CAN YOU PLEASE SPELL CLARK JOHNSEN'S LAST NAME RIGHT ?

All the stories about this play debate the portrayal of Mormons. But what concerns me is the portrayal of Africans. The play seems to deploy some fairly noxious stereotypes about Africans that lack the sense of sympathy that accompanies the portrayal of Mormon missionaries. It comes across as racist minstrelsy of the type satirized in Spike Lee's film "Bamboozled".

In regards to hapless Mormon missionaries, American audiences have a sense of the limits of sarcasm. A Mormon ex-governor is a prominent mainstream candidate for President. When we mock ourselves, the joke is on us. Perhaps we learn a touch of humility when the joke evaporates into the prosperous white air of Salt Lake City. But the East African heritage of our current president is a taint that no birth certificate can erase, giving rise to obscene outbursts: A syndicated columnist recently endorsed obsessive questions about President Obama's birthplace, writing, "The most powerful country in the world is being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s — a polygamist who abandoned his wives, drank himself into stupors, and bounced around on two iron legs"

The AIDS epidemic in Africa in the 1980s was frightening. The disease had a name, but no remedy. Fear abounded, and so did quack cures. The idea that having sex with a virgin could cure you of the disease took hold for a little while in South Africa during the panicky end of apartheid. That particular idea had roots in long-standing ideas about the body and how it works. It had a certain logic in the way that a "detox diet" has a certain logic in our society. Parker's play takes this shameful slice of modern African history and turns into a crass playground putdown. (For the record, Ugandans squarely confronted the epidemic with a public education campaign and brought down the rate of infection within a decade)