Dave Harris: “I’m obsessed with performance and audience. The slight and not-so-slight adjustments we make depending on who’s watching. The way I adjust to being in a space that threatens me or being in a space where I am perceived as a threat. Between living in West Philly and attending The Haverford School in the suburbs, I learned how to manipulate expectations to my advantage. I could say that’s a sad thing, woe that I sacrificed individuality, but I also must reconcile how it is that I, born into a Black space, consistently choose to be in white spaces. The never-ending questions of ‘why am I here? what do I desire?’ Education was where it started. The long train ride from my city to my school. Both places of teaching. I think learning is a form of becoming. It’s impossible to walk into a space and not become a product of it. This is not a unique narrative. But it is at odds with what I previously thought ‘The Black Narrative’ was. The idea is that Blackness is supposed to be one thing, and to perform outside of that idea is to perform whiteness. Therefore whiteness is the costume I perform, and not just, simply me. However, both of those ideas are based on racial clichés. When I strip away the costumes, the imported racial expectations, when I recognize my own agency to choose where I put my body and how I dress it, what am I?” (web)
