The play debuted in 1959 and made Hansberry the first African American woman dramatist produced on Broadway, and its tensions unfold as the United States worked to convince people of color that they would never be at home. Facing segregation and housing discrimination, African Americans cultivated what I call homemade citizenship—a deep sense of success and belonging that does not rely on mainstream recognition or civic inclusion.

Suburban home ownership became a barometer of American success in the 1930s and 1940s, with mortgage loans newly subsidized by the Federal Housing Administration. But Black and Brown citizens were systematically excluded, so most African Americans could not pursue home ownership until the 1950s. Placing Black people’s struggle to attain this marker of American achievement on Broadway, Hansberry accomplished a feat parallel to that of the family she portrayed. Both the Youngers and their creator encountered hostility for daring to reach for what the country defined as success.

Revisiting Hansberry’s 1959 triumph proves poignant in the wake of the open letter to “White American Theater,” which is part of the racial reckoning prompted by the video-recorded police murder of George Floyd. Signed by more than 350 practitioners and creators of color, including Lin Manuel Miranda and Viola Davis, the letter exposes how the theater world resembles other arenas: Its institutions prioritize solidarity statements over self-reflection, structural transformation, and material redress. The letter also suggests that theater criticism facilitates exclusion and condescension: “We have watched you amplify our voices when we are heralded by the press, but refuse to defend our aesthetic when we are not, allowing our livelihoods to be destroyed by a monolithic and racist critical culture.”

Though Hansberry became “a darling of the theater world,” according to biographer Imani Perry, she experienced the racism of its critical culture. Because United States citizenship is built on the exclusion of African Americans, even when Black success does not prompt naked brutality, it inspires condescending reminders of difference, of outsider status. A Raisin in the Sun therefore places a spotlight on what historian Carol Anderson calls white rage: In portraying Black ambition, the play also showcases the white hostility that always accompanies it.

Over the course of the play, as the Youngers pursue a better life, Mama Lena spends part of her insurance payout to place a down payment on a house in the Chicago suburb of Clybourne Park. In response, her son Walter Lee disappears for three days. When he returns, his hopelessness convinces Lena that she has helped the United States strip her son of his manhood and kill his dreams. So she gives him the $6,500 left after the down payment, instructing him to put $3,000 in a savings account for Beneatha’s medical school education and the rest in a checking account under his name. “I’m telling you to be the head of this family from now on like you supposed to be,” she says.

On moving day, Mama Lena is out when a representative of the suburban neighborhood association arrives. Karl Lindner, who is white, tells Walter Lee, “Our association is prepared, through the collective effort of our people, to buy the house from you at a financial gain to your family.”

Insulted by this “civil” effort to keep his family out of the neighborhood, Walter Lee declines. However, he later realizes he has been swindled out of every penny entrusted to him, having given it to an acquaintance who promised to speed up the liquor license process and then skipped town. He invites Lindner back and rehearses a speech to accept the humiliating offer.

In the end, Walter Lee cannot stomach the routine he has practiced. “We have decided to move into our house because my father—my father—he earned it for us brick by brick,” he tells Lindner.

“What do you think you are going to gain by moving into a neighborhood where you just aren’t wanted?” Lindner demands.

The play ends with the Youngers moving out of the tenement, heading for the suburbs, despite every indication that their fellow Americans will not welcome them. Mama Lena is the last to exit the apartment, and her pensive farewell serves as a prelude to a future of offstage malevolence.

Hansberry’s drama highlights the mundane cruelty of denying people of color desirable homes. While the federal government encouraged “all” Americans to pursue home ownership, FHA redlining enacted bloodless violence by making whiteness a qualification for access to the American Dream. At the same time, the labor movement’s “family wage” campaign empowered white heads of household while excluding non-white people, given that (like most American institutions) unions discriminated based on race, as cultural historian Chandan Reddy has shown.

Employment and housing discrimination prevented most citizens of color from organizing their households according to the nuclear family ideal, a male breadwinner and his financially dependent wife and children. The few whose households fit this mold achieved a level of success that would not go unchecked. White Americans attacked families of color who dared to move into “their” neighborhoods. Thus, declarations about the nation’s preferred domestic configuration amounted to discursive violence—telling everyone to aspire to an ideal while affirming only white examples of it—that encouraged physical violence.

