Deedee Our subject today is the Black struggle in America –

Various excited comments fly around the class.

– as reflected in popular culture.

Fifteen-year-old Emmett Till – a boy living in Chicago in the 1950s. One day, he went to visit his relatives who lived in a small town in Mississippi. On the High Street, he saw a young white woman –

Someone in class lets out a wolf whistle.

Stop that! He did it for a dare. That night, the woman’s husband and brother paid him a visit. They took him to a warehouse, broke his wrists and ankles, gouged out his left eye and shot him through the head. Then, they tied his neck to a seventy-pound fan used for winnowing cotton and dumped the body in a nearby river – where it was found by fishermen three days later. This is what Emmett Till looked like after his trip to the South.

Emmett Till’s mother wanted the whole world to see what had been done to her baby. So she insisted on an open coffin at his funeral.

Tahira How did the whites react?

Deedee Many accused her of being eager for publicity –

Tahira That’s blaspheming, right?

Deedee Only in the sense that it blasphemed the reality of what happened to her son.

Tahira So the blasphemers were racists?

Deedee You could say that.

I want you to focus on the extraordinary creativity that emerged from America by artists questioning segregation.

Shahid How’s the music of Prince relate to the Black struggles, miss?

Tahira Prince? He’s a total dushman!

Hat Yeah – he ain’t apna.

Deedee Good question, Shahid. We’ll make that the assignment for next week – how Black musicians responded to racism.

Tahira Why you shoving us always to music and them fripperies – what about the Nation of Islam?

Deedee Let’s have an essay from you on Malcolm X and how the Nation of Islam helped in the Black struggles, Tahira – when you can get your head out of Khalil Gibran. The rest, concentrate on Black musicians. On my desk by next week. And as the mathematicians say, go forth and multiply.

Hat (emulating a move of Michael Jackson’s) Thriller! I’m bad!

Deedee Why do you like Prince?

Shahid Well, the sound.

Deedee Anything else?

Shahid He’s black.

Deedee And half white, half man, half woman –

Shahid Half size –

Deedee Feminist –

Shahid But macho too.

Deedee He can play soul and funk –

Shahid And rock and rap.

Deedee How are you coping?

Shahid Never been so alone before. But I’ve run into people who excite me. Your lectures fire me up to spend the time reading and writing.

Deedee You’re a good student.

Shahid (diffident) Could you – have a look at something I’ve written? About a friend?

Deedee (offhand) How sad! (Beat.) Some of my other students are coming by later to eat and talk – why don’t you join us? You can pore through my Prince videos.

Shahid I’d like that. Thank you.

Deedee Have you read this?

Shahid (taking it) Oh wow! Just the writer I’ve been talking about with my friends! Thanks. 

Riaz Communism has been a good idea to bring into the world, Dr Brownlow. But its repressive championing of atheism goes against fundamental human impulses, don’t you think?

Chad Right. Atheism only a tiny minority thing. Like transvestism.

Brownlow Y-y-you are confusing the p-p-practice with the ideal. That’s like equating the Ch-Ch-Church with the Bible.

Riaz The idea can only be as good as the practice. You have to admit Communism everywhere has failed to wipe out the base human disease of racism. Without God people think they can sin with impunity. There is no morality.

Chad Only extremity, ingratitude, hard-heartedness, like Thatcherism.

Riaz Capitalism in a nutshell, will you agree, Dr Brownlow?

Brownlow Oh, wh-wh-wholeheartedly! Her destruction of the working classes is one of the crimes of the century.

Chad They been saying God dead. But it being the other way round. Without the creator no one knows where they are or what they doing.

Riaz Allah-u-Akbar!

Deedee leaves.

All (except Shahid) Allah-u-Akbar!

Riaz We should pray.

Shahid Here?

Chad Allah’s command overtop all others, brother.

Riaz Will you join us, Dr Brownlow?

Brownlow (to Riaz) It w-w-would be an honour. I have papers to mark. This e-e-evening? If you w-w-would lead me?

Riaz Of course, of course.

Brownlow leaves.

Shahid Who is Dr Brownlow?

Hat Teaches history here. A couple of decades back he was at the Cambridge University –

Chad The top student of his year.

Hat Yeah, I’m telling you. He come from the upper middle classes. He could have done any fine thing. They wanted him at Harvard. Or was it Yale, Chad?

Chad He refused them places down.

Hat Yeah, he told them to get lost. He hated them all, his own class, his parents – everything. He come to this college to help us, the underprivileged niggers and wogs and margin people. He’s not a bad guy – for a Marxist-Communist –

Chad Leninist –

Tahira Trotskyist –

Hat Yeah, a Marxist-Communist-Leninist-Trotskyist type. He always strong on anti-racism. Isn’t that right, brother Riaz?

Riaz Dr Brownlow has a good heart.

Chad Problem is –

Hat (to Shahid) Yeah, listen – problem is – he been developing this st-st-st-stutter.

Shahid It’s a new thing then, is it?

Hat Yeah, it come on since the Communist states of Eastern Europe began collapsing. As each one goes over he get another syllable on his impediment, you know. In a lecture, it took him twenty minutes to get the first word out. He was going h-h-h-he-he … we didn’t know if he was trying to say Helsinki, hear this, help, or what.

Shahid What was it?

Hat Hello.

Chad By the time Cuba goes he won’t even manage that, I reckon.

Tahira You met his wife – Deedee Osgood.

Shahid She’s his wife?

Chad She his wife.

Tahira Keep away from her.

Shahid Why?

Tahira Riaz has evidence that her family are nudists.

Beat, as the others consider the comment.

And she always watching Top of the Pops.

Shahid Really?

Chad Without God-consciousness you can get away with everything. And when that happens you’re lost. Now I know God is watching me. With him seeing every single damn thing, I have to be pretty careful about what I’m up to.

Shahid Like living in a greenhouse?

Riaz Everything you do and think is witnessed. Time to pray.

Chad Oi – this here our multicultural democratic right, so fuck off!