Elmore Cisco James, Jr.
Make Believe: Showboating in America

Show Boat is the heartbreakingly stunning and beautiful, mixed-race woman that is, tragically for America, a rejected Julie. It’s about time—eighty some-odd years later—that we finally get to know her.... America is the land where all Europeans arrive to become “white.” And American theatre artists are invested in keeping that world “white,” even if it means creating the occasional false and misleading image. But Show Boat’s theme shatters all notions of “white” pretense by making the claim that: Whiteness is pretense.... In a Playboy interview in the early sixties, the genius trumpeter Miles Davis was asked how, if he were dying, he would like to spend the last hour of his life. Miles answered, “By choking a white person.”