The Youngers understand that they invite injury by clinging to a suburban definition of success. As they reach for what white Americans will attack them for securing, they do not pursue white acceptance, but instead, claim what they believe to be rightfully theirs. Aligning with the tradition traced by legal historian Martha S. Jones, Walter Lee declares his family to be birthright citizens, telling Lindner, “This is my son, and he makes the sixth generation of my family in this country.”

Interpretations of Raisin have been shaped by the presumption that it is a protest play, that it resists segregation. This lens obscures what most drives the action: a pursuit of success. If one focuses on accomplishment as African Americans do, it becomes clear that pursuing achievement in the face of white opposition requires the Youngers to define and re-define the parameters of success. They are not pursuing integration as a form of protest or resistance, but rather, to accomplish goals and claim resources. The play reveals that what has been framed as “integration” is really about getting white people to stop hoarding everything desirable. Further, “civil rights” are human rights—pursued not for “equality” with white people but as an assertion of clarity about one’s due.

While pursuing success, most members of the Younger family prioritize patriarchy, so the play showcases a reality that protest-obsessed audiences miss: the damage done in Black households when prevailing ideas about gender are not questioned. The Youngers subscribe to the rhetoric of the 1950s Black church that often vilified single women’s goals. Christianity’s message of affirmation routinely failed to reach single black women—represented in Raisin by Beneatha—even in their own homes. Beneatha personifies all that must remain “beneath,” as Mama Lena pursues a particular vision of success. Beneatha’s future is sacrificed because, although Walter Lee shows little capacity for leadership, he is male and therefore his mother is determined to make a leader of him. Beneatha is not only teased for her pan-African sensibilities and denigrated for valuing career over marriage, but also, in an iconic scene, she is slapped by her mother in the name of God.

This complexity has been overlooked because theater criticism kept Hansberry preoccupied with defending Lena’s humanity. White critics’ casual vilification of Mama Lena as an emasculating matriarch revealed a lack of empathy for the pressures she faced, and led Hansberry to defend Mama Lena as fiercely as Mama Lena had defended Walter Lee.

However, if one focuses on how African Americans would encounter the work’s theme of Black achievement, the terms of the debate change. In the Younger household, success is defined in patriarchal terms, devaluing half the community. Scholars and readers rarely notice this, however, because most insist upon seeing Mama Lena as the embodiment of resistance to racism. Even the insightful biographer Perry argues, regarding Lena, that “in Lorraine’s literary world, mother wisdom is trustworthy though subtle, and paternal inheritances are thorny and overpowering.” If Lena’s behavior is examined not as a reaction to white hostility but for its impact on Black people, however, it becomes clear that when family members do not live up to patriarchal ideals, she not only withholds affirmation; she is violent. Besides slapping Beneatha, she “starts to beat [Walter Lee] senselessly in the face” for losing the insurance money. The Younger household is not a safe haven, especially for women who question (divinely ordained) male leadership.

Perry, Hansberry’s most nuanced chronicler, notes the playwright’s frustration with white critics’ failure to engage the work itself. A crucial question therefore arises: “How does one navigate racial perceptions that overlay everything … such that they effectively become part of the production no matter what the artist does? For Lorraine the answer was to become a critic.”

Hansberry could not ignore what the recent open letter to white American theater calls a “monolithic and racist critical culture,” so she wrote cultural criticism herself. Nevertheless, the complexity of her creative work proves undeniable, if examined with Black audience members in mind. Because African Americans pursue success despite the odds against them, the art they produce while doing so offers insight into how they remain invested in accomplishment despite the white rage it attracts.

Debating what constitutes achievement is part of the labor of cultivating homemade citizenship, but it is complicated work. As performance theorist Soyica Colbert suggests, Raisin’s tense scenes expose “the conditions that enable Mama to create a house” as well as those “that establish Beneatha’s homelessness.” Beneatha is outnumbered, yet Hansberry’s play honors her struggle. With her last words, Beneatha stands firm: “I wouldn’t marry [the man everyone approves of] if he was Adam and I was Eve!” In preserving Beneatha’s bold perspective, Hansberry’s work encourages African Americans to question whether their definitions of success account for the entire community.

