One response to this title will inevitably be: 'Noone would ever dream of putting on a one-man show entitled "why I don't hate black people", and that will be very irritating and deserves some answer like: 'No, they wouldn't, but why pretend that there's a level playing-field - white people are in the ascendance so have to take a bit of flak.' On the other hand, how much flak can white people endlessly be expected to take? At the end of this show I felt that Lemn Sissay left no acceptable position for white people to inhabit - it was a matter of 'wilt thou forgive that sin where I begun', of white-skinnedness being some sort of original sin; a pretty racist view.
       Black, charismatic, attractive, early forties, Sissay gave us little vignettes and comments on his experiences, beginning with his birth in Wigan, when, in some unspecified way, the social services 'betrayed' his mother so that he was sent to a foster family. While he was growing up, every single person he saw was, like the three indented slabs on the stage, white. 'The vicar was white, the teacher was white, the postman was white...' Surprise, surprise - this was Wigan in the 1960s. A nightmare for a poor little boy who wasn't white, of course, but what were all these white people supposed to do?
       Of course the audience were meant to be embarrassed, or rather the white portion of it were; and Sissay was funny and astute in his capturing of the two polarised attitudes he encountered as he grew up - aggression or patronisation. Whenever he got on a bus, he was the only black, and encountered either blank stares, or, possibly, often when the bus was totally empty, some little old lady coming and sitting right beside him, just to show she was OK with his blackness. When he accompanied a white friend to a Spanish beach resort full of white Brits, he encountered either hostile looks or drunken gushings that 'we're all the same under the skin', or 'you're not a black man, you're a human being'.
       All this he unsurprisingly hated ('It was their fear of black people', he said, 'that made them want to help so much'), as he hated 'administration', 'group hugs' and discussions of racism and race relations. Maybe he also hated the white women in his audience who were managing to outlaugh their black boyfriends. All Europeans are racist, said Edward Said, but, if so, what is to be done? For Said and Sissay, there seems in fact no tenable position for white people to take - perhaps straightforward antagonism is preferable to the disguised antagonism apparently involved in any effort to make a non-white person feel at home or 'one of us'. Admittedly, Sissay didn't entirely follow the standard line that only white people are racist -- at one point he exclaimed that Asians were racist about blacks and vice versa, Somalians hated Ethiopians, and Ethiopians Somalians, etc, etc. Despite the title of his show, he himself did seem to hate white people, although actually some of them had treated him better than his own family, who by the sound of it had deserted him and never tried to find him. In the end a lot of his bitterness is probably due to the realisation that what has funded his poetry and performances is precisely the systems he excoriates, and a mentality not dissimilar to that of the ignorant but good-willed old ladies sitting next to him in buses.
Jane O'Grady