Having to Define Blackness

I’m a black actor. Here’s how inequality works when you’re not famous.
by Bear Bellinger on February 12, 2016

I walk into the theater; the director, his assistant, and an intern are seated behind a table. The music director is set up on my left to accompany me on piano. I say a pleasant hello, gather myself, check to make sure the music director knows my tempo, and began to sing:

"I'm a colored spade, a Negro, a black nigger..."

I'm auditioning for Hair, the groundbreaking rock musical on hippie culture, race, and sexuality during the late '60s. I'm asked to prepare Hud's song "Colored Spade," which is basically a list of every imaginable slur for black people. As I finish up, content with the line I had just walked between anger and pain, I look up at the four white faces staring back at me. The director stands up, smiling broadly, walks over to me, and says:

"Great, great job, Bear. I'd like for you to do it again. This time I want you to imagine if you were a black man and someone was saying all of these things to you."

I look down at my skin to reaffirm what I already know: Yup, I am still a black man. Here I am, yet again, the only black man in a sea of white faces, being asked by people with no reference point to have a "blacker" reaction, to respond more "authentically." I sang the song again. I won the role.

Another day in the life of a blacktor.

I have been a working actor in the Chicagoland area for seven years now. That includes time auditioning for, and performing in, anything from musicals to plays to variety shows to TV to movies. The one common denominator, in all this time, is that I am a black man constantly having to conform my blackness to what white people, mainly men, on the other side of the table believe to be true. These men have no ill intent in their ideas about or depictions of blackness; they also have no lived experience. And mine, as the only actual black person in the room, is almost never valued or understood.

http://www.vox.com/2016/2/12/10958356/working-black-actor