This message remains relevant, as Black and Brown women succeed against the odds, only to become targets for abuse. When hostility does not come in the form of attack, it manifests as erasure: Black women’s leadership is often relegated to the margins, even as their ideas set the course that many others later advocate. Meanwhile, Black and Brown women continue to be ridiculed whenever they prioritize their own goals rather than simply serve everyone else. These tensions are as deep now as they were in Hansberry’s time, and we should heed her call to address them both within communities of color and on the national stage.

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What I remember most of all is that I was completely smitten with this dance thing.

A friend later suggested we try ballet, and I was all in. Within a few months, though, she had dropped out, while I became even more committed. In college, I tried modern dance, then jazz, and, decades later, an oh-so-brief stint at tap dancing. As a teen, I was clear-eyed enough to know I was not ballerina material. But I had other ambitions. I was a voracious consumer of newspaper and magazine arts sections, and by the time I was 15, I had decided I would become a dance critic.

What an absurd aspiration! Maybe a dozen people in the whole country were making a living writing about dance. But my passion was born out of doing, in the same way that millions of children play and compete at soccer, football, baseball, volleyball, tennis.

My own muscle memory of waltzing, spinning, and grand jêtés developed into and fostered a love for observing others performing those same steps, which is not so different from how children who play Little League end up becoming diehard baseball fans.

Learning to appreciate dance in its many forms was a little bit like learning to eat. Because most of us like to move our bodies, even a little, anyone can understand and enjoy a dance performance. You don’t have to know the meaning of specific gestures. Early on, I was most impressed by the obvious things like a performer’s physical prowess and remarkable athletic feats. I would sit up in the balcony at L.A.’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see American Ballet Theatre, where company stars Cynthia Gregory and Fernando Bujones were first crushes.

The dance world cracked open a little more each time I tried something new; it was like tasting an unusual dish in a different country. At UCLA’s Royce Hall, the Martha Graham Company shook up my entrenched stereotype that modern dance was not as masterful as classical technique. It certainly was. I remember how elegant the dancers looked, how stretched and tall. And I was struck by the stylized movement, the Graham contraction in which the torso is concave, almost scooped out. The heroic emotions of Graham’s storytelling touched me in a way I hadn’t anticipated.

Twyla Tharp’s “The Fugue” was another memorable performance, further busting down my preconceptions and expanding my ability to appreciate. It was stark, simple, and yet miraculous: three performers making dance and music simultaneously, the only sounds consisting of feet hitting the amplified stage.

About the same time, I had my first encounters with the works of modern dance pioneers Paul Taylor and Merce Cunningham. I was mesmerized by the physicality of Taylor’s work and baffled by Cunningham, whose dances seemed, to me, to meander without meaning and I could not decipher the strange body shapes he devised. I had to learn about his movement experiments, how he ordered sections by chance “operations,” such as flipping a coin. When I was still looking for harmony and narrative, I learned that Cunningham believed movement and music existed in separate universes, even if they accompanied one another. Watching Cunningham changed the way I see—and criticize—dance forever, because it forced me to see dance not only with my own eyes, but through the lens of the creator’s intentions.

In 1983, I moved to New York and was lucky enough to start my first regular reviewing gig for a Brooklyn weekly newspaper just as the Brooklyn Academy of Music launched its Next Wave Festival. That festival was a groundbreaking series for large-scale dance, music, and theater and it introduced me—all at once—to envelope-pushing dance by an extraordinary generation of original-thinking artists of the United States and Europe: Pina Bausch, Mark Morris, Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker and others.

At the same time I was watching all of this avant-garde work—Bausch covered the stage with a thick layer of loamy dirt for her version of “Rite of Spring”—I was also trying to figure out neo-classicism, the style of ballet without an overt story, but which was wedded to the score in ways that required I have a more thorough knowledge of music, too. I got a subscription to the New York City Ballet the year after George Balanchine, the co-founder, died.

What looked like a professional life was also a personal life that I was carving out for myself. Without fully realizing it, seeing dance, and also going to museums, galleries, plays, was becoming more and more a defining part of who I am.

