English 102

CHARACTERS:

Janine Bosko - Female, white, early 60s. A college professor.

Zoe Reed - Female, black, 20. A college student.

SETTING:

An elite university in the Northeast.

Act I - late March, 2016

Act II - early May, 2016

NOTES:

The events and discussions in this play are deeply felt and emotionally difficult for both characters - but there is no crying in this play.

A line break within a character's dialogue indicates a new thought or a beat.

A slash within a line signifies interrupted dialogue.

I should like to have that written over the portals of every church, every school, every courthouse, and every legislative body in the United States: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, believe that you may be mistaken."

- Learned Hand

ACT ONE

An office at an elite northeastern college. There’s a stately, antique mahogany desk. There’s a high wall of bookcases, filled with an overwhelming number of books.

There are a few framed images from revolutionary movements: a Lech Walesa / Solidarity poster; a painting of the tennis court oath; a photo of Emiliano Zapata; and a portrait of George Washington.

Janine, early 60s, white, is behind the desk in an ergonomic chair. Zoe, 19, black, sits in a folding chair across from her.

They are looking over a paper. Zoe sips from a venti Starbucks cup.

JANINE You’re missing a comma here.

She holds the paper out to Zoe. Zoe looks.

ZOE Oof. Yeah. I definitely am.

JANINE Always proofread in hard copy. Proofreading on a computer does not work./ Excellent word choices by the way. I don’t think I’ve ever had a student use “bedeviled” in a paper before. I love that word. All the “be” words, bemuse, beguile.

ZOE

(agreeing) Mmm.

ZOE Bedazzle. Beseech.

1.

JANINE Beget.

ZOE Classic. Betoken.

JANINE Bedeck. Oh, I could do this all day. Focus Janine. Next comment. Ah, here, you have - “Washington succeeded owing to his presenting himself as a leader, elite status as a plantation owner, and his ability to establish commonality.”

ZOE Yes...

JANINE Have you heard of the idea of parallelism? / I would say that of all the simple refinements in writing it’s the most important. It’s - the idea that every clause in a list should have the same grammatical structure.

ZOE

Oo - shoot, yeah.

No - right -

ZOE I definitely know about it, don’t worry / I just -

JANINE Because here you have “presenting himself as a leader” - gerund - “elite status” - noun - “his ability” - noun with possessive pronoun. Can you hear it? Whereas if you imagine - “His ability to present himself as a leader, to project elite status, and / to establish commonality”

ZOE “and to establish commonality.”

JANINE Yes - yes! There are a plethora of options, three nouns, three gerunds, but any one of them telegraphs to your reader - “you are in safe hands.

2.

This writer will not do anything truly horrible to you, like assaulting you with grammatically incompatible clauses.”

ZOE No, totally. My English teacher had us do like 800 worksheets on it senior year I just - I wanted to get the draft in early so I could get your comments before the deadline, and to be honest I had kind of a tough weekend and I didn’t get to proofread as much as I normally would.

JANINE Oh. Well.

ZOE So, proofread more carefully, go through and make the sentences parallel.

JANINE Yes. And I would say you’re under-footnoting.

ZOE Okay. So I correct all of that, and then the writing’s good?

JANINE Well... It’s a bit more complicated. I’ve written suggestions, but - Do you have a little more time?

ZOE Yeah, I mean, I want to make it as strong as possible. But I know office hours are almost over, if you -

JANINE Oh, it’s no problem. I just turned in a draft of my new book so there’s no chance I’ll be productive. I have absolutely nothing to do until dinner with my better half at 8:30.

ZOE Haha, well, hopefully it won’t take that long! Um, so what else is there to fix?

JANINE Well... it could all use a bit more flair.

3.

ZOE ...flair?

JANINE A good history paper should not be - a workhorse, just getting the job done. A good history paper is a show pony. That’s a terrible analogy - When you can give your reader a detail from the past that’s surprising, that’s palpable, the reader can suddenly imagine how history actually worked. How messy, and human it all was. For instance!

(Janine gets up and goes to the bookcases to hunt for a book. Zoe checks her phone)

Have you ever been to India?

ZOE No. Never.

JANINE It’s really - it’s quite spectacular. The spirituality is just - jubilant. And who knew lentils could be delicious? You really must go sometime.

ZOE Well I do like lentils.

JANINE You know this place has oodles of money for travel, if it’s related to research. I had a student once who developed his entire senior thesis around getting funding to visit places where he wanted to bunjee jump. He’s now a district attorney for a major American city. You’re a history major?

ZOE Poly sci.

JANINE Ah. Well. That’s alright. And you’re a - which year are you?

ZOE Junior.

JANINE My son is a junior! Zachary Wheeler.

4.

ZOE Oh! He’s in my section for Modern Poetry. He’s really smart.

JANINE I like to think so. His being a student here... it’s been interesting. It’s forced me to see my students as not just walking thesis statements but as human beings. Which is of course very disorienting. Here it is! I’m really not as informed about South Asia as I ought to be, I’m trying to bone up, and I ran into this anecdote. So, there is a province called Sindh, okay, in what is today Southern Pakistan, fascinating place, used to be the Easternmost province of the Abbasid caliphate, major supporters of the Mughal Empire, until of course they weren’t - anyway - In 1843, Charles James Napier was sent there by the East India Company to put down a rebellion - just to put it down, mind you, but at the Battle of Hyderabad he conquered the whole area, and he sent a telegram to the Colonial Office - now, keep in mind, all these men, these British men, they had all been at the same fancy private schools, or rather, public schools, as the Brits put it quite ridiculously, and they all had these absurd classical educations, and anyway Napier sends a telegram back to the Colonial Office containing one word. Peccavi. As in “quoniam peccavi ignosce pater” - forgive me father for I have sinned. Get it! Sinned. Sindh. “I have Sindh.” As in the province.

ZOE Ha, yeah. That’s - pretty disturbing.

JANINE Oh, God yes, I mean he’s making a joke about decimating a civilization.

ZOE Like - we just killed people - hilarious!

JANINE I know, it’s awful. Only, it’s also so human. These men, these powerful, destructive men, these leaders of armies, were also - dorks. Telegraphing puns to each other halfway across the world.

5.

ZOE Yeah. I can see that.

JANINE (coming back with the book)

Do you like my chair? It’s supposed to help you hitch your shoulder blades up so you stretch out your cervical disks, or something like that. I have bad back pain. The result, I’m afraid, of a lifetime of scouring sources. It’s like some ghastly metaphor about the price we pay for knowledge. Don’t hunch, Zoe, when you are looking for your new, illuminating evidence, never hunch. Pull the evidence up to you. What my son would call a protip. You see what I mean though?

ZOE Yeah, it looks like a really supportive chair.

JANINE No, about - about evidence. Peccavi. That’s the kind of story I want you to put in your paper. The kind that might make a reader laugh. Or gasp. Or remember. Or or or - here’s one of my favorites. So George Washington - you’ll remember from class - he believed that he had to act dignified to basically, to give America credibility. Very formal, very standoffish, never drank too much, anyway, one night, there was a reception at the - well the proto-white-house, and Hamilton and Gouvernor Morris were there. And they’re goading each other to do stupid things - you know, men -

ZOE Haha, yeah.

JANINE And Hamilton says to Morris, “I’ll bet you a nice dinner you don’t dare go up to Washington, slap him on the back and say, ‘damn good to see you!’” Morris accepts the bet, goes up to Washington, says “damn good to see you George!” And Washington gave him this look of such pure distaste, that Morris later wrote in his journal he had wished the floor would open and swallow him up. Can you hear it? The detail, the - the - humanity.

6.

ZOE Definitely. I’m not sure I see, like, what the larger point is.

JANINE I think it’s an absolutely wonderful story. To imagine all of those men just - joking with each other. Shooting the shit, as it were. Like utterly normal people. I would give absolutely anything just to be in that room for a night. Wouldn’t you?

ZOE Um. Probably not. No.

JANINE Haha, right, I’m probably a bit more obsessed than the average person.

(handing over the book on South Asia)

You can borrow this, if you like.

ZOE Thank you.

She tucks it in her purse.

JANINE Have to give it back of course! Though God knows why, I’ll never reread it, but-

ZOE Sure, of course. So - the parallelism, the footnotes, more flair in the evidence, and then I hand it back in?

JANINE Actually, these comments were more about writing than argument. I like to offer very thorough comments purely on writing, for three pages. Most teachers in this gothic pile don’t see that as part of their job - to teach any practical skills. I’m glad you brought this in early. I can see you’ve done an impressive amount of work on it-

7.

ZOE Yeah, well. I can tend to get a little intense about fulfilling requirements. Only child. Or - it’s weird that you never get to graduate from being called only child to being an only adult.

JANINE I wish you hadn’t plowed ahead like this - written the full draft without getting comments on the outline.

ZOE I was just excited to lay out the ideas.

JANINE I’m afraid you’re in for quite a substantial rewrite. Your argument is... fundamentally unsound.

ZOE Unsound?

Janine flips to the front of the paper

JANINE “The American Revolution was only possible because of the existence of slavery.”

ZOE Yes.

JANINE Yes?

ZOE Yes. In most countries, revolutions become traumatic internal conflicts. Basically civil wars. Because - there are usually two factions. There are the moderates, the upper middle class people, lawyers and merchants. And they want moderate, constitutional changes, that enhance their own legal status and political power.

8.

Then there are radicals, people who want to address real injustices - economic inequality, land redistribution, entrenched political power. These two groups fundamentally don’t agree, and so revolutions devolve into violent, drawn-out conflicts.

JANINE ...Yes.

ZOE That’s what happened in France, in Russia. In Iran, Guatemala. In China with the war between Mao and the Nationalists. That’s what you talked about in class.

