The Tight Rope

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As we navigate the balance between hope and uncertainty, we invite you to join Dr. Cornel West & Professor Tricia Rose on The Tight Rope, a weekly program where we welcome listeners and guests as thought collaborators. The Tight Rope is rich in creative, unfiltered dialogue on topics ranging from culture, art, and music to the contours of systemic racism, philosophy, the power of Socratic self-examination, and the possibilities of a peaceful and just world. Our innovative and interactive format will highlight the professors’ combined expertise to encourage critical thinking, self-reflection, and human connection as we navigate The Tight Rope.

Episodes

Thursday Jul 23, 2020

Daveed Diggs: Tony Award-winning star of Hamilton says Watch My Joy

Thursday Jul 23, 2020

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Tight Rope, Dr. Cornel West and Professor Tricia Rose connect with Tony award winning actor and rapper Daveed Diggs to dive into his career, upbringing, influences, and playing the “fool.” They wrangle with the nuances of hip hop past and present, colorblind ideologies in theater, and the healing power of Black creativity. Get ready for the twists and turns in this episode of The Tight Rope!

Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West is Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University. A prominent democratic intellectual, social critic, and political activist, West also serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton. West has authored 20 books and edited 13. Most known for Race Matters and Democracy Matters, and his memoir, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud, West appears frequently on the Bill Maher Show, CNN, C-Span, and Democracy Now. West has appeared in over 25 documentaries and films, including Examined Life, and is the creator of three spoken word albums including Never Forget. West brings his focus on the role of race, gender, and class in American society to The Tight Rope podcast.

Tricia Rose

Professor Tricia Rose is Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University. She also holds the Chancellor’s Professorship of Africana Studies and serves as the Associate Dean of the Faculty for Special Initiatives. A graduate of Yale (B.A.) and Brown University (Ph.D), Rose authored Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994), Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk about Sexuality and Intimacy (2003), and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (2008). She also sits on the Boards of the Nathan Cummings Foundation, Color of Change, and Black Girls Rock, Inc. Focusing on issues relating to race in America, mass media, structural inequality, popular culture, gender and sexuality and art and social justice, Rose engages widely in scholarly and popular audience settings, and now also on The Tight Rope podcast.

Daveed Diggs

Daveed Diggs, Oakland native, is a rapper, actor, singer, songwriter, and producer. He graduated from Brown University (B.A.), and after his Tony and Grammy Award winning performance as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s widely-acclaimed Broadway production of Hamilton (Best Featured Actor in a Musical (2016) and Best Musical Theater Album (2016)), Brown University conferred Daveed an honorary Doctor of Fine Arts. As a member of experimental hip hop group, clipping., Daveed has released multiple albums including their third full-length record, There Existed an Addiction to Blood (2019). He continues acting with roles in Black-ish (2016-2018), Wonder (2017), Velvet Buzzsaw (2019), and Snowpiercer (2020). Daveed wrote, produced, and starred in Blindspotting (2018), a performance that earned him a nomination for the Independent Spirit Award for Best Male Lead.

Insight from this episode:

Strategies for collective healing to massive collective trauma.
Details on Daveed’s recent and upcoming creative projects, including reflections on growing up in Oakland and filming Blindspotting.
Behind-the-scenes look into how Daveed picks roles and his Black-Jewish heritage.
Reflections on diversity in the theater and its audiences.
Strategies on exposing children to new music to generate curiosity.

Quotes from the show:

