How to Fly a Kite

One of our first events was to take a tour of the south side of Chicago with Rev. Steve Saunders to get an idea of how separated the and segregated the neighborhoods are. There was more than a slight overtone of people being socially assigned to different areas of town based on race and economic status. Rev. Saunders is the Executive Liaison for the Featherfist Agency one of the foremost organizations working with the homeless community in the Chicago area. Rev. Steve mentioned police sanctioned racial beatings in the Bridgeport neighborhood, an area that most of Chicago's mayors have lived in. Obviously, these beatings were meant to cause fear in anyone else thinking of crossing social bounds. And this pressure is what keeps people from crossing boundaries and integrating the city. There will always be economical restrictions on where people live. There will always be a poor end of town, the question I want to answer is: "Why is it not just 'the poor end of town' and instead it is referenced as a 'poor Black neighborhood' or a 'poor Latino neighborhood' and what pressures keep people from integrating?" There is a push and pull effect caused by three different factors: Society, Culture, and Economics. Fugard's Master Harold... and the boys provides a good illustration of these three ideas.


Master Harold takes place in South Africa during the apartheid years when legal segregation and discrimination had taken hold and the European minority had taken most of the power from the Native African majority. Master Harold or Hally, as he is called, is a white upper class boy around 17. He is friends with a pair of African servants named Sam and Willie. When Hally arrives we are filled in on the history of the trio and how Sam had made a kite for Hally when he was young and how he cherishes that memory in particular, though he is still disappointed that Sam had to leave him and return to work. Hally's father is a drunk and an embarrassment to the boy. It is then revealed that Sam decided to do something to cheer Hally up after Sam had to help Hally retrieve his passed out father and saw the shame the boy held. Hally is then forced to choose between his father and Sam after Sam reveals that he did not leave to return to work but because the bench he left Hally sitting on was labeled 'White only.' Hally has huge blow up and makes Sam call him "Master Harold" as Willie does. Sam swallows his pride and tries to make amends one last time, saying that perhaps they should try to fly a kite again, it worked once. Hally then leaves, choosing his family and society over his friends.

As was brought up by Rev. Saunders in the aforementioned example of beatings, there are many pressures from society that are pushing people to stay in the areas where they 'belong.' Hally's father in Master Harold is a proponent of this idea. Many people feel unwelcome in areas they feel that they do not come from or are not culturally or racially majority. It is not always an outward showing like a public beating though, as Word, Zanna, and Cooper found in their 1974 studies of self-fulfilling prophesies the person isn't even aware of how their interaction could affect outcomes. Fourteen white Princeton students were instructed to interview three high school students, the first was always white then the next two were alternately white than black or black then white to deter ordering effects. The results showed that when it was the black student, the subject subconsciously sat an averagely of three inches further away, had an average of three minute shorter interviews and made an average of one mistake per minute more than when the interviewee was white. As unfortunate as this is, it is hard to gauge whether it is an innate racism that causes this or if it is a malicious racism that is based around the subject's actual beliefs. This is the cause of some of the problems as well, and as unfortunate as it is, it is hard to call all who show some racist tendencies an out-and-out racist because humans are hardwired to use heuristics and lump things together into categories. Hally shows us that racism is a choice when socially pressured but this is a different racism entirely. No, it does not make it right, but it means that we need to address issues other than 'racism.' In Home/Land, a documentary play that was put together using real interviews that the APTP went out and did, one issue that was addressed by the Albany Park Theater Project was Arizona's Immigration Policy. This policy can obviously be called racist as it encourages profiling and this can only lead to blatant discrimination. This is an extreme case, but it illustrates what happens when society pushes legally against a certain people to keep them from expanding.

Then again, sometimes it is not an outside force, but an internal one that makes people stay the way they are. Let's call this a cultural force, because one way or another, ties to a culture are what are going to keep people from moving out of an area. Chinatown, for instance, is a relatively large area of Asian-Americans with somewhat similar backgrounds, making a life based on the fact that they are a large area of Asian-Americans. Chinatown is a good example of people who embraced their culture enough to dig out a niche to create a place where a semblance of their old culture can flourish. Hally eventually gives in to the cultural force he feels from his parents and friends to stay isolated from the Native Africans. If this is what you have grown up or lived in, it can be hard to let go of it. As a different example, in Invisible Man the president of the college he is at and the man in the paint factory both have adapted and made a life they are content with, this causes them to act in ways that will allow them to protect the stations that they have even if it is not for the better of their race. This could also be explained by their knowledge of the economic standing of those who turn their back on the status quo. Unfortunately, the recession has caused many more people to fall into poverty. This means that people just do not have the ability to move, and are stuck in places where they can hash out a life, usually in areas where the living conditions are less than ideal. As pointed out by the Rainbow Push Coalition this can be its own form of discrimination. Economics are usually controlled by those that have the money, and unless those without can find a way to gain capital, that is not going to change.

Speaking of Rainbow Push Coalition, you have to admit that there are many advocates for those in bad situation to change their lives. Rev. Jesse Jackson and Rainbow Push advocate that the African American community become informed in an attempt to branch out from their current situation. Sam has gained his capital with Hally and we see his attempts to cash in this capital in the form of trying to convince Hally that the current system is wrong. Home/Land is a form of advocacy, drawing attention to pertinent issues such as legislation like Arizona's aforementioned policy. Rev. Saunders works with the homeless and advocates as much as he can. The problem, as Mandy points out in Time Stands Still is that it never really reaches anyone that can do anything about it. In Invisible Man the narrator finds people who he thinks will advocate for him, though in the end they end up using him for their own gains. He ends up being his own advocate. Time Stands Still raises the question: what methods of helping advocate are best? Sarah and James claim at the beginning that bringing the stories home to those that have power and can help but even James makes the comment about the play that he saw that it is "just preaching to the choir." So how can you help without having any ability?

The question raised then is how do we balance all of these problems in a positive way to end the separation of races and economic classes. Or maybe asking for both is fallacious? Perhaps the best we can hope for is to integrate all people into economic class based living areas instead of racially and economically based ones? How do we address issues based in culture and people who want stay in an area with others like themselves? Just like we are afraid of people unlike ourselves we feel better with people like ourselves, this also drives people to cluster into racially segregated areas. Self-induced segregation provides an answer for the current state of affairs but cannot answer how to change it or if this problem needs addressing. Yes, it is unfair. But is integration the best policy? Yes. Aronson showed with the Jigsaw classroom studies that by making people reliant on each other, regardless of race, tolerance and acceptance are created. Hally, unfortunately spent too much time within the confines of an unsegregated life to offset the time he spent with Sam, so the respect he had gained for him was negated and we see the horrid effects of society on a young mind. We can make the right choice to fly the kite.

Work Cited

Aronson, Elliot, and Diane Bridgeman. "Jigsaw Groups and the Desegregated Classroom: In Pursuit of Common Goals." Readings about the Social Animal. By Joshua Aronson and Elliot Aronson. New York, NY: Worth, 2008. Print. 


Fugard, Athol. ""Master Harold"... and the Boys." The Wadsworth Anthology of Drama. By William B. Worthen. 5th ed. Boston, MA: Thomson/Wadsworth, 2004. 908-23. Print.

Word, Carl O., Mark P. Zanna, and Joel Cooper. "The Nonverbal Mediation of Self-Fulfilling
 Prophecies in Interracial Interaction." Readings about the Social Animal. By Joshua
 Aronson and Elliot Aronson. New York, NY: Worth, 2008. 397-422. Print.