SPOILER ALERT: Read this and you will learn how the play ends. As a former English teacher and longtime teacher of English teachers, my touchstone in “Pipeline” was Nya, a single-mom teaching English in an urban high school in what I’m guessing is New York City or one of its boroughs. Nya’s son, Omari -- an intelligent young black man who attends high school not at his mother’s (or his neighborhood) school, but, significantly, a private boarding school “upstate” -- is the play’s other main character. Omari is angry, and figuring out how to understand or just deal with that seemingly justified anger (and its potentially tragic consequences) is the focus of the play, Nya’s problems, and ultimately her character’s development. Why is Omari so pissed off? Is it because he’s been sent away to boarding school to “achieve his potential” (read: assimilate to white middle class culture, like his dad)? Because his mom won’t let him attend his home school and just be himself? Because his dad has more or less abandoned him and his mom for a “better” life (and new family) in the suburbs? Because that same father has nonetheless cast himself as Super Dad due to the latter’s dutiful provision of monthly support checks to Omari in lieu of any real relationship? Because Omari’s white English teacher has cast Omari in a role where his limited options as a young man on the brink of adulthood are to choose either the white middle class assimilationist path of his father or that of a black male criminal/”animal” ? My guess is “all of the above,” along with a host of other really good reasons related to just being an adolescent in this crazy, mixed up world. But it’s the last of these that finally causes Omari to snap, “attack” his white teacher, and set in motion the events that lead to the play’s unsatisfying ending. Which is not to say that the play is not “good.” On the contrary: it’s wonderfully complex and sends a powerful message about how complicated and damaging institutionalized racism is for every individual caught in its ugly web -- even the white people who supposedly benefit by it (portrayed by the play’s one white character, Laurie, another English teacher at the school). I’d recommend that anybody and everybody see the play. But one of the best things about it is the way it refuses to tie things up in a nice neat bow at its close. There is indeed a “resolution” of sorts at the end: Nya and Omari find some semblance of equilibrium, with Nya developing over the course of the play from an (understandably) fearful and controlling mother who goes to great ends to ensure her son’s safety and opportunities to a mom who finally concedes to giving him space and accepting her son’s “instructions” for letting him “be,” despite the mortal danger he faces daily in the racist system that they seem to have no choice but to try to get by in. But the play begs the question of whether “getting by” is good enough. Despite the seeming reconciliation of mother and son at the end of the play, there has been no resolution of the larger problems of systemic racism that are at the root of Omari’s anger and Nya’s anxiety. I believe that the playwright wants to leave her audience unsettled by the play’s seemingly “happy” ending amidst these larger unresolved systemic problems looming large at the drama’s margins. To frame this tension, let’s return to the English teachers in the play. There’s Laurie, the veteran white English teacher who seems no longer able to control her classroom or teach anything of value. Her students are always fighting or subject to worthless substitutes, so little learning happens and students understandably rebel. She seems to represent an educational system that has lost touch with what engages and inspires young minds, as her self-avowed hankering for the old days when teachers could physically discipline their students seems to suggest. That Nya, in contrast, has a more smoothly running and engaging classroom suggests the playwright’s subtle endorsement of her more evolved and culturally responsive way of teaching. But the racial identities of these teachers are also significant, I think: studies have shown that students of color tend to be more successful with teachers who look like them, and there are just way too few teachers of color in our schools today. Nya’s pedagogy is also useful to compare with that of the third English teacher in the play: Omari’s nameless white English teacher. Both teachers’ classes revolve around the work of revolutionary African American writers: Nya’s, Gwendylon Brooks’ “We Real Cool”; Omari’s teacher’s, Richard Wright’s Native Son. These teachers’ different approaches is significant. Nya makes a point of drawing students’ attention to two different versions of the same poem: one by a mainstream textbook publisher and one by a radical black publishing house, putting front and center what happens when white supremacist culture commodifies or “tames” (to use a word from the play) the language of black protest. The differences Nya points out in the typography of the two versions of the poem may seem harmless enough, but the potential for real human consequences of such a co-opting and depoliticizing gesture is dramatized in the sequence of events that unfolds in Omari’s classroom. To Omari’s white teacher, Native Son’s Bigger Thomas is not the very human victim of racist social and economic circumstances that Richard Wright intended him to be. Instead the teacher focuses in on Bigger as rapist of “the white girl” (failing to name Wright's Mary Dalton), thus perverting the text into