“How do you step into the unknown in such a way that you bring the best of the past with you? You bring all the love and all the joy and all the memories that’s gone into the shaping of who you are.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #5
“The vicious legacy of white supremacy has been one in which it has tried to convince Black people that we are less moral, less beautiful, less intelligent, and ought therefore feel intimidated and never have anything really safe and never have a home. So we had to create home in our language, we had to create home in our music, we had to create home in our relationships that are always dynamic. It’s a way of being fortified that is dynamic.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #5
“We’re going to have to get highly creative because Black folk without hugging… somehow we’re going to come up with creative, virtual, abstract ways. We got to have some way of affirming, enabling, and ennobling each other.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #5
“I’ve been making art for as long as I’ve been alive… The work hasn’t changed that much honestly, which I’m grateful for. Just more people watch me do it now.” – Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
On Hamilton: “Its success is directly based on the fact that it was brown and black bodies portraying the founders of our country-- and also that the music was great... The buy in from America that I felt while I was working in Hamilton was a particularly hopeful version of it… It really is a product of the Obama era.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
On Hamilton’s “colorblind” casting: “If you don’t make sure to contextualize some of the things in it, there are some dangerous assumptions there. It is about the building of a financial system, [but] it doesn’t contextualize it as one that is fundamentally racist. The revolutionary act is having black and brown bodies portray that moment in history. And that makes a statement that we should and we deserve to be able to participate in it, and in fact, it was built on our bodies. But you gotta make sure to really put that at the front of it, in a way that honestly [Hamilton] was always scared to.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
On Hamilton’s delayed public support of Black Lives Matter: “So what does that say? That a show built on black and brown bodies about giving black and brown bodies a sense of ownership over a financial system that was built on black and brown bodies refused to publicly support black and brown bodies.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
On Hamilton’s delayed public support of Black Lives Matter: “That’s just a matter of moral courage versus cash making.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #5
“You have to view art in the context of the moment you’re viewing it in, especially theater. Theater takes place in a time and a place. So if you’re going to revive a play, you should have a reason for reviving that play now. What are you saying now that either speaks to the original motive for it or that reframes it in a different way?” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“The thing that has always worried me about Hamilton [is] a colorblind ideology that drives people’s enthusiasm for what is going on. That is to say, on the one hand, everyone gets to be black and brown, but on the other hand, “I don’t see color! Thomas Jefferson can be black, or can be played for a black person because I don’t see color in the first place” But you’re celebrating it because you see color, because you know there’s a racial hierarchy and you know this illusion of colorblindness creates racial privilege. But then you’re going to tell me you don’t see it at the same time.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #5
“For me, it’s not color blind; it’s color specific… Turning Thomas Jefferson into this comic, foppish, uber privileged character, there’s an element of cakewalk in there. This is like being able to imitate the slavemaster in front of the slavemaster.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“In a Broadway audience, there's like four Black people in the audience every night. We can see them. I can see who they are. And we are having a different experience than the rest of the audience is having all in the same space… The nuance of this conversation doesn’t come through on a large scale until you also diversify the audience in a better way than Broadway has managed to do… Are we really interested in Broadway anymore? Or do other spaces do this better?” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“I love playing a fool, but I like the fool to have context for their decisions. I like there to be a choice being made.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“When you’re less known, you choose things and you happen to become known for them. Then at a certain point, the fact that you are choosing something becomes an event. At that point, I feel like I have to be a lot more careful about what it says that I choose [a role].” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
On the cultural differences he experienced at Brown University: “I could not for the life of me understand why every Black person I saw wanted to shake my hand… because I had never categorized my Blackness as being part of an endangered species.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“The thing I appreciate most about Judaism is that analysis and argument are baked into the religion. Talmudic scholarship is really about just arguing about what the Torah is about.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
On his role as an actor: “I’m responsible for this character’s portion of the story. It’s all about the story. If the story doesn’t come across, every piece of it failed... We all have to work together to make sure that the story comes across in all its nuances and it can raise all the questions it’s trying to raise.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“August Wilson used to say, “When Black people perform, they authorize an alternative reality.” To be able to be in the water and not wet, to be on the mothership away from a white supremacist world that is putting you down but you’re still preserving your sanity by, not being stupid, but being foolish in the most profound sense of what it is to be a holy fool.” –Dr. Cornel West The Tight Rope Episode #5
On the Hyphy Movement: “You’ve been calling me dumb for so long, I’m going to go out and show you how beautiful dumb is and show you what exactly dumb looks like. We’re going to act the fool in this incredibly profound way... We would all hop out of the car at a stoplight and just hold up traffic and party in the middle of the street. And it’s this performance of despite everything I have been through, that you have put me through, watch my joy. You have to stand on the sidelines cause you’re actually never going to feel it.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“Artists are interpreters of data… cultural data analysis is what we do. So we can see something out there and break that down and take a number or an observed behavior and break that down into something that can be felt.” –Daveed Diggs The Tight Rope Episode #5
“When popular culture, to me, is really making its own generational mark, it’s in conversation-- it doesn’t have to be with elders-- but with other musical traditions in a way that respects something bigger than what’s going to be consumed in a short-term way.” –Tricia Rose The Tight Rope Episode #5