COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT - The Benefits & Power of Words

[N'Zinga Shani]

LA Police Inflicted Death Blows on Rodney King In 1991

King’s Physical Death Was Finalized in 2012

Roger Smith, actor, brought the story to a New Haven stage in 2015. Only by reading the well-written NHI article can you decide: What’s the purpose? How is language appropriated? Are there benefits and costs of using certain words, and to whom do these benefits and costs accrue?

How do we, the readers, appropriate our time?  What’s important to us and why? It often takes much time to recognize value.

What are the “real” affect of words on our psyche? Who decides?

If only time was limitless.  If only we had objective, brilliant time appropriators.  Thanks to the NHI.  What did we do before you arrived?

"The day after a white supremacist killed nine black people in a Charleston, S.C., church, an actor with Charleston roots brought home the violence facing black Americans for a mostly white audience up north, tossing around the “n” word and raising uncomfortable questions about how we view victims.

The actor, Roger Guenveur Smith (pictured), embodied Rodney King, in a one-man show that opened Thursday night at Long Wharf Theatre as part of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas. The show runs through the weekend.

While playing multiple roles, Smith narrates King’s videotaped brutal beating by Los Angeles police in 1991, King’s psychological decline after the officers’ acquittal, his subsequent rounds on the reality TV circuit, and his death at the bottom of his own pool in 2012.

“Before you know it, Rodney, you’ve gone viral before viral was viral. Before you know it, Rodney, you’ve become the first reality TV star,” Smith says in his performance, as the unidentified narrator whose voice weaves the story together.'"

http://goo.gl/sOElrz