infinite redundancy isnât funny, itâs sacred. Would the Good People have wasted all that time recounting over and over and over an increasingly ancient and irrelevant story if it werenât of crucial importance to helping us understand America in 2020? Of course not.