JANINE ...Yes. That’s - mostly - yes.

ZOE Is any part of that wrong?

JANINE No.

ZOE But in the U.S., the white population was unified by the existence of slavery. Upper class whites were okay with granting legal equality to poor whites, because they still got to enjoy elevated status as plantation owners. And poor whites were satisfied with just constitutional changes - they accepted enduring economic inequality - because they got to enjoy the fact that they weren’t slaves.

JANINE Is this a theory that you read somewhere? Is there a book that-

ZOE No. It’s my theory. I mean, I draw on a lot of other thinkers. Carrie Matthews, in particular. She’s written a lot about - basically about how people tend to be less focused on their actual quality of life, and more focused on how their quality of life compares to the people around them.

9.

That’s why even though the standard of living has risen dramatically in the last hundred years, we’re still all unhappy - because we’re aware that other people have more. Basically - people don’t want to be well off, they want to be better off than the person next to them. So, I’ve applied that to politics - in order to be comfortable with the idea of equality, people also need an assurance of superiority.

Beat.

JANINE I’ve never heard of Carrie Matthews.

ZOE She’s at Duke.

JANINE (baffled)

No she isn’t.

ZOE She’s in the psychology department.

JANINE Ah. That explains it.

ZOE Explains what?

JANINE This isn’t a history paper. It’s like those books that say Martin Luther invented Protestantism because his father didn’t love him enough - all intriguing suppositions but none of them rooted in provable facts.

ZOE Psychology is provable it’s clinically tested.

JANINE I should have started by saying - this is a very interesting idea. It’s one of the most interesting arguments I’ve seen-

10.

ZOE You don’t have to start with a compliment if you don’t respect my work.

JANINE I do respect it. Don’t get me wrong - it is bold, original thinking. Reading it made me wish you’d speak up more often in class. But- Your thesis is not an explanation that any scholars who really know the period could agree with.

ZOE Wow. Um. You’re saying you think that universally, everyone who’s studied the American Revolution would disagree with me.

JANINE Well. Yes.

(she waves at the bookcases) I’ve read what they think. They’re my colleagues. I see them at conferences. I edited their work together for your Comparative Revolutions textbook. None of them have reached the conclusion you did.

ZOE Like you said, it’s original.

JANINE It’s also not a good fit for the available evidence.

ZOE Yeah, I’m sure that’s the reason none of them thought of it.

JANINE How do you mean?

ZOE Never mind.

(she decides she does want to say it) I just think it’s - I think it’s funny - that a lot of smart, educated people don’t think that an institution affecting millions of people played/ a role-

11.

JANINE It wasn’t millions. Technically. In this era it was more like 500,000.

ZOE -that an institution affecting 500,000 people helped shape the revolution. Except it’s also maybe not incredible given who those historians are.

JANINE It’s not about who the historians are. Trust me. It’s not about that. A lot of historians have written about the role race has played in shaping American politics. James Rosen (who is white, incidentally, I mean Rosen) has argued very persuasively that the reason America never became a welfare state is because white voters don’t like programs that help black people. There’s clear evidence that during the Civil War, wealthy Confederates used racism to get poor white support. No one is questioning the role of race in American politics - One need only turn on the TV and watch these stupid Republican primary debates. I’m sorry, I should have - if you’re a Republican, of course I respect -

ZOE I’m not a Republican.

JANINE Oh good. Well, right? Am I right?

ZOE I haven’t really been watching. I can’t handle all that -

JANINE Oh me either. Thank God they’re hopelessly divided because otherwise the situation would be dire. What I’m trying to say is that the evidence from this period doesn’t fit. It doesn’t make any sense to say that revolutionary ideals required the existence of slavery, when the most passionate advocates for democracy and revolution were in Boston. A place where almost no one owned slaves. And when most of the ideas they espoused about universal rights came from England, a land where there was no slavery and no substantial racial minority.

ZOE Well I found sources that said different.

12.

Janine looks over the paper, thoughtful.

JANINE (reading)

“Wealthy white elites strengthened racial barriers to build common ground with poor whites.” Where did you read that?

ZOE It’s in my footnotes.

Janine flips to the footnotes.

JANINE Www.ncpedia.org You know what they’re calling your generation? I think this term is much better than “millenials,” millenial makes it sound like you’re all hopeful religious fanatics. I heard this term the other day - “digital natives.” Have you heard that?

ZOE Yeah, somewhere. I think I saw it online.

JANINE I think it’s wonderful. I heard it at a modern pedagogy workshop, and another professor there, for the rest of the day he kept deliberately confusing it and saying “technological savages.”

(she finds this funny, Zoe does not) Well the trouble that I have with this info from www.ncpedia.org is that it doesn’t make sense. Because they didn’t strengthen racial barriers during the revolutionary era. Revolutionary ideals actually inspired people to weaken those barriers. During the colonial era, almost no one was talking seriously about ending slavery. Just after the revolution, six states abolished it. Far from strengthening the institution of slavery, revolutionary leaders opposed it.

ZOE They wrote protections for it into the constitution.

13.

JANINE They compromised with the institution, temporarily, when Southern States threatened to walk out of the constitutional convention. But they were not unified by the institution’s existence. They were actively fighting over it.

ZOE Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia offered white people who volunteered to fight in the Revolutionary War one free slave each as a reward for their military service. They literally bribed poor whites to fight for the legal reforms they wanted by offering them elevated status over black people.

JANINE Yes, that - did happen. Sort of. Georgia and South Carolina actually didn’t end up delivering on those promises after the war. Heaping dishonor on shame, you could say. But, appalling as those promises may be, they’re still very far from definitively proving your thesis. You haven’t shown whether it was the elevated status that mattered, or the economic incentive. You haven’t shown that any of this applies outside of the deep South.

ZOE In every state, after the revolution, white people got more intense about solidifying their separate status from black Americans. They stopped agreeing to be indentured servants because they didn’t want to do the same jobs as black workers.

JANINE You can’t prove that’s why they wouldn’t. They wrote letters explaining it, actually - given the general emphasis on liberty, they didn’t want to take on a subservient status to white masters, but that doesn’t mean they demanded a superior status to black laborers.

ZOE Before the war, free blacks could vote. After the war, multiple states passed laws stripping away their legal rights until they had less rights than white people. New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania took away the right to vote. They lost the right to testify in court, and to serve on juries.

14.

Why would someone take away rights - why would they do that - it’s not like if black people couldn’t vote white people could suddenly vote more, it was the status, it was the feeling of being one of the special people, that’s what made white people buy into this system which honestly wasn’t helping them. Why did the American revolution go so much better than any other revolution / in any other country ever -

JANINE Well abundant available land far from enemies -

ZOE - a free nation required a subjugated people.

Janine pauses. Appraising.

JANINE I like your spirit. I do. I like that you stick by your opinions. You know so many of your classmates - and, I hate to say it, but the women especially - they come in here. In their cute outfits and their faces full of makeup. And I try to push them on their thinking and they nod, and tell me that’s so interesting, or they’ll do that right away. They’re so eager to do what I tell them. When what I want, of course, is debate.

ZOE Of course.

JANINE And then when I get it, it’s always from the men - and who wants them to sharpen their debating skills?

ZOE Ha. Right. There’s actually - there’s this joke - Where did the male debater get his water? From a well, actually...

JANINE Oh. Ha. That’s funny. ...You know I was in the third class of women here. And the men couldn’t decide whether they were allowed to argue with us.

15.

Or whether it was unchivalrous. And then if you argued with them they thought that meant you wanted to go out.

Zoe laughs a little, thinks about this.

ZOE That must have been pretty crazy.

JANINE Oh it was. You know when I found out I was having a boy I thought oh no. Oh no. I was sincerely worried that I would impair my son in some way. / Hold him back. Because I don't want him to be president, or head of the history department, or CEO. I want that to be - well, you. I wanted a daughter. I could have made her unstoppable.  I change my mind. I want you to keep your thesis. But you’ll need better research.

ZOE

Oh - no...

ZOE What exactly does that mean, better research?

JANINE The economics section of the paper was great, it’s very compelling. But many of the paragraphs about leaders’ motivations are - conjectures. You cite - bloggers. Psychologists. Theoretical arguments. But you offer no primary documents. No perspectives from people who were there about what they saw going on. You need to hit the library.

ZOE The library?

16.

JANINE Yes. The library. Go find some books. Big heavy books made of paper. / It’s not always that easy, you can’t always just type a couple words in a box and know everything there is to know, sometimes you really have to work to get at the truth. John Adams hated Paris. You know how I know that?

ZOE

That’s not what I -

ZOE ...From a book?

Janine gets up, goes to the bookcases, looks for a book.

ZOE I believe you-

JANINE Hmmm, I thought it was here...

Janine looks in the wrong place at first, it takes a while for her to find it.

Zoe checks her phone.

JANINE I can never tell, whether my memory is going or whether I’ve just lived through so many things that it all blurs together. I’ve lent so many - aha!

Janine comes back with a heavy book. She sees Zoe on her phone.

JANINE Well please, if I’m boring you -

ZOE No, you’re not.

17.

Zoe sets her phone down.

JANINE (colder now, more irritated)

Look. Adams explains it right here. In a letter to Abigail. And there’s a footnote, where Hollings tells me, in case I don’t believe him, I can go find the letter, at the Massachusetts Historical Archives, in Boston, and I can go there, and hold it in my own two hands, and see where Adams signed it. That’s how I know it’s true.

ZOE But there won’t be proof like that for a thesis like this.

JANINE There won’t be proof you can google, no.

