Hit Musical Featuring Cotton-Picking White People Singing Slave Songs Closes Amid Protests

[sheshe2]

The world’s biggest jazz festival was forced to end the run of one of its most popular shows after protesters objected to the musical that featured white people picking cotton while a white woman warbled organic, gluten-free, kale-wrapped negro spirituals. Ain’t that good news?

snip

Even though the Montreal Jazz Festival had sold more than 8,000 tickets, the festival closed the show on Wednesday after only two performances. Organizers said they were “shaken” by the intensity of the response and decided to lay their burdens down by the riverside and study whiteness no more.

“We would like to apologize to those who were hurt,” festival producers said in a statement. “It was not our intention at all.”

As a descendant of enslaved people, I offer the following response to the Montreal Jazz Festival’s apology:

If you weren’t aware that stealing that stealing the most painful part of an entire group of a people’s past, whitewashing it and then allowing the people who benefitted from the historical mass kidnapping, rape and genocide to double back and profit from that theft could possibly be a bad thing, then the audacity of whiteness must be the most insipidly evil thing that ever existed on the face of the earth.

Read More: https://thegrapevine.theroot.com/hit-musical-featuring-cotton-picking-white-people-singi-1827359045

Please, say this never happened. Talk about tone deaf. The gentrified version of American slavery as performed by white people of an abomination carried out by this nation. They pickin' cotton and singin'...'cause they happy. The gentrified version, performed in their pristine costumes and full make up perhaps they broke into a slight mist of perspiration under the hot stage lights for the five minutes it took to sing.

Slaves worked from sun up to sun down. This is what picking cotton looks like.

[heaven05]

1. that child's face!!!!!!!!!!

how evil slavery, racism and ignorance, willful or otherwise is. Both historical and present day. Tone deaf to have even considered this as appropriate. I am just amazed.

[sheshe2]

3. The cast was shocked, shocked I say at the outrage!!!!

an audience member even held up a sign that said: “Is there nothing y’all won’t steal? White culture is theft.”

I agree, heaven...

[Recursion]

2. The unbearable whiteness of being

I saw this headline in my Facebook and assumed it was the Onion.

[sheshe2]

4. Yep...

I had to follow a few links to check it out.

[Afromania]

5. ....................................

[Olafjoy]

6. Grotesque

Cotton is ready to pick when the boll bursts open revealing the white puff. The boll petals are hard and have needle sharp points on them. It is very difficult to grab the puff without getting stuck over and over again. In the unrelenting southern sun and humidity. Bugs biting you and getting in your
eyes and up your nose. Bent over all day. Torture.
Was this show written by the author of “Abu Ghraib
A musical Comedy”?

[Quayblue]

7. My maternal family picked cotton

as sharecroppers up until the early 70s. And before that, they were slaves. There are none of them alive now (who were born in the 1940s) except for one of my aunts.

I believe PTSD led to their early deaths, though they managed to migrate North.

There is nothing entertaining about cotton's legacy.

[Kind of Blue]

8. I guess they figured it was cool because they're not in blackface.

Wow! whiteness and theft does display a complete lack of creativity and sensitivity, shown at a jazz festival. The caucasity. It would have been interesting to me if they took the original SLĀV, as in the show's title, to highlight the music and genius that came out of enslaving Central, Eastern, Southeast Europeans for centuries and performed that somewhere else.

I'm glad protesting shut that mess down.

[sheshe2]

9. Wow!

Thanks for the link, Blue.

[Kind of Blue]

10. You're welcome. It's so good to see

all kinds of people working together to shut nonsense down.

[Best_man23]

11. All Night Forever

This is from the Ken Burns Civil War series, and its one of the most powerful segments in the series. It speaks to the unholy conditions slaves were forced to endure.

There is a recorded testimony from a former slave captured by the Federal Writer's Project during the Great Depression that starts around 3:25. That former slave's testimony and what he would do if he heard they were bringing slavery back debunks any "gentrified characterization" of what slavery in the United States was like.

[sheshe2]

12. All Night Forever.

Powerful.