The Talk Crucial Conversations for Contemporary Kids of Color in the New South

In this piece, author Sonny Kelly introduces excerpts from a dialogic performance piece. Kelly developed this performance as a means of intellectually, artistically, and spiritually digesting the fear and angst that overwhelmed him as a parent of a black boy living in the wake of multiple reports of black boys and young black men being killed by civic authorities across the United States. This one-person performance was designed to incite critical conversations around race and equity in the American South and America at large. In The Talk, Kelly embodies twenty characters as he ushers audiences into a space to have the difficult, but crucial, critical conversations necessary to pursue equity and inclusion for black youth in the U.S. This theatrical experience weaves together auto-ethnography, oral history, interactive theater, prose, poetry, and a multimedia production to voice one father’s anguished attempt at explaining a racialized America to a seven-year-old child.