ZOE There won’t be proof I can hold in my hand either. No one writes down what they’re actually feeling. Like if someone emails you tonight and says how were office hours, you’re not gonna write back, actually, this one student had some ideas about American history that made me uncomfortable -

JANINE You haven’t made me uncomfortable -

ZOE - and I kind of closed my mind to the possibilities she was raising. You’re gonna write “pretty good. Think I gave some good advice.” And if someone wrote a paper a hundred years from now on these office hours they’d think they were “pretty good.” That maybe you gave some good advice. I’m not gonna find a letter where someone says, “today I used racism to bond with my troops!” That letter doesn’t exist. But I know that’s what happened.

JANINE No - no.

18.

ZOE You can say what you want, but I know, I know, because I know how race affects people, I understand how people work. I mean we don’t have a bunch of letters by a bunch of slave women saying, “hey, I hate being raped-/ sometimes I think about killing myself, or him,” but I know that’s how they felt -

JANINE

No. No. You can’t - you can’t do that.

Actually we have those letters.

JANINE Wait a minute, were you - have you been raped?

ZOE NO! I’m saying, I am a human being, I have empathy, and experiences, and I can tell how they must have felt.

JANINE You may be right. You’re probably right. About the feelings that were there. It’s possible you’re right about the effects those feelings had. But that isn’t history.

ZOE Yes it is history. It’s a part of American history.

JANINE I don’t mean it’s not important or it’s not part of the American story. I mean, it is not history - it’s not what historians do. Historians sift through evidence - documents, objects, recordings - to draw informed conclusions about the past. That is our trade. Ordinary people guess. They tell themselves stories that seem to make sense and then because they seem to make sense they believe them. “Immigrants steal jobs.” “Women are less ambitious than men.” The sun goes around the earth. Those ideas sound convincing to some people, some people may “just know” they’re true, but when you look at the evidence, they’re false. The entire point of a university is the idea of expertise.

19.

We are people who refuse to go with our feelings, our guts. We look at the evidence. And by doing that, we drive back ignorance.

ZOE But if you say you need evidence... You’re excluding the people who couldn’t leave evidence behind. People who couldn’t write. Anyone without money, or an education. Anyone with no possessions for historians to dig up.

JANINE It’s an unfortunate consequence of sound methodology.

ZOE “An unfortunate consequence.”

JANINE Yes. A very unfortunate consequence. It’s still better than guessing.

Beat.

ZOE You know I remember going on field trips. When I was little. My school was very into like, fancy activities, we went to a lot of museums. And I remember these... ten foot high paintings in big gold frames with - Kings. And Gods. And Soldiers. And Beautiful women in shiny dresses - I loved the dresses, way more than the paintings, honestly. I used to say I wanted to be a duchess when I grew up. And it took until I was maybe eight, or nine? To realize none of the women in the paintings looked like me. And there were like, ships. Churches. Fruit. A lot of fruit. But never the people who built the churches. Or sewed the dresses. Or picked the fruit.

JANINE I know.

ZOE It’s messed up!

JANINE Yes, it is.

20.

ZOE But then - the textbook? The book you edited? It’s the exact same thing. Soldiers, statesmen, women in big shiny dresses, and like bunches and bunches and bunches of white men. As if that’s all there was in this country.

JANINE It’s a book about inner political workings, not a general history. But it stinks, I get it. Believe me, I hate it.

ZOE Okay, well then change it. Hello, you have power!! Let me do the kind of history I want to do.

JANINE I’m afraid that I can’t simply do that. These requirements aren’t arbitrary. Let’s say you decide to apply to graduate schools -

ZOE I’m not going to apply to graduate schools.

JANINE But if you did - a good grade from me is a signal to my colleagues, this young woman has all the skills you’re looking for in a historian. But by the standards of academia, your current work is immature, and unsophisticated.

ZOE Unsophisticated?

JANINE You have potential. A great deal of it. Maybe you should think about graduate school. The field could use people like you. People asking questions. Demanding modernization. But if you want to change how people do things - it helps if you’re the best. I have gotten to do what I want in my career, because I have worked to be twice as good as anybody else. Find the sources. Get the rock-solid evidence. Check every comma. Prove me wrong.

21.

ZOE So... But - It will always be harder to write a really excellent paper about black history than about white history.

JANINE From this time period? Unfortunately, yes. That’s the way things are.

Zoe takes her paper back.

ZOE ...If I made just the writing changes you suggested. Polished sentences, added footnotes. What grade would I get?

JANINE I can’t tell you that. It’s against university policy, and even if it weren’t... Zoe! You are a bright young woman. I don’t want you to ask, am I meeting the bare requirements? I want you to pursue excellence. I want you to ask yourself, am I doing the absolute best I could possibly do?

ZOE I can’t rewrite my paper. That much. I can’t - get twenty pages of all new, very-difficult-to-find evidence in a week!

JANINE I’ll help you, there’s no need to worry.

ZOE No I don’t need help. I mean I don’t have time. My schedule is already crazy. I used Spring break to do this paper, I thought I’d already done this essay. More than / done it.

JANINE You know, you would be amazed what you can accomplish in six good hours of distraction-free time - no cell phone, no internet. What are you doing this weekend? I could send suggestions of collections to look at in the archives.

22.

ZOE This weekend Sandra Day O’Connor’s speaking on campus.

JANINE Yes I know, it’s very exciting but it should only take about two hours.

ZOE Well I’m part of the cross-cultural alliance and we’re organizing a protest.

Beat.

JANINE You’re protesting her.

ZOE Yeah. It’s a ton of work. We’re writing up leaflets on the real effects of her work. We’re going to be live-tweeting rebuttals to her speech and staging a walkout. It’s a lot to organize.

JANINE You’re protesting the first female supreme court justice.

ZOE Yes.

JANINE Are you opposed to there being female supreme court justices?

ZOE In 41 decisions concerning racial minorities, O’Connor voted against the minority all but two times.

JANINE That can’t be right.

ZOE You’re forgetting that I know how to use google. She voted against extra funding for minority school districts.

JANINE Well she didn’t vote against it. She felt that it was unconstitutional. Whether a judge likes a policy or not they have to go by the constitution.

23.

ZOE She voted against redistricting to get black representatives elected.

JANINE Well there are a lot of good reasons to oppose gerrymandering-

ZOE She voted to keep the death penalty even though it’s used disproportionately against black convicts.

JANINE She supported affirmative action! I remember this, I lived through this, she was a supporter of affirmative action.

ZOE She reaffirmed the theory of affirmative action over and over again, but every time an affirmative action policy came in front of her she struck it down.

JANINE And you believe that by holding up a sign in a gilded auditorium you’ll fix all of these problems?

ZOE I just - I can’t sit through the oversimplified story that the dean is going to give about her career. People have to hear the rest of the story.

JANINE It does sound like she had a troubling record on racial issues. She had a troubling record in general. I mean Bush v. Gore. Bush v. Gore - I ask you! God, were you even alive for Bush’s election? Oh you were, thank God. But the thing is - the thing is, Zoe -

ZOE I don’t need you to tell me the thing-

JANINE A dark spot in her record - a very dark spot - does not negate everything she accomplished. And there are things you could learn from her - particularly if you’re studying political science - but only if you’re listening -

24.

ZOE Thank you, I know the facts about her and I will make up my own mind. Just like you’ve done. I mean do you need to listen to a speech by everyone you disapprove of just to be sure? Should I pull up a Dick Cheney video?

JANINE So you’re going to be so busy protesting against female supreme court justices that you can’t rewrite your paper.

ZOE That’s basically correct, although it’s a deliberate misstatemment of what I said.

JANINE Spoken like a historian. You know I never do this. But I can offer you a one week extension.

ZOE Thank you. But... There’s a rally next week in Bridgeport for police reform.

JANINE You don’t live in Bridgeport.

ZOE That’s why it’s going to take so long, we have to get there. And we’re doing a recruitment event the day before. I promised my friends I would help. And then Howard Stern is visiting campus.

JANINE And you’re... going to see him or protesting him?

ZOE Protesting him obviously.

JANINE Ah - his jokes are offensive.

25.

ZOE No, he supports Israel.

JANINE Okay. Well I’m going to sidestep that - whole - thing. Look - I have to break it to you - you’re overcommitted to your extracurriculars.

ZOE It’s not an extracurricular. It’s not, like, marching band. I don’t do this for fun.

JANINE Well if you don’t want the extension then turn in what you have, and get the grade you get.

ZOE I need at least a B+

JANINE Well I need a new lumbar region, and yet I do not have one. You have agency, Zoe. You’re making a choice about how to spend your time. Can I tell you a story?

ZOE Look I understand your point but if you could try to understand mine -

JANINE The summer between my freshman and sophomore year, a girlfriend and I made plans to bicycle from Paris to Amsterdam. Then right at the end of the school year, I was offered an internship with the Smithsonian. A big opportunity, okay? But I had a feeling - now was my time. If I was ever going to be young, ridiculously young, your kind of young, and spontaneous, now was my time. I asked if I could start the internship a week late. That would at least give me time to go to Paris, if not Amsterdam. They said no. I chose the trip. And you know what, I liked Amsterdam better. Have you ever been?

ZOE No.

26.

JANINE I had one of the best months of my life there. But I paid a price for that. The point is choices have consequences/ You are choosing to spend your weekends organizing protests, instead of doing homework. That’s fine, that’s even laudable. But the consequence is, your work does not merit a good grade.

ZOE

I obviously understand that-

ZOE Well I need one.

JANINE I did not take you for a grade grubber.

ZOE I’m not. I have a 4.0. I’m on track to be Phi Beta Kappa.

JANINE Good for you. I made Phi Beta Kappa. I had to make certain sacrifices to achieve it.

