Seeing the revival of “South Pacific” on the same day last week as Sen. Barack Obama’s (Ill.) nomination to be the Democratic presidential candidate had an interesting connection for me.
The play, based on James A. Michener’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tales of the South Pacific, was adapted by Joshua Logan half a century ago, has become a musical-theater classic, and has had a spectacular revival this year. How fitting I saw it the same day as Sen. Obama’s acceptance speech.
Sen. Obama, of mixed racial parents and raised in Hawaii, the site of the play, is the personification to many people of a “post-racial” time, the product of the Rev. Martin Luther King’s 45-year-old dream to be sure, but also the lesson of one of “South Pacific’s” serious songs, “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught,” written by the show-biz titans Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. The lyrics instruct, “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid/ … Of people whose skin is a different shade/ You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
People ponder, especially Obama enthusiasts, whether, despite his obvious superlative credentials and the political tides that run strongly in his favor, this country is prepared to elect a black president. I ask: Why not? As the Rodgers and Hammerstein song pointed out half a century ago, truly another time, these prejudices are taught, not natural. The lyrics I heard in that revival last week resonate in today’s news. “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear/ … You’ve got to be taught before it’s too late/ … To hate all the people your relatives hate/ You’ve got to be carefully taught.”
Hopefully, in the half-century since Michener’s and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “South Pacific,” America has altered its views on race. In November 2008, we will discover the extent to which this country has been taught a new lesson about the relevance of race, one dramatized in “South Pacific,” and hopefully one that materialized last Thursday evening in Denver.
Visit www.ronaldgoldfarb.com.