In our efforts to expand the notion of transforming the conversation about race and skin color, Company Cypher has taken to the streets, literally and personally. Our community engagement project consists of spending time in a public space in NYC with a sign stating a question to provoke a unique exchange of personal stories.

This account occurred at the corner of 152^nd street and Amsterdam Avenue.

It was a good day to gather stories. Under the shade of a playground tree leaning over the fence I enjoyed what had become an extremely hot sunny day. I grew up here in Harlem, but I certainly don’t remember the sun being as intense when I was a kid. It had always been humid and hot this time of year, but the intensity of the sun seemed different. I sat under a handcrafted sign, made out of construction paper and decorated with markers. The prompt read “Have You Ever Been Treated Differently For The Color Of Your Skin? Tell Me Your Story.” I wrote it up the night before with a sharpie while sitting on my stoop. I was hanging out with my husband and a friend who lived nearby. He had rode by on his bike, parked it on the sidewalk and sat with us as we drank from a bottle of wine with a few glasses. It was fun and I was giddy about it then, the night before.  Now taped to the gate behind me, my giddiness had turned to nerves. Watching people walk by, scan the sign as they read it and then glance back at me as they walked on with a “look”, I began to doubt not only my chances of getting someone to sit down and talk to me but also my motivation. My intention, ultimately, was peace on the planet. Yet my sign seemed to have the potential to engender negative feedback. At least that was the feeling I had sitting there. The “look” people were giving me seemed to say “oh no, I’m not going there” or “mm mm, not me” or flat out “you’re crazy”. Then finally a man walked by and read the words behind me. The look I got seemed to say at first, “are you really asking that?”, but then I distinctly saw, “game on”, and I went for it.

            “Do you have a story sir?”

            “About a million.”

            “Well, can you tell me just one? I’d love to hear it.”

The “story” was pretty simple and definitely not as detailed as I was hoping for. He said he went to Presbyterian Hospital, and a nurse told him “why don’t you just go where you belong”. Apparently a doctor overheard the nurse say that and apologized to him.

            “What did she mean by that?”

            “That I should go to Harlem Hospital”.

Hmmm. Well, that was kind of interesting. It seemed like a crazy assumption, but somehow I felt strongly that I had to trust his experience. As it turned out, Bother Melvin had indeed a million stories and an incredible amount of experience. It seemed he had lived multiple lifetimes within his one. He sat with me for the next 2 hours after that first story and spoke about everything under the sun that was his life, moving from topic to topic, era to era of his 68 years. He left home when he was 13, which was also when he started using Heroine. He was part of something he called “the Syndicate”, which seemed to be a rather organized drug gang. He turned 21 in prison, and became a Muslim, joining the Nation of Islam during the reign of the Honorable Elijah Mohammed. Somewhere in there he became a grass roots activist, leading a “street academy” and through his fire and charisma got IBM to donate land upstate for him to have a summer camp location and take the kids out of Harlem for the summer. Then of course was the time he was met by two strange men while swimming in the out door pool at 145^th street who gave him a book that changed his life. These men were members of some ancient secret society. They told him his destiny and informed him that all he needed to be was a force in the world with a “burning desire”. He was a photographer, a restaurant owner and one of the real life characters from Super Fly. My intention for parking myself on the corner of 152^nd street and Amsterdam was to hear from the people in my neighborhood, to get to know my neighborhood. What I got was a deep history of a man, a life, and the vision of a Harlem I never knew. I was given a glimpse into the 60’s era of grassroots movements at it’s height, the 80’s crack epidemic what it is today to be a 68 year old man living in 2012 and wondering where is the next generation of “voices”, wondering who are the next leaders? We’re both looking for answers to that.

After a recent performance of In The Cypher I was speaking to a friend about how to create solutions to structural racism in our great country. She mentioned the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment test, a questionnaire designed to measure psychological preferences in how people perceive the world and make decisions. How, you may ask yourself does a test whose main intention is to make inferences regarding job placement relate to structural racism? Well, this conversation with my friend occurred after a particularly interesting yet intense post show talk-back, where once again 75% of our audience remained to continue a discussion inspired by the performance. Although everyone was wonderfully respectful of other people’s opinions, there was a lot of passionate disagreement on several matters. Looking back, I believe one of the reasons for that was because of a general lack of agreement about the existence of structural racism in this country and what it is exactly. An interesting thing that my friend related to me about the Myers-Briggs test is that the US population’s average score is about 50/50 on three out of four continuums (extravert-introvert, judging-perceiving, thinking-feeling), but they are 75/25 on the sensing-intuitive continuum. Sensing pertains to seeing the trees while Intuitive concerns seeing the forest. Therefore most Americans (75%) sense the trees rather than Intuit the forest. My friend had a theory about this imbalance, which I found particularly compelling. She surmised, because most people lean more towards S (seeing) than N (intuitive) in the Myers-Briggs, this indicates that they are more comfortable or more easily able to see the components of a system than to see the whole system – meaning it’s difficult for as many as 3 in 4 Americans to conceptualize institutionalized racism. Moreover, it’s their natural tendency, in terms of how they process information, to focus on individual acts of racism instead of seeing how those fit into a bigger system. The implications could be to look at methods in academia or in the workplace for helping S’s (those more inclined to seeing the trees) see the bigger picture. The Myers-Briggs does give us some leeway by asserting, “Because we have an order of preference for the mental muscles, we tend to use the preferred muscles much more frequently than the lesser preferred ones. As with physical muscles, the mental muscles can grow in strength with use. As we become more practiced with certain mental muscles, we tend to use them even more and eventually they may become dominant in our personality.” Therefore, psychological preferences may be changed through learning new practices. Once learned, people can then apply that understanding to conceptualizing systematic/institutionalized racism in order to help all the S’s see the system at work. The other option is to perhaps leverage people’s natural strengths. By finding ways for those people who have a natural inclination to see the trees focus on efforts that address inter-personal relationships and individual acts of racism, while the N’s (those more inclined to seeing the forest) focus all of their efforts to addressing institutionalized racism, everyone is working where his/her natural strength lies. The point to all of this is, here we clearly have an existing model for how people process data and make decisions (the Myers-Briggs ‘S-N continuum), and we can apply that to how we have conversations about race and how we try to address the concept of systematic racism. If in fact the majority of our audience is likely to have a naturally harder time seeing the systems than the individual acts, they may need to be led through all the data first by going through all the little individual acts of racism in order to see how those start adding up to a system. It’s not that they’re not able to see big picture ever, they just don’t go there automatically because that’s just simply how their brain works, They can’t just jump into seeing that without being led on a journey to that place.

Be outrageous for a moment and ask yourself, “What would it look like if I helped America transcend racism and skin tone prejudice?” Take a second to imagine living in a world where theater, television and movies were stories about being human and color lines were a topic of the past. There were no longer shows which perpetuated race, skin or prejudiced stereotypes. Smile in your mind as you conjure the possibility that being human has nothing to do with the shade of ones skin. COMPANY CYPHER & GLOBAL EYE ENTERTAINMENT PRESENT In The Cypher-The Musical!  A mind blowing and chilling theatrical experience which inspires audiences to transform thoughts and dialogue about skin and race. JOIN THE CONVERSATION.