ZOE The Carson Fellowship for Social Justice is my dream job for after graduation.

JANINE You can’t possibly know your dream yet.

ZOE They train you in community organizing, lobbying, outreach, communications. It’s perfect for me, and for what I want to do. And I’d be perfect for it. But I’ve heard that they weight transcripts heavily in the evaluation process. Campus activism has taught me all the real skills I would actually need for the fellowship. But because our society buys into bullshit credentialism and signs of elitism more than actual skill, I need a high GPA to get started on my life’s work.

27.

JANINE Zoe - it’s not bullshit credentialism. I am telling you that you are lacking some of the real skills that go into top- quality historical work.

ZOE Those skills are useless.

JANINE Useless? Strangely I have found them to be of enormous use.

ZOE But you don’t have a normal adult human job. I mean - what do you think your students are going to become?

JANINE Any number of wonderful things.

ZOE Would you admit that you’re not training dozens of future historians? Everyone at this school is going into investment banking. Like, literally, everyone. They’re here for four years of parties, one semester of microeconomics and their on campus Goldman Sachs interview.

JANINE Well we needn’t concern ourselves with the lacrosse players.

ZOE Come on. You have to have some thoughts about the bullshit that is a liberal arts education. A bunch of rich kids spending literally half a million dollars to get bits of random knowledge and a piece of paper they can show lazy employers who can’t spot skill, or work ethic, and just want to know, are you a half million dollar kid?

JANINE It’s easy, at your age, to be cynical about education. It is. My son calls this place charm school.

ZOE That’s actually pretty good. I might use that.

28.

JANINE But I think you will find as you grow older an ineffable-

(Zoe is about to interrupt) -but very real difference between you and your less elitely educated peers. An ability to see nuance. An ability to serve the world in a way others can’t. The state department calls me for advice about mass protests in foreign countries. I have been able to give sound, well-supported advice, because of my supposedly useless knowledge. You want skills that translate directly to a job? Go to vocational school. What we as an institution have on offer are 44 million manuscripts and some of the best minds in the world, available to you for picking. Take advantage of that. There are others to take your place who would really welcome this opportunity.

ZOE I earned this spot. Some people might want to use that spot to party, some people might use it to get ready for a PhD. I want to study ideas that I find interesting, do some good, and qualify for the job I want. And for $84,000 a year, that’s not a lot to ask.

JANINE You know women fought to go here? We fought so hard to make it possible for you to go here-

ZOE $84,000 a year that pays for your health insurance and your travel and your son’s fully-funded tuition -

JANINE The teachers didn’t want us, the administration didn’t want us, but we knew this place was valuable, and special, and we fought to be a part of it, and here you are taking it for granted.

ZOE Only it’s not valuable, because you don’t understand my work.

JANINE I understand your work perfectly, it’s just flawed work and it doesn’t deserve an A and it won’t get one.

29.

Beat.

ZOE What grade do you think you deserve?

JANINE Excuse me?

ZOE Well it’s a little bizarre, isn’t it? You do something for me, I do something for you, but you get to tell me when my work isn’t good enough and I don’t get to tell you when your work isn’t good enough?

JANINE I’m afraid you’re not yet educated enough to tell me when my work isn’t good enough. But don’t worry, there are plenty of mechanisms for that. Tenure committees, peer reviewed journals. Peers in general.

ZOE Don’t you want to try to do the absolute best you could possibly do?

JANINE Is there something you feel you’re not getting from class?

ZOE Do you know that you consistently mispronounce several students’ names?

JANINE I’m mispronouncing Zoe?

ZOE Not my name. Other students’ names. Ana Maria.

JANINE Yes. Ana Maria.

ZOE No. It’s Ana Maria. Roberto.

30.

JANINE You know many people prefer to have their names anglicized.

(Zoe snorts) It’s true. You know my own birth name is Yanina. I changed it to Janine to go to first grade. It made me feel more at home.

ZOE That’s nice, I’m happy that that worked for you. You should offer your students a choice about what works for them.

JANINE Students are welcome to come talk to me themselves if they have a problem.

ZOE Or you could make things more comfortable for them by asking on the first day how to pronounce their name. You could ask about student pronouns-

JANINE Pronouns? Oh you mean the - the transgender / thing-

ZOE -anything to indicate that you care at all about respecting your students’ identities.

JANINE I’m very respectful. I don’t ask questions. I go by whatever pronouns a student indicates that they want to use-

ZOE Based on what?

JANINE Their name, their general appearance.

ZOE But those things don’t always align. A person could wear dresses and want to be called a he.

31.

JANINE Well in that case it seems to me like that person wants to confuse people and will enjoy watching me get it wrong.

ZOE Are you being sarcastic about your students lives?

JANINE No, I’m not, no, it’s just - I mean come on.

ZOE You come on. You have students who are vulnerable, who may not feel as comfortable as you do in this elite environment, and you’re contributing to that.

JANINE All students should feel comfortable here.

ZOE Well they don’t. Some people are thriving here. Some aren’t. Some people are just trying to survive through their days without reminders of / discomfort.

JANINE Trying to survive? They’re trying to survive on the mean streets of this ivory playground? Is a thousand year old manuscript going to fall on their head?

ZOE They are trying to avoid emotional trauma -

JANINE Trauma? I am not torturing anyone, I am not a war zone. Your whole generation, you have this cult of fragility, with your - your trigger warnings and your / safe spaces -

ZOE It’s not being fragile it’s being like - / aware -

JANINE I may be behaving sub-optimally. I may be insensitive. Which is bad. But when you throw around words like survive and trauma you invite people to belittle your cause.

32.

ZOE Because you are looking for ways to belittle your students. Which I think makes you unfit to be a teacher.

JANINE That’s preposterous. I’m trying to teach you. I’m trying to advise you about your use of language.

ZOE No you’re not. You’re not. You didn’t suggest more effective language. You made a joke. People don’t teach through mockery.

JANINE Well now you’re undermining the entire British system of pedagogy.

ZOE Stop. Joking.

JANINE Look, yes, alright, humor can be difficult, but my main point was-

ZOE Could you not say but for once, could you listen? Could you try to hear, please?

JANINE I’m listening. It’s inevitable that I’m going to have / opinions.

ZOE That is a but-

JANINE -but I am listening. What other suggestions do you have for me? I’m listening.

Beat.

33.

ZOE Don’t make jokes about savages.

JANINE You mean the - you mean the digital native thing? B-

ZOE But?

JANINE That was just a joke.

ZOE Yes. Only it was also a reminder of centuries of Europeans using mockery to dehumanize the people they exploit. Can you hear it?

JANINE No no but - metaphorical savages, I wasn’t referring to any of the cultures historically referred to as savages, I would never do that. It was ironic, because I was talking about technologically advanced / people -

ZOE Maybe it would be. If you hadn’t told a delightful little story about the invasion of India. The forcible colonization of millions of people, it’s funny to you. It’s a cocktail party punchline. Are you even capable of perceiving how screwed up that is? Oh and those little snide remarks, like, “you’re protesting the first female supreme court justice?” - as if I’m stupid as if you know so much more than me-

JANINE I do know more than you!!

ZOE Can you hear it? You have a contempt for your students. Particularly your students who think different from you.

34.

JANINE Differently.

Zoe takes a moment.

ZOE You use your intelligence to critique and belittle people who have less power than you. Like your comments on my paper. You think that’s helpful? To take a person who’s trying to put forward an underrepresented point of view, and to criticize them until they feel like they might as well just give up because you’ll never understand?

JANINE I didn’t tell you to give up. I specifically told you that I thought you had a lot of potential.

ZOE If I work harder than anyone else to please you.

JANINE To suit what good methodol-

ZOE Listen. There is one appropriate way of responding to a woman of color who says, I have an idea to assert, and that is to shut up and listen. Because she has experiences you cannot possibly know, and insight you can learn from.

Beat.

JANINE To shut up and listen would be doing you a disservice. I have been to you exactly the teacher I would have wanted. I have offered you equal treatment.

ZOE You are incapable of offering me equal treatment. You like white ideas, you get white ideas, so you will never be able to offer me equality, and in lieu of that I would like for you to hear and validate what I have to say.

35.

JANINE I’m not going to validate you. You’re not a parking ticket. You are a very young person with a lot to learn, including that you will never get ahead in life if you are rude and confrontational with powerful people when they’re trying to help you.

Beat. Zoe gets out her phone. Seems to be engrossed by it.

JANINE What are you doing?

ZOE I’m canceling plans with a friend for tonight. I’m not going to be in any mood to go out.

JANINE Look, I think we should call it a day, actually. I have some work to get done.

ZOE You said you were free until 8:30.

She sets her phone down on the desk.

JANINE Zoe. Greatness does not come from a supportive environment. I have a friend, she’s one of the top cardiothoracic surgeons in the country. Do you think she got there because a doctor stood next to her during her first 100 surgeries, and said - you’re doing great? Your approach is really valid? No. He - and it was a hostile, old-white-guy he - said, that’s not perfect. That’s not even good enough. That could be faster. That could be better. That’s how she got better.

ZOE How did you raise your son? Did you correct him all the time? Say that’s not perfect? that’s not nearly good enough. Or did you love to listen to him express every little opinion. I want to be treated however you treated him. I want the white boy treatment.

JANINE I certainly told him when I thought he was being rude and disrespectful.

36.

ZOE You haven’t earned my respect. You’ve earned my frustration.

JANINE Because of a few jokes? Believe me I make jokes at home too.

Zoe pulls out a spiral ring notebook with dozens of post-its sticking out from its pages. She flips to the first post-it.

ZOE “America was beyond lucky to have Washington and Jefferson as two of its first three leaders.”

