A word in her tin ear

Imagine a play in which black characters are prominent and which uncritically relays several tropes standard in the racist disparaging of black people: such as that they're feckless and lazy, are sexual predators, lower down the evolutionary scale than whites, and so forth. Would this play be defensible on the ground that its author hadn't intended anything untoward by deploying such themes? As I noted in commenting on Jonathan Freedland's recent column, only where anti-Jewish prejudice is concerned do some people try to swing it that there's no racism if it isn't in their minds. That it might be carried by words, symbols, well-known stereotypes, is a truth lost to them once Jews have become the subject. Thus Caryl Churchill in writing to the Guardian on Friday. In a letter responding to hers today, Anthony Julius sets the record straight: 'In this play, Jews confess to lying to their own children and killing Palestinian children. They also confess to something close to a project of genocide. And they freely acknowledge the source of their misanthropy to be Judaism itself.'