Fires In The Mirror

Race is an integral aspect of the Crown Heights riots, as they would not have begun without the racial tensions evident between the black and Jewish communities in Crown Heights. However, the play presents race within a larger socio-historical context than merely that of Crown Heights. Smith attempts to locate race within the larger American historical context, even going so far as to include Angela Davis’s analysis of the origins of race:

[R]ace has become, uh, / an increasingly obsolete way / of constructing community / because it is based on unchangeable / immutable biological / facts / in a very pseudo-scientific way, / alright? / Now / racism is entirely different / because see racism, / uh / actually I think / is / at the origins of this concept of race (30).

Davis suggests that race was created as a result of racism, and not the other way around. Rather, in order to allow for the subjugation of black and Native American bodies, colonizers had to create the pseudo-science of race to rationalize the racism inherent within their actions. Davis suggests that race is inherently violent because it was created out of this desire for corporeal subjugation.