JANINE Yes... We could have had Robespierre. We could have had Lenin.

ZOE You know you said that in a room that included at least five African- Americans.

JANINE Yes, I - yes, I see that that is unpleasant. But you know - you must know, there’s no evidence that any other leader would have succeeded in stopping slavery.

ZOE You love them. You love them. “I would give anything just to be in that room for a night.” That’s what you said. To me. And you know all I could think - all I could think about, when you said that, was that if I’d been in that room it would have been as a slave. I don’t need to be reminded of that kind of crap when I’m tired, when I’m stressed, when I’m talking through a paper with you that was difficult for me to write.

Beat.

37.

JANINE You know if I had been in that room I would have been a wife, or a servant, not a politician-

ZOE Oh that is not the same shut up that is not the same.

JANINE No. It’s not the same. I can see that that remark was not tactful. And I apologize.

ZOE So what are you going to do about it?

JANINE Do?

ZOE Yes.

JANINE I mean, I misspoke. I misspoke. But what you people have to understand is -

ZOE Us people?

JANINE No, no, I did not mean that as a race thing. You millenials. You people who have not been out in the world. What you never understand is that it is easy to pick apart all the ways a person didn’t say things just right, and what is hard, okay, is to put something out there in the world. To pass a law, or teach a class, even to be Howard Stern and tell a dick joke, it’s hard, you don’t do it perfectly, but at least you’re adding something to the world. Instead of just complaining about it like a teenager.

ZOE Are you going to add more black history to your curriculum?

38.

JANINE Well, I think you’re right, I think the New Jersey and Connecticut point is an interesting bit of - it’s worth mentioning in future classes.

ZOE Are you going to talk about the lives of Washington and Jefferson’s slaves?

JANINE It’s a course on revolutions.

ZOE So no. You’re going to ignore a fifth of Americans’ experiences with the “revolution.” You’re going to ignore the bad bits. I mean your whole generation. You say we’re fragile. And you’ve kept reading the children’s book version of American history your whole adult lives. Well - trigger warning - America was a land of equality for white Americans because 20% of Americans were enslaved. White settlers enjoyed a higher level of prosperity than they’d had in England. Because they stole their land. And then they didn’t pay their workers. When 20% of the population has literally nothing, the other 80% gets more. That’s your land of opportunity. And that’s why that 80% was so unified and so happy with their moderate democratic government and so able to have the most successful, proud, prosperous un-radical revolution of all time. Teach that. Spend your last 10 lectures on that.

Beat.

JANINE It’s horrible. So much of history is horrible. “Nasty, poor, brutish and short.” Tinged with racism, sexism, classism, cruelty, exploitation, religious persecution, casual disregard for our mutual humanity. But we can’t spend all of our time focusing on that. I have to teach the really important stuff.

ZOE That is the really important stuff. For millions of Americans, slavery is the most important thing about American history.

39.

JANINE But... it isn’t. It isn’t! Democracy is the most important thing about American history./ If only because cruelty - no, no euphemisms - slavery is a thing that has happened throughout human history, while the birth of constitutional democracy - that’s us. That’s our thing. “All men are created equal.” Even if Jefferson didn’t think that included women, or slaves, or white men without property, still he wrote it down. And as a result, it’s something we keep, keep, keep striving towards. It’s our North Star. America is a painstaking, lengthy, but ultimately revolutionary quest for freedom.

ZOE

Please.

Beat. Janine believes she’s gotten through.

ZOE America is an engine of racial oppression.

JANINE I feel - sad. For you. That you can’t see any of the beauty. I understand it. But you’re missing something really wonderful.

ZOE You know when you were dicking around backpacking in Holland, or whatever? You know what I was doing the summer between my freshman and sophomore year? That was the summer Mike Brown was shot. I was marching. Have you ever been to Ferguson? You really must go to Ferguson.

JANINE That’s very impressive. Look but you’d be surprised - the year when you are born makes an enormous difference in the ways you do or don’t help the world. By the time I got out of college, the Vietnam War was over. The Civil Rights marches were over.

40.

We didn’t have the internet to tell us what was happening in St. Louis. My activism has been in the workplace.

Zoe flips to another marked page in her notebook. Janine gets irritated.

ZOE “In an embarrassment of riches, America was blessed with not only Washington, Hamilton, Franklin and Jefferson, but James Madison as well.”

JANINE Did you prepare that notebook for this meeting?

ZOE In all my classes, I mark the things that I shouldn’t have to hear. It’s a little way to process it so I can move on. I was going to send you a note, at the end of the semester. A really nice note. Saying, excuse me Professor Bosko, I really enjoyed your class, but you said a couple things that I found problematic, and you might want to be more thoughtful next time around.

JANINE Well it’s not that many things.

ZOE (flipping to another post-it)

“While the slave ownership of men like Jefferson is galling to us, we do have to understand them as men of their time.”

JANINE That’s not dismissive, that is trying to understand the past, it’s like the anecdotes - we have to understand that justice is not always obvious, that history is carried out by flawed, imperfect human beings-

ZOE But who are you humanizing? Who are you teaching us to empathize with?

JANINE Everyone!

41.

ZOE (flipping to another post-it)

“Washington commanded admiration, even adoration, from the people who knew him.”

JANINE He did. What? He did!

ZOE Not all the people who knew him.

JANINE Oh yes, asterisk asterisk asterisk. You can’t make an assertion today without adding four or five asterisks - you say “manual laborers had it rough in the 19th century” and you have to add, asterisk, but not all laborers had the same experience, because of race, asterisk, and of course within each race people were treated differently based on gender, asterisk, none of which is meant to suggest any sort of endorsement of the gender binary, asterisk, meanwhile let’s not forget that any discussion of manual labor is inherently ableist, asterisk asterisk asterisk. I mean none of it’s wrong, but it’s a seriously inefficient way to discuss the working conditions of 19th century laborers.

ZOE You have a picture of George Washington on your walls. You have a picture of a racist criminal on your walls, looming over me as I sit here, like this - like this constant reminder, that I do not need. That isn’t a tactless accident. That isn’t, oh I mispoke. You bought that, and had it framed, and hung it up - because you have no ability to understand the perspectives of your students of color - because you have never even tried to imagine their perspectives - and that is traumatic, yes, traumatic, the constant dismissal of slavery is traumatic, the fact that you don’t care is traumatic-

JANINE Oh my god get over it!!! It didn’t happen to you! Be angry at what’s going on now, be angry about Ferguson, but don’t be angry about slavery.

ZOE Don’t tell me what to be angry / about.

JANINE My family is Polish, okay?

42.

ZOE Good for you!

JANINE You know what was going on in Poland in the 1770s, the country was being partitioned, it was being carved up like a prize hog between Prussia, Russia and Austria, it was being wiped off the map, and I read books about Catherine the Great, and I do not start weeping.

ZOE Because everything turned out fine for your people.

JANINE You’re a student here, okay? You have one of the best lives of anybody in history ever. Ever.

ZOE I need you to say it. I need you to say out loud, that first came 250 years of slavery, and then came a hundred years of segregation, and then came a deliberate and systematic attempt to exclude black people from good school districts and good jobs and to lock them up or hunt them down for doing things white people do every day. I need you to say that whatever else it stands for, America has systematically persecuted one part of its population, in a way that benefits the other part. In a way that has benefited you.

JANINE You are oversimplifying.

ZOE I’m so tired of remembering for both of us. This should be a pain that we share. I have been carrying all of this around on my own. I have been carrying your share of history, as well as mine, and I need you to take your half. I can’t carry it all anymore. I will get exhausted and go crazy, I will have no joy-

JANINE You are making yourself crazy. With your post-its, with your paper, with your refusal to see the good in anything, it is clearly more of a strain than you can bear. Do you think you are the first person in history to get hurt?

43.

The grand sweep of history is that some people hurt other people and they never really make amends and you have to move on and win the next round. But you will not win the next round if you keep thinking like this. It will cost you a grade. It will cost you jobs. It will cost you political power. No one likes to feel pity. No one likes to feel guilt. No one likes anything that sounds anything like whining. No one wants to hear more about racism. You are so relentlessly negative and unpleasant and you make everything uglier, why would anyone want to listen to that? I hate seeing the world through your eyes!

Zoe picks up her phone.

JANINE By all means, rather than engaging in a serious intellectual discussion, be on your phone instead. Be a millenial.

Zoe turns her phone to face Janine.

JANINE That’s illegal...

ZOE In the state of Connecticut only one of the parties participating in a conversation has to be aware that it’s being recorded. Google.

JANINE Look, you can’t - I hope you’re still recording - when people are speaking casually, they’re not careful with every word.

Zoe just keeps holding the phone in front of Janine. Janine thinks about trying to make a grab for it, but doesn’t.

JANINE God, I barely remember what I said. I - I helped you with your paper. I listened to your concerns about class. Who are you planning on sending it to? The provost? The dean?

44.

ZOE No. No. They’d just end up like, having a meeting with us to try to “mediate a better understanding” or whatever. I think no one does anything real unless there’s public pressure.

JANINE I am not a racist. I’m not. Ask anyone who’s ever known me, I’m not.

ZOE You’re more afraid of looking like a racist than you are of being a racist. Don’t you want to think about that? How you weren’t trying to be nice until this thing came out?

JANINE I care very, very deeply about equality. I care-

ZOE Okay. What are you doing to promote equality? Are you using the money you saved on your son’s tuition to fund a scholarship for a student of color? Are you getting all your white friends together to call congressional representatives and demand criminal justice reform? Or do you actually never bother to think about racial equality, and now you’re just trying to claim that you do to save face when you know you’ve been behaving badly, because in that case you can go fuck yourself.

