ABSTRACT

Students from dozens, likely hundreds, of schools across the United States and United Kingdom created online statements, petitions, social media accounts, and hashtags to speak out about their traumatic experiences as a call to action. Practitioners of color have experienced and seen the harmful impact of oppressive training for decades. They often feel the burden of tokenization, are expected to fix systemically racist institutions, and are conflicted about the extent to which they perpetuate such cultures. Race is a social construct, and it is important to acknowledge this, particularly given the relationships and power dynamics within actor training. Feminist and postcolonial scholar Sara Ahmed defines racialization as a process that “involves the production of ‘the racial body’ through knowledge, as well as the constitution of both social and bodily space in the everyday encounters we have with others”.