Using hand-sewn charts, a live hashtag war and a crude felt iPad, comedian and cultural commentator Kristina Wong discussed white privilege in her solo theater show “The Wong Street Journal.”
According to Zoë Norton, executive chair of the Arts and Culture Committee and junior in supply chain management, Wong was featured in the New York Times’s “Off Color” series, a highlight of artists of color who use humor to make social comments on how issues of race play out in America. She has also been a guest on late night shows like Comedy Central and FX and has toured internationally across North America, Hong Kong, Africa and the U.K.
Wong first became interested in performance art at UCLA after realizing that there weren’t many options for female performers who looked like her. She liked the processes involved in solo performance shows, such as not waiting for a producer to write a role tailored to her and still having to audition for the part. However, before Wong began touring fulltime, she worked at an arts organization selling things on sites like eBay.
Wong presented “The Wong Street Journal” as a tale of how a “not-so-white saviour” goes to Northern Uganda and accidentally becomes a rap star.
“But the deeper pitch [for the show] is what does white privilege mean to an Asian American in Uganda,” Wong said. “That’s a trickier sell.”
Wong’s show began with her obsession with social media, attacking racists, sexists and cis-white people. In the show, she began to wonder what legacy she would leave behind for future generations and if hashtags will be all of her legacy. In wanting to go out and actually do something, Wong told of her trip to Northern Uganda working with an organization awarding microloans to women in Uganda to start businesses.
In telling a story of how Wong began learning phrases in one of the local languages a man told her that they call her “mzungu,” which is Swahili for “white person.”
“But I’m not a white person,” Wong said. “You don’t have a Swahili word for a third generation Chinese-American or a radical woman of color?”
In an attempt to confront her accessibility to white privilege and not hide in her Western hotel and really entrench herself in the environment, Wong ventured out and somehow became involved with local hip hop artists and recorded songs logging her experiences in Uganda.
“[This show] is about my proximity to white privilege and how to I leverage that in my relationship with other communities of color,” Wong said. “I think if you can just step back from feeling personally attacked and realize the greater thing we are working towards is equity.”
Wong suggested that another solution to the issue of racism and privilege was for people who recognize their power to concede space for people in marginalized communities who do not have the space to share and speak up.
Kristina Wong throws hashtags into the crowd to simulate a tweet going viral on Sept. 11, 2018.