JANINE Zoe - my parents, okay? They fled Poland, because there was no freedom. Under the Communists. You couldn’t toss out a thought without worrying about being punished for it, and it was - it was crippling - look free speech is - critical - is - is everything. We came here to have it-

ZOE No, we didn’t.

JANINE What do you want?

ZOE I want this to be your problem. I have spent my life living with this problem. Why are my teachers talking to me the way they do?

45.

Why are my friends looking at me the way they do? Why is this boy interested in me? Why isn’t this boy interested in me?

JANINE I get it, I do -

ZOE No you do not. That is my whole point, you don’t get to say, enough. It keeps coming. Was I just imagining it, or did my sociology professor jump when I jogged past him in the street after dark? And will I ever really be safe if that’s the kind of thing that happens here? Here. Is there anything for me to love about my country, any way for me to look around this country with love when everything is tainted, everything, and no one else seems bothered by it, everyone else seems happy as a clam - and I have the burden of seeing it for what it really is, I have to educate people, and I have to decide when to stop educating people-

ZOE -and just let it go in order to stay likable and employable and I have to try to focus on my dumb and problematic assignments with all this shit racing through my head, and it’s all my problem, how is that fair?? So here I am. In your office. This is your problem.

JANINE Zoe I’m sorry-

JANINE Look, Zoe. Delete the recording. You have made your point. We will start the conversation again and I will do better. Just - delete the recording.

ZOE Don’t tell me what to do.

JANINE Look I’ll make - I’ll make any changes to the curriculum that you recommend. This week. I’ll change my lectures.

ZOE That’s not really enough anymore.

46.

JANINE So what is? What is?

ZOE Say, “I’m a racist.”

Beat.

JANINE The only assumptions I ever made about you were that you were capable of great work and able to handle honest conversation.

ZOE Your work has hurt people of one race more than another. That’s racism. So - say it.

JANINE Perhaps my work has had some unequal effects.

ZOE Say it.

JANINE I’m racist.

ZOE Now say, I’m not fit to educate a diverse group of young people.

JANINE No! I won’t say it. I am fit!!

Zoe waits.

JANINE I may not be the ideal teacher in some cases.

ZOE Now say, what was that thing? I have sinned.

JANINE Peccavi.

47.

ZOE A little louder.

JANINE Peccavi.

ZOE Thank you.

JANINE Are you satisfied now? Do you want to hear that I’ve learned my lesson? I’ve learned my lesson.

ZOE I want everyone else to hear that lesson.

JANINE What does that mean “everyone else”?

ZOE I’m going to release the whole thing.

JANINE You little bitch.

ZOE I think I have enough.

Zoe starts typing on her phone, taunting.

JANINE I know someone. At the Carson Foundation. A college friend’s ex-husband. I was planning to send an email to them. Recommending you. As a young woman of exceptional promise. I can still do it.

ZOE I don’t need your help to do the things I care about.

Zoe stands, collects her books.

JANINE I’ll give you an A. On the paper. In the course.

48.

ZOE Oh my God. You really have no integrity, do you?

Zoe heads for the door.

Janine lunges at her, trying to grab the phone from her hand. They grapple for it.

Zoe shakes Janine off, just as Janine manages to twist the phone away from her - Janine crashes to the floor with a CRY of pain.

She thumbs through the phone, trying to find the recording.

JANINE Where is it. Where is it?

ZOE It’s too late. I hit send.

End of Act One.

49.

ACT TWO

The office. Mid-morning. About a month later.

The portrait of Washington is no longer on display.

Janine bustles around, tidying, making tea from a small hot water boiler. She wears a back brace. She does not walk or move quite as comfortably as she did before.

Zoe enters. She watches Janine for a moment, then clears her throat.

JANINE Hello! Welcome. Welcome.

(it’s possible that Janine initiates the world’s most awkward hug)

Would you like to uh - to take a seat?

ZOE I’m good.

JANINE Would you like any tea, by any chance? I was about to have tea.

ZOE No thank you.

JANINE Oh - you know - I won’t either.

(she takes a seat) Thank you. For coming in.

ZOE You’re welcome.

JANINE How are you?

50.

ZOE Um...

JANINE I know, I know, that’s a - what a ridiculous question.

ZOE A bit, yeah. I am keeping it together.

JANINE That’s good.

ZOE Haha, yeah, real good. How are you?

JANINE I am trying to keep it together, as you say. This whole thing has been - quite something. If I had known how many people could be persuaded to care about a history course I would have - I thought it would be good for us to meet. Zoe I want to apologize. I’ve gone back and listened to that recording of our conversation again and again. The things I said have haunted me. I didn’t understand your feelings. And instead of trying to understand them, I tried to talk you out of them.

ZOE Yes.

JANINE And you tried to tell me that too, and I didn’t listen. And for all of that - I apologize. People may not always be able to agree. But we can believe that another person feels the way they say they do. And that they have reasons for feeling that way.

Beat. Zoe takes a moment.

51.

ZOE You know-

JANINE I really-

JANINE I’m sorry - you go.

ZOE My friends tried to tell me not to come today. They said you’d disappoint me again. Upset me further.

JANINE Well I certainly hope to prove them wrong.

ZOE I thought they would probably be right. But I guess I’m just - I’ve been feeling alone in all of this. I mean my friends have been so supportive. Most of my friends. My real friends. They tell me that I’m brave. And that I am beautiful. And strong. But I am not feeling any of those things. I mean it’s insane! All of this has been insane. Like, first came the nice articles. Saying it’s high time we reexamine how we teach American history. Saying I called much needed attention to microggressions in academia. Calling me a hero.

JANINE Yes.

ZOE ...Did you read the one about how one of Washington’s slaves ran away to join the British army?

JANINE I did, yes. I thought it was a good article.

ZOE Lots of flair. Then there were the articles I expected. Free speech. Back in my day we weren’t so sensitive - no, you weren’t, you just let bad things happen all the time.

52.

That kind of thing. Then came the pieces listing all of the points I had forgotten to make. The one about how microaggressions have a disproportionate effect on poorer students and I couldn’t possibly understand their feelings-

JANINE I didn’t think that was fair though-

ZOE No, they were right.

JANINE I didn’t know you were from Westchester, incidentally. I’m from Tarrytown.

ZOE Then the articles about how I hadn’t mentioned that Latinx history is even more under-represented than African American history.

JANINE Well they forgot Native Americans, who were much more involved in the Revolutionary War.

ZOE Then the marches. Then the articles criticizing the marches for not having a clear enough platform. Then the articles criticizing the criticisms of the marches. Then the blog posts criticizing the articles for paying attention to an elite school when there are so many more serious problems. And I just want to be like - I’m a person. I am a person. I am not some kind of walking manifesto you can grade. I am a person you should seek to understand. And then I thought - fuck. I know who else probably feels that way.

JANINE I’ve been reading everything. Absolutely everything. I can’t stop myself. Even the comment threads.

53.

ZOE Yeah no don’t read those.

JANINE I must say, you come from a generation that doesn’t know the difference between a hyperlink and a footnote. You’re all convinced that if you can link to someone who agrees with you you’ve proven your point.

ZOE I saw your son’s oped. I didn’t think he should have written that.

JANINE I thought you would agree with him.

ZOE Oh I do. But I think family loyalty is important. I was raised not to criticize my parents in public. I just - I wanted to say that I’m sorry if this has caused problems within your family.

JANINE I appreciate your saying that. But Zoe - I’m grateful that you did what you did. You’ve made me look at my subject and see things I never saw before. I’m planning a new chapter for my book. A comparative study of the role of minority populations in revolutions. Looking at the Kurds in Iran, Afro- Cubans under Castro. The Uighurs under Mao. And of course, African Americans.

ZOE Okay I don’t want to like that idea but that actually does sound like something I would read.

JANINE I’m especially concentrating on tracking down more diverse primary sources. We always - we speak about African American history in generalities. We say life tended to be like this, or roughly 60% of slaves experienced that, but the letters, the testimonies, they’re all from white men -

54.

ZOE Yeah, I - I know.

JANINE - and the result is a colossal failure of empathy. All the science indicates that people empathize more with individuals than with groups. / Irrational as it is, we care more about a photo of one starving boy than we do about the fact that 6 million Americans live in hunger. And so we feel for Washington, and Hamilton, even Abigail Adams, but we feel no personal connection to generalities about five hundred thousand slaves.

ZOE

Yeah, I mean -

ZOE I really - I know all of this? I don’t need you to explain it to me.

JANINE Right, right, absolutely. I’m not explaining! I’m - I’m just expressing some of what’s been on my mind. And of course I’m not limiting my explorations to history! I’ve been reading about the modern situation too. Mass incarceration. Police brutality. Implicit bias. I’ve been reading a great deal of Ta Nahesi Coates.

ZOE You should get a hat that says that. So everybody knows. And they can give you credit. I’m not an idiot.

JANINE (taken aback)

Of course not.

ZOE Your tenure’s under review. Because you verbally and physically assaulted a student.

55.

The university put out a statement saying that they understood the protesters’ concerns and that they would be examining your role at the university and whether your continued presence on campus was in the best interests of students’ academic and personal well-being.

JANINE That’s true. I won’t insult your intelligence by pretending that isn’t part of why I wanted to speak with you.

ZOE I think you already did.

JANINE I want to propose a joint statement. I say I’m very grateful that you’ve made me aware of certain issues in my teaching and in the field of American History. Which is the truth.

ZOE And I say... what?

JANINE Whatever you want.

ZOE Whatever I want?

JANINE You could say you’re proud that your work has given rise to a long-overdue conversation about race on this campus. That you thank the protestors for their support, and that they should feel as if their efforts have been a huge success.

