Stacia Hitt kester reading

A politically coherent community leaves room for trans formative effect on participants, especially in collaborations involving young people. When I was in middle school I was accepted into a program called Reach for Excellence http://www.reachforexcellence.org/podium/default.aspx?t=12078. Classes consisted of three six-week summer sessions. This program brought together a group of kids from all over Georgia to challenge preconceptions and transform learning through the community on social, culture and political issues.
"Alternately it can lead to a patronizing form of tourism in which the artist uses the others culture as a romanticized site at which to parade his or her own fluency with difference."
I was the only white student in this program, there was a production of The Wiz that a group of us were putting on and even though I was white I was still cast as Dorothy. I didn't feel awkward even though I knew some of the students were unhappy about the fact but at that point I didn't really look at it like they did I had empathy for them feeling a certain way but I had grown up in the ghetto of Atlanta most of my friends were black and I looked at The Wiz as just being another show after all it was just a learning program I wasn’t being hired to perform in that on Broadway. I am sure that some of the students felt oppressed that a white student was playing Dorothy when in the wiz Dorothy is played by a black female in most cases. This was a vulnerable topic and I had many discussions with students before portraying this role as many felt it to not be right and when we finally performed for parents again my single mother being the only other white woman in the room we ended up having discussion after show on how that made the community feel. I did not ask to be put into that position as a seventh grader but I also did not view it as a big deal but I had empathy for the people who did and did not take it personally. I think many of those parents perceptions were challenged and transformed. I was put into this position of claiming this role even though I was not the teacher to assign parts. "Empathy can also be used to deny the very real social differences that exist between artists and their collaborators, encouraging an exploitative form of vicarious possession.” I feel as though this act was patronizing for some because they felt that the white girl was taking something that was theirs but again I was put into that position and as an artist even then I wanted to do my best.
Every one of these students was all oppressed in some way. The program was held at one of the most prestigious private high schools in Atlanta and it was as though we were the hidden step children that a white upper class let us use facilities but they didn't really care or want to see us around and most of the students that went to the school on a full time basis would often make fun of this program that was doing a good thing for unprivileged children.