On March 3 at the DC Social Forum, a number of young people performed Race for Your Life, a play to forge better Black and Brown alliances. The play is the product of discussions between some young Brown and Black activists and artists living in DC. They are both the script-writers and the actors of Race for Your life which was also performed last year in November at an event organized in DC to promote and support USSF. It was titled Deconstructing Divide and Conquer Tactics: How institutions of power divide communities of color.

The audience response to the play has been overwhelming and the group has been approached by many people with requests to do a performance for their organization/community, including a number of suggestions to perform it in a plenary at the USSF. The play's storyline is that there is a literal race to achieve a "prize": CLEAN WATER, FOOD STAMPS, $5.15 JOB or MEDICARE. The MC is a white person with a huge Uncle Sam hat and a red-blue stripes bow tie. The participants are an immigrant from El Salvador, an African Amercian DC resident and an immigrant from India. They are told by the MC that the neediest among them will get a headstart which causes a strong and race-prejudiced fight among the participants. The issues that come up are immigration, terrorism, wages, housing, militarism, etc. The end-result of the fight is that the participants realize that they are actually fighting in the name of race over tiny handouts when they should be fighting for all of their human rights. The MC is angry at them for reaching this conclusion and tries to create rifts between them but they stick together and drive the MC out, leaving the audience with the understanding that all of our struggles are closely interlinked, regardless of what oppressed group we may come from. Usually the audience joins in the chanting at the end, and as this is street theater, there is a lot of audience participation throughout.

The play is under 25 minutes and does not need any special setup. It can be done without a stage and for audiences upto 200, we don't need any mikes. If there is a miked stage, we can perform for even larger audiences. Usually we perform the play in English and have one of our supporters summarize the play afterwards in Spanish.

We can provide handouts in English and Spanish.

This play addresses the fear of "divide and conquer" politics, wherein historically oppressed communities are pitted against eachother. At the current moment, with Latino movements sometimes being portrayed as a threat to the "power" of African American and Native American communities, and the "war on terror" propaganda teaching us to fear Muslim and Asian immigrants, we feel that this play has a very important message.