(Zoe just stares at her. ) It’s not as if I’m escaping without punishment. I am suspended without pay.

ZOE You’ll be fine. Your husband works.

56.

JANINE Wife, actually. Surprised?

ZOE The articles just said spouse.

JANINE Well my spouse is a wife. So you see even though you think I do not understand - in some ways, I do. I know what it’s like to be missing from the history books. I have had to fight for things too.

ZOE That makes me more mad. You should be someone who knows how hard it can be. You should be someone who bothers to think about being inclusive.

JANINE I failed you, yes, I was not the right teacher for you. But for some students, I have been exactly the teacher they needed. And I have ideas the world needs. Publication of my book has been postponed indefinitely. I have no classes. No research assistants. I’ve been gently shunted aside from my DC consulting work and replaced by a Republican moron from George Mason who wouldn’t know a coup from a street fair, so at this point my reputation is actually an issue of national security.

ZOE I’ve been getting death threats. Like, a lot of death threats, actually. Some were specific enough to make the police think they could be serious. I’m taking the rest of the semester off.

JANINE Zoe. I’m so sorry that’s happening.

ZOE I wasn’t actually at the protests. My roommates went. But I -

57.

Even before the threats, I stopped going to classes. My professors look at me like I’m a bomb that’s about to go off. I don’t really go outside anymore. Except for - once a day I walk to Walgreens. And I buy like - anything I shouldn’t. Like if they figured out a way to make chocolate flavored cheetos I would buy those. And I am someone who - I take such good care of my body. But now - all I want to do is sit in my room, and watch Netflix, and eat bags full of these disgusting things. Not just because of you. Or this. Because of - the news. This country.

JANINE Yes. Never in my life did I think that I would be pining for Jeb Bush. Yet here we are. The Republican nominee is a - well, you know.

ZOE Yeah. So yeah. I sit around a lot. And like, I’ve read blog posts, so I call it self care. But I ask myself what would Harriet do? What would Rosa do? What would Angela do. And I think - you were right. I have one of the best lives of anybody in history ever. And then I feel like a real shit for being such a weakling. And that makes me want more Netflix.

JANINE Zoe I don’t mean to be insensitive-

ZOE That’s like, an almost certain tipoff that you’re going to be.

JANINE Yes. But... All of this - is another reason why this idea of a joint statement... It’s a good idea. It’s a good idea for you too. If everyone, all around the internet, all those right-wing nutballs heard that you and I were collaborating. It could be safer, for you. And if - I’m sure you’ve thought about this but - When you’re done with school - because I know that you will finish school. With flying colors. When you’re applying for jobs. Everyone is going to be able to google you.

58.

And see this. That you recorded someone, without them knowing. That you took that recording public. And I know why you did it! I know it was the right thing to do. But employers are scared of that sort of thing.

ZOE If someone can’t see the value in what I did, I don’t want to work with them.

JANINE That’s easy to say. But it could be a hard truth to live with. But - imagine - If all the alumni, from fifty, or sixty years at this future leaders grooming ground, read about how you helped reunify a shaken institution. How a beloved professor thinks you did more to invigorate intellectual life on this campus than any student she’s ever worked with. Which is true. Imagine the job offers you could get then. I still say what I always said - you’re a person of enormous potential. Position yourself to use it. It is not too late for us to help each other.

ZOE Could I get a cup of tea actually?

JANINE Um - yes. Yes of course.

Zoe sits still while Janine waits on her.

ZOE What you’re offering - or, I mean, what you’re suggesting, right, because it’s not like a generous offer, it helps you too. That would be my father’s dream come true. He’s been furious at me. He says I’ve been careless with opportunities he fought to provide.

JANINE He has a point.

(off Zoe’s annoyed look) I’m not saying he has the only point!! Just, he has a point.

59.

ZOE See I find myself with three possible paths. Path 1 is my parents’ path. The path you’re describing. I get the best possible degree. I get the best possible job. I make the most possible money. I show my black excellence to the world and I hope, I hope, that the world sees it. I hope they aren’t too threatened by it, and I hope I don’t get so tired of the everyday awful that I snap. Again. Path 2 is I could leave. I could say, I’m done with this country. I shouldn’t have to sign a statement to not receive death threats. I could just make like Josephine Baker. Move to Paris, or Brazil, or Nigeria. Publish Nigericanah. Maybe there I’ll be exotic - like, oh, that’s the American black lady. Maybe there my feelings will seem new and interesting and no one will tell me to get over anything ever again. Or Path 3, I could consecrate myself to the cause. I could sign on for a lifetime of marches. And protests. And flyers. And gently correcting people. And loudly correcting people. And taking it on my own shoulders to fix the world. So I came here to choose. 1, 2, or 3.

JANINE Well please. Anything I can do to help you figure it out.

ZOE Talk to me about this statement. I mean - it can’t just say, good job, you can all go home now, right? Because nothing’s really changed, right?

JANINE No - of course not -

ZOE I mean - you were right. I was worried about - such stupid things before. My GPA. Protesting Howard Stern? If I’m going to get - targeted, and blamed and threatened. I want it to be for real changes. Real, concrete changes that mean something. And last.

Beat.

60.

JANINE I can’t offer many concrete changes.

(Zoe is about to be frustrated) But the university can. We could say, we both agree that the university needs to make certain changes. Faculty and students both agree - we could both recruit more people to sign on - And say...

ZOE We demand an adequately funded student resource center with people of color on its staff.

JANINE Oh. Okay. Yes.

ZOE You sound like you don’t really agree. I’d prefer for you to be honest.

JANINE No! No I’m just surprised. I would have thought your concerns would be more academic.

ZOE I’m getting to those.

JANINE Ah. Yes. Good.

ZOE Just - there should be a building on this campus where students can walk in and say, I’m having this problem, and someone who’s actually qualified is ready to help them with it. There should be therapists who are people of color, and academic tutors who understand that not everyone comes from prep schools. And better financial aid officers who really know what they’re doing.

61.

JANINE You’ve given this a great deal of thought.

ZOE Yeah, when I actually have a chance to think about what I’m going to say I do better.

JANINE Yes. Me too. I once - I once was delivering extemporaneous remarks at a constitutional law conference and I misquoted the Declaration of Independence as saying that it was “a truth universally acknowledged, that all men are created equal.” It was - you know - the opening line from Pride and Prejudice.

Zoe laughs.

JANINE I’m not endorsing Jefferson-

ZOE I know.

JANINE Student resource center. Good. What else.

ZOE We demand that the university use its powerful influence in this city to promote safer policing, equitable public school funding, and the decriminalization of non-violent offenses.

JANINE (hesitant)

Yes. Yes.

ZOE People who live three blocks away from here shouldn’t be struggling to get a high school education. People three blocks away shouldn’t be getting arrested for stuff kids are doing with impunity inside these walls.

62.

JANINE You’re right. The university does have to maintain a positive relationship with the city, including the city government.

ZOE You’re saying the feelings of city council members are more important than the lives of this city’s inhabitants.

JANINE No, no - I’m just - weighing - I’m not -

ZOE It’s not fun, is it? When someone stands over you and says that if you get one word choice wrong, one sentence not quite right, your whole point is invalid? You don’t like it, do you?

JANINE I take your point. You know what really we should include, is - we demand that the endowment be ethically invested. Defund from... for-profit prisons, oil companies, Much as I hate to say so - billions of dollars can be a much more effective lever than political advocacy. Other schools are doing it. I’ve been reading about it in the Chronicles of Higher Education.

ZOE That’s good. I like that.

JANINE All right then.

ZOE We demand a required course for all incoming freshmen. To make them acquainted with basic elements of critical race theory, gender theory, class theory. To make them more prepared to talk to each other with a modicum of sensitivity and respect.

Beat.

63.

JANINE So...

ZOE

(imitating) “Wellll....”

JANINE I do not think that that is a strategic idea.

ZOE You think more sensitive and aware conversations are a bad idea?

Beat. Janine is reluctant to say what she’s about to say.

JANINE Give me your phone.

A beat while Zoe adjusts to the very different feeling in the room. Then she gets out her phone and hands it to Janine. Janine examines it carefully - but there’s nothing to find.

Zoe dumps out the contents of her purse.

ZOE I’m not recording.

JANINE Let’s say the university does what you’re suggesting. Let’s say they embrace that - they say we are going to have the most sensitive the most thoughtful, the most caring students in the country. We are going to orient the shit out of these students. Who’s going to come to this school? People who already agree.

ZOE If someone doesn’t want to be a decent human being to minorities, I’d prefer that they not come here.

64.

JANINE And then - what’s the rest of the country going to say about it? What are conservatives going to say? They’re going to say, we were right. These liberals are thought police, these liberals want to make rules about what you are or aren’t allowed to say.

ZOE It’s not about that - it’s about knowing the impact of what you say before you decide to say it.

JANINE I told you, I read - every bit of news coverage on this. I mentioned - your generation uses a lot of hyperlinks. I followed them all. You won’t like what I’m about to say. But I also believe - I believe part of you must see it too. The speed with which your generation is attempting to update language - The term racist, which used to mean a bigot, now means anyone who participates in structural racism. The term feminist is now tainted and we ought to say womanist. The term woman can’t have anything to do with ovaries. The term diversity is now suspicious because it can lead to tokenism. I mean a person could spend nearly all their time just staying up to date on how to talk about things, and have no time to actually get anything done. Your generation - and your race - you’ve gone off in a huddle by yourselves. To generate a lengthy list of all the things that are wrong with the world. But the problem is that you’re not reaching out to the people who are doing things wrong. You’re moving forward alone, and you’re leaving everyone else behind. And then hating them for being behind. And instead of progress, the result is a yawning gap. A massive, growing gap between what you see and what everyone else sees. A gap that may prove unbridgeable.

