Contrary to popular belief, this is the reality that tends to mimic art - and not the other way around.
The latest proof comes from the University of Michigan, where the campus stormed due to an event reminiscent like two drops of ink the plot of the TV series "The Chair".
The series, which aired this summer on Netflix, was devoted to depicting a breakthrough scandal at a generic academic institution, when a popular lecturer was run over under the wheels of a cultural-political boycott.
The Moal-Yad movement, which he carries out in an attempt to explain to students the characteristics of totalitarian rule, is presented as a deliberate insult to the students, and the protagonist of the series finds himself gliding quickly and steadily down the slippery slope of political correctness.
What was presented in the series as an absurd occurrence in character will take place about a month ago in deafening decibels in the Department of Music in Michigan, where his outstanding professor Bright Sheng asked his students to watch a short excerpt from the play "Othello." He chose, for his part, the glorious 1965 film adaptation, in which Lawrence Olivier plays the Moorish general from Venice. Da Aka, Othello is black-skinned, while Olivier - what to do - is a white actor. The latter's choice to play the tragic figure in heavy makeup, which gives him the look he wanted, was icing on the cake in the eyes of the students, and complaints of racism were not long in coming.
Sheng's attempts to explain that he had no intention of harming anyone, and the letters of apology he sent, only ignited the fire. A petition signed by lecturers and students demanded his dismissal, due to the "harmful behavior pattern" of his actions. As a result, Sheng was forced to retire from teaching the course, and his academic future is in a fog. In his youth he managed to escape the "re-education" camps to which he was sent in his native Shanghai. From the re-education camps of the contemporary "culture of abolition," it turns out, it is much harder to escape.
There was room for discussion as to whether a white person's choice to play a black person is pretentious, and whether any such performance is necessarily caricaturing and humiliating, had Sheng critics not eluded one basic fact: Shakespeare, Othello's creator, was not a black person either. Whoever was responsible for the creation of the character, and whoever put the words in her mouth, was a white Englishman, who doubtless ever met dark-skinned military men in Venice (as he did not meet Jews there such as Shylock, "the merchant from Venice"). Like any great artist, Shakespeare was not interested in the elements of identity that differentiate between people, but in the character traits common to all, regardless of religion, race, and gender.
His Othello is a social exception, a perpetual stranger laden with feelings of guilt and rage.
Othello's portrayal or character writing is not a matter of more or less dense pigments.
"Othello" is a universal play about love, envy and possessiveness, human qualities that do not differentiate between black and white.
The ability of white actors to play black characters, or vice versa (as in the upcoming Macbeth film production, in which Denzel Washington plays the King of Scotland), could serve as evidence of the character base we all have in common;
But the politics of identities prefers the separator over the author, the superficial over the profound and the marginal over the essential.
Undoubtedly, something very rotten in the Kingdom of Michigan.