Fires in the Mirror
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How Anna Deavere Smith presents the play is attractive and interesting. The whole play mainly focuses on the real-life of August 1991, viewpoints of people from Hasidic Jewish and black people based in New York City, and who were connected and directly and indirectly who were racially charged riots in the crown heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Majorly, the play discusses the pain of prejudice in black American and Jewish communities in the form of multiple monologues provided from various perspectives by community members. Facing out reality using the play, Smith tries to ask essential questions pertaining to historical prejudice, genocide, and slavery. In this concept, Smith uses several characters; among them is Richard Green, who seems to reveal the existence and raise of these questions.
Richard Green, who is the community activist, seems to be an interesting character in the play as he mainly speaks about the wrath that young black people fee and their lack of guidance and roles. Richard Green focuses on addressing that leaders of the black community are so reckless as they do not control the way in which their youths carry out the riots, Richard finds the youths riots so rampant in the way they cannot be contained. He accuses some of the leaders such as Al Sharpton of not taking the initiative to control the youths in their riots. Richard argues that the rioting youths don’t even know who Hitler was, implicitly defending the young black people, as according to Smith (2015), who used phrases like “Heil Hitler” in their riots, and that the only black leader they know was Malcolm X.
The character catches my attention in that he mainly carries out his role of trying to end the occurring violence during the racial tension between black American and Jewish communities. He openly condemns leaders who cannot take the initiative to stop their people who are taking part in the chaos. By doing this, Richard urges the leader to be at the forefront to help contain such cases. This kind of character in leadership is the type of display that is needed in today’s communities.
Smith, A. D. (2015). Fires in the Mirror. Anchor.