Dustin Chinn:
Another #AngryAsians Playwright

2,288 words

The #AngryAsians ^[2] motif continually fascinates, especially given their relatively well-to-do economic position in our “white supremacist” society, and the proliferation of plays and other writings by them that villainize, ostracize, and “Other-ize” white people has become an identifiable trend. Snowflakes, or Rare White People can be added to this list, a supposed comedy by New York City-based playwright Dustin Chinn ^[3], which is currently being workshopped at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Chinn has a track record of churning out speculative comedies ^[4] with overt racial themes: there’s his previous plays Asian Women in Space (“It’s the 24th century and the United Earth Space Federation is looking for a few good Asian ladies. Will Nausicaa Lee and her fellow wayfarers be enough to stop humanity’s greatest and most perverted threat?”), and The Rise and Fall of the United States of Asian America (“After an earthquake levels San Francisco, a clandestine organization sends the Bay Area’s Asian Americans north of the Canadian border. When the newly minted refugee government declares independence, all stupidity breaks loose”).

In his advance review ^[5] of a production of Chinn’s Snowflakes, Chris Rohmann gleefully writes of the play’s clobber-you-over-the-head moralizing and heaps approbation on the play’s anti-white racism, which, if the races were in any way reversed, would certainly outrage the Woke Crowd, leading to loud protests, de-platforming demands, firings, and the like. Rohmann begins his piece with a scene from the play:

“What am I bid for this fine specimen of white manhood?”

The swaggering black auctioneer scans the audience of prospective buyers, who quickly bid the price up, until the white man on the auction block goes to the jubilant winner for a fat five-figure sum . . .

This table-turning riff on an antebellum slave auction was part of the UMass Theater Department’s season kick-off event earlier this month.

If there’s one thing to be said about this satirical (?) scene, it’s that it is more relevant, allegorically, than standard white liberal optimism. Enoch Powell, in his famous “Rivers of Blood ^[7]” speech, predicted that in due time, given the trajectories of mass immigration and the emergent shape of Political Correctness as a social force (which he himself had the pleasure of witnessing), “the black man will [someday] have the whip hand over the white man.” When it comes to the future of race relations in a white-minority United States, white liberals, on the other hand, hold an imagined, idealized, and often unexamined teleological idea: They believe –  explicitly, but more often implicitly – that we will then enter a transformative, qualitatively different, Kumbaya State of Being, where ethnic group loyalties are shed and all races finally “get along.” This is the same sort of mindset which actually expected the election of Barack Hussein Obama to be so cathartic and redemptive for the nation that we’d be entering a historical era of post-racial America ^[8]. That this utopia did not come to fruition during Obama’s presidency (and actually led to the reactive spawnings of the Tea Party movement, which peaked in 2010 or so, and the Alt Right, which peaked in 2016-2017) does a lot toward explaining the hysterical levels of anti-whiteness we’ve seen really accelerate among the Postmodern Left in the last couple of years.

The road to Hell, as we are wont to say, is paved with good intentions. The imaginative yearnings of white liberals, even those with the best of intentions, are an unfortunate delusion completely out of touch with human history. When whites do, in fact, become the minority in the United States, revenge (for imagined slights) will be exacted upon them by newly empowered people of color (POCs), and it will assume all sorts of latent and manifest forms.

One doesn’t have to look far to see what the rationale for such vengeance will be. It is right before us: generations of POC quasi-intellectuals serving up the latest bromides of postmodernism, neo-colonialism, gender studies, and other variants of Cultural Marxism. Simply put, white malevolence is the “root cause” of group differences between whites and POCs. Discussion of the compounded effects of poor choices, bad behavior, and cognitive misfortunes which befall non-white group X is – as we are all too well aware – taboo. In such a white-minority future, even the Last White Man Standing will continue to be blamed and held indirectly responsible for the continued relative failure of black and brown cultures. Even after the Last White Man’s throat is slit, and his race is no more, the “trauma” associated with his memory and past actions (however fancifully imagined) will then be positioned for blame and passed down through folktales and PhD theses in Departments of Wokeness Studies.

