A racist scene in a high school musical

The following scene was performed by my Christian high school when we put on The Music Man my sophomore year:

Four actors danced in a circle while wearing costuming that looked like an imitation of the natives scene from Disney's 1953 Peter Pan. The pianist played a pattern of fifths in the key of C minor an octave below middle C (because, according to our music director, that "sounded Indian"). As they were dancing, the actors repeatedly chanted, "Wa tan ye!" Then they stopped dancing, and one of them said, "I will now count to twenty in the Indian tongue. Een! Teen! Tuther! Feather! Fip!" At that point, the scene was interrupted.

I don't know how much of that scene was scripted and how much was artistic license**, but the fact remains that that scene was extremely racist, and my high school chose not to edit it out.

By contrast, in the opening chorus number for the same musical, "Iowa Stubborn," one line goes, "And we're so by God stubborn, we could stand touching noses for a week at a time and never see eye to eye." Our music director thought that this would be offensive by taking God's name in vain, so we changed the line to "And we're so by George stubborn..."

The following year, we performed "The Ballad of Sweeney Todd." One of the lines in this piece is, "He served a dark and a hungry god." There was talk of changing this line too, even though it was referring to "a god" rather than "God." This change was never realized.

This phenomenon of selective editing was such a double standard. I am shocked that we allowed such a racist scene to be portrayed, yet we took offense at saying "God" in a song. The worst part is that I'm sure the scene mocking Native Americans was not entirely scripted and we added some of our own flair**, which we deemed acceptable, but singing a pre-scripted "God" was questionable.

"Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me."

God forgive us.



**UPDATE 4/15/16: I found the script for The Music Man online. It turns out that that scene is indeed scripted, and we performed it exactly as scripted. But the issue still remains that we chose not to edit that particular scene, but we readily edited any reference to "God".