ZOE I don’t have to accommodate the feelings of people who have made themselves comfortable in a white supremacist world.

JANINE No, you don’t have to. But you are, in the end, stuck sharing a world with them. And if you are speaking on forums they aren’t reading in language they can’t understand about things they haven’t experienced - that’s not going to go well.

65.

ZOE So what so you think just, don’t move forward? Because somewhere, someone won’t like it? Sorry but I am not / in any way on board with that.

JANINE No, not at all. Have - sensitivity training for faculty and staff. Have voluntary workshops for students on how to navigate challenging conversations. Give people space to become enthusiastic about the future you envision.

ZOE Maybe.

JANINE I do - study revolutions. I study the mechanics of political change. I may have some useful advice to offer.

ZOE ...Alright. Alright, I agree with that. We demand increased resources and training for faculty and staff. We demand that student evaluations include questions about the climate a professor creates in class for students of different backgrounds. So people know if they need to get better. And we demand that within ten years, the composition of the faculty and staff match the population of the United States.

Beat.

JANINE Well there’s just - there’s difficulties with that. There are a lot of difficulties with that. There’s a process. There’s - You need a PhD, first of all, those numbers just don’t match.

ZOE So they should start recruiting people-

66.

JANINE And then tenure track, publications, number of years of teaching experience- Will you really cut off people with the interest and talent, with contributions to make- Every single professorship is expensive, a college can’t just hire hundreds of new people You need to ground your suggestions in reality

ZOE Or, value life experience, career experience value the impact on students

so they should fire some of the million year old white guys who don’t even care about teaching

ZOE Then make your own suggestions!! I just - I don’t know why you’re fighting me on this! I don’t know why these don’t at least sound like good things to you. I don’t know what possible decent motivation you could have for not standing up and saying, we demand better assistance for students on financial aid.

ZOE We demand that the percentage of black and latinx and american indian students match the population of the united states. We demand a curriculum that reflects what has actually happened in this country. We demand a female university president for once. We demand that the university take issues like discrimination and discomfort at least as seriously as they take fucking football. Do something, suggest something, care-

JANINE I am trying to give sound, actionable advice

You need to be aware of the costs, of the risks

Yes but

Heedless, thoughtless change can be very damaging.

ZOE But no change is damaging. No change is damaging, just because it’s not damaging to you in your white feminist paradise here, like, if the school was still 80% men would you say be patient with that?

67.

JANINE Look Zoe, my movement - my people’s movement. In my own lifetime, I have seen it succeed. Do you know how I found out that lesbianism existed? How I found out there was a word for what I was? I found out from a nun who was in the process of telling my class that it was something that got you sent to hell. The birth of my own identity came in the very moment when someone called my identity vile. I didn’t have a chance to take one second of happiness from the fact that there was a word for it! Which also meant there were more of us! That happened to me when I was ten years old. And this year, the supreme court upheld my marriage.

ZOE Good for you.

JANINE But if we had all behaved the way you’re behaving. Throwing around terms like “white feminism.” Who’s going to respond well to that? Throwing around, we demand, we demand, we demand people think and do all of the following things, or they’re not good people, they’re not even acceptable people. That’s a way to end up with fewer and fewer allies. And you need allies. If I had given up on everyone who offended me, or disagreed with me. I wouldn’t currently have a single friend, or family member, or colleague. And if we had all done that, if we’d said, how dare you not already know this, how dare you get it wrong, we would never have gotten 60% of the country to agree with us. It’s the reality of being gay in America. Or black in America. It’s the pain of being 10%. You need other people on your side.

ZOE Some people aren’t trying to win over friends. And family members. Some people are trying to win over people who don’t like their skin. Some people don’t get to stay in a closet and come out when it looks safe.

JANINE Is it fair? No, it’s not fair, it’s not fair that other people get to withhold their help, and quibble, and disagree, while you’re fighting for your dignity, for your humanity, it’s not fair.

68.

It’s infuriating. But it works. It works it works it works it works. It works to be patient. To find the language that gets through to people. To be a little nicer to people who are doing their best.

ZOE “Be nice?” That’s your advice for me - be nice?

JANINE Kindness, there is a role for kindness, there is a role for patience, for tolerance. For disagreement.

ZOE This is not the first time I have been asked to be nice. Or patient. This is the 500th time. I was nice the first time I walked into your office. You did not show a lot of tolerance for my disagreements.

JANINE I know.

ZOE I mean - all that I wanted was to like your class. I wanted to have the experience here that you had. I wanted to have the experience with this country that your family had. I wanted to thrive here. / That’s all I wanted. My parents were asked to be patient. Their parents were asked to be patient. Black Americans have tried being nice. We have been so god damned fucking nice and patient-

JANINE

You still can.

JANINE And it’s working. Things are getting better. America is - it’s taken too long yes, it’s taken far too long, far far too long, but America is working. Our parents had better lives than our grandparents. We have better lives than our parents. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

69.

ZOE Uh uh. Don’t quote Martin Luther King while you try to get a black woman to shut up and be patient with the problems in her world. Don’t do that.

JANINE We just had our first black president. We’re about to have our first female president. Things are getting better. Now’s a terrible time to give up.

Beat.

ZOE Yeah. We have our first black president. And we’re still getting lynched. We’ve been nice and patient for 400 years, and I’m not happy with the results. You are, clearly. You think things are good enough. Not too bad. I wish this could have worked. I wish I could trust you.

JANINE You can.

ZOE No? I don’t think I can. I don’t think you really care. Or, you don’t care enough to fight for it. I think you only care to the exact amount you have to care to tell yourself that you’re an okay person. And to get other people to think so too.

JANINE I don’t think that’s fair at all-

ZOE So let’s say I compromise. We work out some platform we both kinda agree with. I sign this statement. You get your job back. And then - what? I’m left hoping that you turn around and keep fighting for me. You’re like the oldest son in a poor family. You get fed first. Let’s say you go back to teaching. Maybe you give an extra handout on black voting rights after the Revolution.

70.

Maybe, before you discuss our miraculous democracy, you talk just a little about how American opportunity was fertilized by oppression. If I’m really optimistic, maybe you even remember to give me credit for those ideas. Maybe you even show up for a couple protests. Maybe you petition city hall. I mean I don’t feel like I can count on that. But maybe you do. Even if you do all the right things. What are you really teaching? You’re teaching 100 future leaders a year, to say “yes, there are some dark elements of the American past,” and you, your life story, shows them that as long as they do that - as long as they say asterisk, of course there were some dark sides, asterisk, I certainly agree there are some things we have to fix, as long as they do that, they can go off into the world and become guilt free corporate lawyers, or investment bankers, or senators, or journalists, or artists, they don’t actually have to give up a single bit of their money or their power. Because they’re the good white people. Like your son. I mean, he’s pulling this off perfectly. He’s selling his people out at just the right time. But I don’t think I can do that. I don’t think I can be complicit in one more generation of American leaders learning that if they get 5% better than their parents, then they can keep running the world. I can’t sign that piece of paper. Because I think you should be fired. I think you should be done. I think the way that your mind works, and the things that you care about, are a poison that should not be taught to any more people.

JANINE We can go back to talking about your ideas for student evaluations - nothing’s off the table-

ZOE No. I’ve seen the inside of your mind now. You will never really get it. You will never fight as hard for good things as someone else would. You are not the best person for this job.

JANINE I am an excellent teacher.

ZOE You’re an outdated teacher. You are struggling so hard to understand things that other people understand already.

71.

JANINE I have won teaching awards. I have mentored accomplished people.

ZOE You are an intimidating and hostile figure for the students who most need encouragement.

JANINE That's unfair.

(Zoe laughs) Don't laugh - that's not - that's not funny. You are describing a world where I am not right for a job because of my age and my skin color that's not funny that's - that's awful. That's not justice. You are not describing justice, you are describing revenge.

ZOE I’m describing reality.

JANINE I did everything that was ever asked of me. I did the best that I possibly could. If you had been born who I was, when I was, you would have the same opinions, you would have made all of the same mistakes. You cannot say I am a bad person if there was no way for me to be better.

ZOE I don’t care whether you’re a good or bad person. I care about the effects you’re having on the world.

JANINE Those are good. That’s what I’m trying to tell you, my effects have been good. I had a blind spot, yes, I’ll admit it. I have blind spots. I also have value.

ZOE Maybe? Your blind spots are too dangerous.

JANINE I have had one bad effect, perhaps, and many good effects. I hope you never know what it is Zoe, to make it through sixty years, doing your absolute best, and then one day you make a mistake, and that’s all anyone can see!

72.

ZOE You made a mistake for forty years. That’s the buzzer. You’re out of time.

JANINE I’m not done.

ZOE I think you should be.

JANINE I never said anything wrong. I may have said things that were unpleasant. I may have said things that were unpopular. But I haven’t said anything that wasn’t true.

JANINE Look it’s - it’s really simple. It’s not enough for you to be right. Or even for you to be good. You have to give up some of your power. Because you have too much. You have more than your fair share.

Beat

JANINE Take a moment to think, first. Plenty of movements have failed because they were not well thought out. I do not think a renewal of this fight between us is what this campus needs. I don’t think it’s what the world needs. We both know that there are very serious, very urgent problems out there in the world right now. And I think good people should not be fighting amongst themselves.

ZOE I give up. I give up. I give up on you. I am done. You have wasted so, so much of my time, never hearing-

JANINE Maybe above all - I don’t think it’s what you need. More of these articles. More of these worries about your future. I don’t think this is good for you. Or fair to you.

73.