an invocation of the nameless, shapeless caricature of powerful, sexualized black male bodies that have been leveraged throughout print and visual culture since the abolition of slavery to spike fear and justify white supremacist policies to discipline black male bodies, especially through the prison industrial complex. Omari’s teacher totally overlooks Wright’s socioeconomic critique -- one that might have actually engaged Omari given his struggles, choosing instead to badger the only black male in his classroom (Omari) to explain why Bigger rapes and kills “the white girl.” When Omari refuses to engage, despite the teacher’s persistent questioning and finally aggressive blocking of his student’s literal attempt to extract himself physically from the discussion and the classroom, Omari finally snaps, pushing his teacher out of the way in order to escape his teacher’s unrelenting bullying and abuse -- a completely understandable response, in my opinion. Yet in a system where black male bodies are criminalized, Omari’s “aggression” is framed as the final straw -- a third strike that will inevitably lead to his expulsion from school, advancing him that much further along the “pipleline” that has profited, since the abolition of slavery, from directing black male bodies ever increasingly toward prison. There’s much to be said about the play’s perspective on what constitutes good teaching and bad, along with the respective effects of each on developing students. But I’d like to focus instead on the way that these contrasting ways of reading black revolutionary literature are offered up as a critique of the two different ways that audiences of “Pipeline” might read the play itself. On one hand, there are readings like Nya's that center the complex lived human experiences of the individuals most negatively impacted by white supremacist culture, as we see in her exposition (and experience) of "We Real Cool." And on the other, there are readings like those of Bigger's white teacher who has integrated Native Son into his curriculum at the elite, majority-white boarding school that Omari attends -- readings where dominant culture co-opts these stories in order to reestablish the racist status quo by neutralizing any potential discomfort they might cause white folks. The title of the play alone is a persistent reminder that despite any genuine catharsis offered at the end of the play as Nya’s and Omari’s differences are resolved, this domestic equilibrium is still circumscribed by unforgiving, racist, systems that they will need to face the minute either steps outside their apartment. This “both/and” gesture of the play’s ending asks the audience to keep the human and systemic dimensions of this story in constant tension, and to recognize that one without the other has a potentially devastating effect on the real people represented by Nya and Omari whose lives actually unfold at the intersection of these human and systemic forces. In other words, view the play as a domestic melodrama with a cathartic “happy ending” where mother and son ultimately find common ground, and the play’s systemic critique is effectively defanged, leaving the audience exiting the theater feeling good about having worked through the problems of systemic racism within a mere 90 minutes. With solely this view of the play in mind, the audience feels free to ignore the larger and obviously unresolved problems of systemic racism that persist at the play’s margins, following in the footsteps of Omari’s teacher. View the play as solely a commentary on systemic racism and you erase the actual human beings who live these problems, an erasure the playwright refuses her audience by virtue of the play’s final focus on Omari and Nya. The “both/and” reading of the play’s ending -- holding both the human and systemic aspects of this issue in tension -- seems the only reading the playwright will sanction. Only when dominant culture centers the voices and experiences of the people most affected by systemic oppression can lasting change occur. This all starts -- the play seems to tell us in its final moments -- with humanizing the characters in these cultural narratives -- in Omari’s case, with legitimizing, allowing, and uprooting the source of the anger that he (and the other young black men referred to in the play) seem to feel, and with finding ways to support them to be themselves despite everything. In other words, expose and change the white supremacist systems that continually cast young black men as criminals within two-dimensional narratives and, as Nya does for her son, "create space" for them to be complex individuals, navigating very complex, multilayered, and sometimes conflicting cultural storylines. Finally, shift the dominant narrative in order to highlight the complex conditions that circumscribe the choices, emotions, and stories of these young men of color -- who are already caught up in a system in which they are victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And help clear the path, so that they can write their own stories, on their own terms, and in their own unique voices. Endnote: It is not lost on me that I am a white woman writing about the meaning of this story. My "work" is to find ways to engage in this race equity work in partnership with others, such as the playwright, Dominique Morisseau. One way I feel I can do this is by amplifying her message. But I invite feedback on how I might be co-opting her message in ways to which I remain blind. As I say, that is my “work,” and I rely on your help to uncover my blind spots!