“Appropriate” by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins advances the idea that America and its people should strive for progress, not perfection, when it comes to addressing historical and present-day racism. This play follows the story of a family of adult siblings, their romantic partners, and their children who have all come together to mourn the loss of their father (grandfather to the kids) and distribute his earnings and possessions. However, they all soon uncover the dark past of their (grand)father who may have been a racist bigot and a member of the secret society of the Ku Klux Klan. The family returns to their father’s home in southeast Arkansas, a former state of the deep South Confederacy.
Much of the dead father’s prejudice became uncovered not only through physical findings in his house but the behavior and thinking processes of his family members who arrived. Well into the play, one of the children discover an old photo album, which was presumed to have belonged to the grandfather, that encompassed photographed lynchings of African-Americans. These were enslaved African-Americans that once worked the very plantation on which their father’s house stood on. Instances of anti-semitism also occur in the play. The wife of the eldest son, who identifies ethnically and religiously as Jewish, is repeatedly offended by racial slurs used by her sister-in-law and primarily identified by some members of the family as Jewish before anything else. For example, the sister-in-law’s son once refers to the wife of Beau, the eldest son, as “Beau’s Jew wife” rather than “Beau’s wife” or her first name.
The outstanding message of the play asks a recurrent question of today, “Why do those with power and privilege desire to ignore or to not acknowledge certain parts of history?” It was interesting to see how the children in the play were more willing to openly discuss and explore tragic history than the adults were. Instead of talking about how their father was a hateful and oppressive person, the adult siblings decided to throw the photo album filled with pictures of lynching victims into the garbage. They chose to deny their father’s prejudice as an “easy” way out, as a way that did not make them feel uncomfortable. They felt ashamed to have ever called a hateful figure and bigot leader “dad”. It would have been best for the family, as a whole, to address the past and deal with it in the present in order to make real progress.
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