With Snowflakes, we have a play that actively fantasizes about such a future:

What’s noteworthy about this season is that, as theater professor Harley Erdman told me, “There are no canonical white male playwrights” in the mainstage lineup. In fact, three of the four plays are by and about people of color, and the fourth features a gender-fluid central character. In other words, this is not your granddad’s college theater.

Indeed.

The goal posts are shifting. Having proportional representation is no longer enough. True Diversity can only be reached when whites are themselves underrepresented, or essentially wiped away from the scene altogether. Again, if and when its proponents are ever pressed on it, such a strategy will no doubt be rationalized by appeals to alleged historical injustices and so forth. It will take the same form as contemporary appeals for slavery reparations, where future generations of whites – most of whose ancestors had absolutely no involvement with slavery whatsoever – are nonetheless to be taxed (and implicitly held as the beneficiaries of slavery) based on, presumably, sufficient levels of melanin in their skin.

Erdman said the department strives to be “conscientious about what’s taking place in the country and the world, serving our community with work that’s relevant, that reflects our ideals and aspirations.” The ability to even mount a season’s worth of shows with majority non-white casts is due in part to the department’s Multicultural Theater Certificate program, directed by Priscilla Page, which has attracted a lot of students of color as theater majors.

We are actually at a point in time in our nation’s history where having a majority non-white cast, in a country that is still currently majority white, is actively celebrated. The current demographic reality doesn’t matter. It is the Long Arc of History – you know, the one that Bends Towards Justice – that matters. It is the reality of imminent racial displacement, one that the Left is very much aware of (but that Conservatism, Inc. is afraid to discuss) that matters. The projected and imminent demographic displacement of whites is a clarion call among the Left, and with Snowflakes we have Left-wing agitprop making use of this racial displacement as a premise of the play:

It begins with a deliciously unsettling premise, building on the demographic projection that before midcentury a majority of the U.S. population will be people of color. Extrapolate that shift out a couple hundred years and, in the playwright’s imagining, Caucasians are almost extinct.

Hip, hip, hooray!

In this 23rd-century fantasy, humanity has evolved into a mixed-race multiculture and the country is governed by the Listen to Black Women Party, which has imposed “decades of sensible, boring, stable regulation and reform.”

At this point, the play is beginning to sound like an inversion of The Turner Diaries. It also represents another iteration of the burgeoning “shut up and listen” cultural niche animating much of the Left these days.

Remnants of the once-dominant white race are preserved on remote reservations and in Nueva New York, in the Museum of Natural History. There, in the Hall of Caucasian Peoples, two of them are exhibited as anthropological curiosities in a 1950s domestic habitat.

Similar dynamics already exist anytime a coastal elite journalist is forced to do a story on “middle America”: their reportage on whites in Flyover Country treat them like anthropological curiosities, relics of a dead past. And why, I wonder, would there be a Hall of Caucasian Peoples? Oughtn’t such a despicable Race be forgotten and memory-holed?

When the captive couple escape from the museum with the help of a white-obsessed curator, high levels of Caucasity are released on a public that hasn’t been subjected to it for generations. The show morphs into a madcap chase thriller, as the Caucasoids’ mere presence infects the outer world with microaggressions, unconscious entitlement, “irrational self-confidence” and cultural appropriation.

Where to begin? Unpacking that last paragraph could consume an entire dissertation. Notice, however, how the reviewer’s use of the phrase “high levels of Caucasity” is an acceptable sentiment in a review. It’s akin to how virtually every POC “comedian” has obligatory bits about “Ever notice how white people do _____?”

Snowflakes is a giddy, sassy, reverse-transgressive fun-house-mirror image of today’s society. The dark-skinned locals are both intrigued and fearful of the pale exotic fugitives, as officials from the Department of Fish, Wildlife and Ethnic Preservation try to recapture them and contain the toxicity levels.

