Last week I wrote about a racial incident that occurred with Southwest Airlines when my family was on our way to a Royal Caribbean cruise vacation. Excited to be passed the craziness, we boarded the boat and checked out the itinerary for the week. The cruise had a lot to pick from, including a couple of live shows. My sister and I read the description of one called “Blue Planet.” It was said to be an acrobatics show with singing and choreography. Halfway through we started to realize that it was more so interpretive dancing set against the backdrop of popular, early 2000s music, with a couple of more recent songs.
The show used a lot of different props, and when it came to one particular scene, a blue, filmy sheet was drawn across the width of the stage. The main singer, a white, blonde haired woman dressed in all blue, started a slow and familiar hum. Now normally, I wouldn’t find it important to include someone’s race in a story — usually, the content doesn’t call for it, but this time it does.
As the hum progressed into a recognizable tune, my sister and I’s heads immediately whipped toward each other as we listened in horror as the singer began her Pop rendition of “Wade in the Water.”
Yes. This happened. And it gets worse.
A group of dancers appeared behind the transparent, blue sheet. They were all white dancers except for the two racially ambiguous performers. As the scene unfortunately progressed, the dancers’ movements became more erratic, with gestures including the shaking of the arms and hands overhead. To simulate what? Drowning. The sheet rose higher and higher throughout the performance, until it was taller than the dancers who were supposedly drowning behind it. And then, it a somewhat jerky conclusion, the dance ended and the sequence of movements flowed into a new scene.
Both of our mouths hung wide open, and I looked around to see what I thought would be a lot of “What the hell did I just see?” faces. But the rest of the predominately white crowd continued to enjoy the catchy music and eye-seeking movements on stage. I could not see one face that was filled with as much confusion as I felt, or a face with lips that were weighed down at the corners by history and the on-coming acceptance of constant disappointment.
In the antebellum south, slaves had to use songs to disguise their plans for escape and used the lyrics as a coy set of instructions. “Wade in the Water” was used by many who helped free slaves, including Harriet Tubman, and the lyrics warn escaping slaves, telling them to diverge from the trail and wait in the water in order to keep dogs from sniffing out their trail. According to Scholastic, over 100,000 slaves escaped using methods like this on the underground railroad between years 1800 through 1865 alone. These slaves escaped with little more than what they could carry on their back and a few lyrics they heard in the fields as comfort. They feared their masters, any white person, any Stockholm-syndrome-having Black person, dogs, guns, lynchings, death, starvation, dehydration, and simply getting lost in the woods. Everything was against them, and still these brave slaves risked everything for their fundamental right to freedom.
And Royal Caribbean turned that into entertainment.
People clapped when the scene was over, congratulating the dancers for having rightfully entertained them — and there was my second issue. The first was that someone had the insensitive idea to include such a heavy song in a performance where white people mimicked their version of history and pretended to drown. Somehow the pitch for this song to be included was let through and deemed as appropriate for Family Fun Night. There was also the fact that people were clapping! Here they were, white people smiling, pointing and clapping at a truth my people died for. Even so many years after slavery, white people were still using our eternal struggle as entertainment — a good time. Something to keep their interest for a couple minutes before it delved back into the unmemorable corners of their minds.
And no one cared.
And that seems to be the theme of everything. Black people and Black history are trending; they’re hot or they’re the topic to go to in white people’s eyes. So, they capitalize of off us without any shame or hesitation, sometimes not even realizing the weight of what they’ve done or continue to do.