Now, there’s a phrase I actually like: reverse-transgressive. The Dissident Right is reverse-transgressive. Race realism is reverse-transgressive. Believing that the West is unique, and came from a particular, narrow group of Western European ethnicities, is reverse-transgressive. Believing in scientific objectivity is reverse-transgressive, ad infinitum.

UMass MFA candidate Gabriel Harrell is directing the show. The play’s themes are timely and topical, he said, citing the white male privilege on display in the recent Supreme Court confirmation hearings. (In Chinn’s future utopia, most of the characters holding power are female.) “These are not issues that we can often laugh at. There’s something about the comedy of this show that I hope will enable conversation that it’s difficult to have in our day-to-day lives. In reversing the paradigm, the script allows you to laugh, and then hopefully to talk to the person who’s sitting next to you.”

From the sound of it, every check box on the PC Checklist has been checked. In Chinn’s “future utopia,” power is held by females. And I chuckle every time I hear someone from the Left (e.g., Eric Holder) talk about having a “conversation” about race, by which they mean a monologue involving them lecturing to you, Whitey.

After the season kick-off, I sat in on a rehearsal of Snowflakes. The cast was working through a scene in which the white couple crash a traditional Indian wedding, observed with horrified fascination, from a safe distance, by the two officials pursuing them. They freely partake of the henna tattoos and ethnic food, claiming “a real connection to what’s happening here – an authentic cultural experience.”

Even liberal white hipsters, it would seem, have no place in this future utopia. But think of what underlies this “comic” bit about “cultural appropriation”: We are in an age where there is both a denial that a uniquely white culture exists (or even really existed in a positive way), as well as a simultaneous zeal to pounce on and vilify any discernible iota of uniquely white cultural expression. So, with no real culture of their own to publicly extol, liberal whites and CivNat GOPE-types earnestly try to “experience” and appreciate The Other. While this was supposed to be virtuous behavior among good-thinking whites, it seems to have backfired, as they are now maligned, mocked, and ridiculed. Such are the hilarious foibles of cultural genocide.

It’s worth mentioning that Snowflakes has very specific ^[9] racial casting recommendations (strictures?):

Roles by Race: 1 middle eastern or arab american, 1 black or african american, 1 latinx, 1 native hawaiian and other pacific islander, 2 white

It doesn’t look like the UMass production has an Arab or Pacific Islander in the cast, though I’m not certain. Question: If their representation is lacking, does this mean the whole production is itself racist?

Rohmann’s interaction with the UMass production’s cast of Snowflakes – which from the accompanying photos, as well as the cast’s names, appears to have a high Wakandan ratio – is most telling:

During a break, I spoke with some of the cast members. I asked the actors of color what it’s like being the majority in a show, for a change.

“It’s really beautiful,” Sabine Jacques enthused. “It’s a beautiful feeling to be in the majority on this stage, because we’re not often represented and I want to show representation for young black women and girls.”

Taylor Mickens observed that while TV is getting “a little more open” for actors of color, positive roles are often given to light-skinned black women “and usually color blind. But in this show the roles are meant to be people of color because of the circumstances and the setting, so the fact that it’s majority people of color, and meant to be that way, is also breaking some boundaries.”

One of the token white actors displays all the requisite contrition, virtue-signaling, and Soy Boy Wokeness:

Nicholas Cummings plays one of the two white characters. I wondered what it’s like for him to be in the minority, for a change. “It’s been incredibly valuable to me, to just sit there and listen,” he said. “Everyone has heard the white guy’s story a million times, and to have an environment where other people can talk, and hearing everything they have to say, has really impacted me. I’m really grateful for that.”

Yes, “just sit there and listen,” White Boy. We don’t want to hear you anymore. That is what we want of you, and all we want of you, thank you very much.

Oh, and for you to continue to subsidize our existence.

Indefinitely.

You awful, racist monster.

The author writes at Logical Meme ^[11] and @Logicalmeme ^[12].