Dance is both inside and outside the mainstream of life. In this country we have a finicky and complex relationship to the arts. A 10-year comparison of the National Endowment for the Arts’ public participation surveys found that audiences attending live performing arts events have declined slowly, but 70 percent of Americans in the 2012 NEA survey said they watched art (including dance) electronically. Sure enough, dance keeps cropping up in pop culture, demonstrating that it’s still a powerful force—whether it’s the nearly 23 million views for Hozier’s “Take Me to the Church” video starring Ukrainian ballet superstar Sergei Polunin, or the longevity of hit television shows such as “Dancing With the Stars.”

“Cravos,” by choreographer Pina Bausch. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

My first reviews were mediocre—or worse. I used to think a critic’s job was to educate the reader. But I developed a different understanding of my role in the triangle that is the artist, audience, and critic, thanks to all those years of learning about contemporary dance and art. I wanted my criticism to tell the reader what the dance looked and felt like; what was good or bad about it and why; and to put the company and the performance in its proper context. I aimed to create my own piece of artistic writing that could stand on its own worthiness.

I also came to understand that I was witnessing and writing a slice of history. In 1973, the Joffrey Ballet and Twyla Tharp’s company came together to perform Tharp’s cross-over dance “Deuce Coupe,” with music by The Beach Boys. Soon after, other choreographers started picking apart the virtual wall between modern dance and ballet. Now, 45 years after the premiere of “Deuce Coupe,” a fusion of ballet and modern dance is the ubiquitous and dominant style. Some ballet-lovers have despaired that, even though 19th-century classical ballet is still taught through rigorous daily classes, stylistically appropriate performances of traditional story ballets will disappear. I, too, would mourn the complete loss of classic portrayals of, for example, “Sleeping Beauty” (by Marius Petipa, 1890) or “Giselle” (by Jules Perrot and Jean Coralli, 1841). But I’m being optimistic, and I don’t think that will happen entirely because these traditional ballets still sell well. On the other hand, dance is carried forward through oral tradition, and with each passing year it becomes ever more difficult for dancers to perform these 19th-century pieces with artistic integrity.

As the dances and dancers have changed, so have the critics. Many newspapers have laid off their arts critics, disrupting that artist-audience-critic triangle. Dance companies and artists can directly reach out to their fans through the internet. But the best critics supply context and that all-important impartial authority that can’t be replaced by stories written by the marketing department. I and other critics have artists begging us to keep writing reviews.

But one thing I feel is that dance is kinetic and you don’t have to know everything about it to find pleasure and discover gratification in a performance. Most choreographers care less about the audience deciphering their specific meaning and process, than they do about viewers feeling stimulated by what they see onstage.

Which brings us back to creative movement. That’s what dance is—movement born from a creative impulse. Just bring a little imagination, an inquisitive nature, and your youthful muscle memories, and you’re prepared for any dance performance.

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Just as the Church has always been run by a tiny group of white men who have the power to determine what is worthwhile and what is not, the art trade’s tiny group of “influencers”—gallerists, managers, a few artists, high-end high-visibility collectors, publicists, and critics—largely determine which artists are in, which receive accolades, which make millions. Charles Saatchi, when he was a high-profile, admired influencer, almost single-handedly “made” the Young British Artists when they were unknowns. His purchases encouraged other collectors to follow, thereby inflating the value of what Saatchi had already bought before it was hot. Now the Armory, Frieze, and Art Basel art fairs are so influential as to leave others in the dust. Galleries do the heavy lifting in terms of publicizing, and get 50 percent of sale prices, while largely determining which artists make it. Note that this is less about the objective qualities of the art, if examined in a vacuum, than about influence, PR, hype, and muscle.

Art criticism is the same, just without the money. Old-school art critics, those with a prominent voice through columns in the right newspapers and magazines, get to choose what is good and what is not (though this most often manifests in shining a light on select artists and ignoring the others, which in PR terms is worse than giving them negative reviews). Criticism is least interesting when the critic decides what is good and bad, while it is at its best when it explores a work and then allows you to decide.

The former type of criticism results in petty territorialism all too often, with ideas and arguments bouncing around the squash courts of peer-reviewed journals, without reaching the public at large. It amounts to preaching to the converted or to those in “rival” pulpits.

The Reformation that opens up art and criticism to the masses, to the audiences for art, is not yet upon us, but its harbingers can be heard.

Take, as one wonderful example, a project funded initially by the Slovenian Ministry of Culture. It is a beta version of a website, by the name of ArtOpen, and it has been a modest success. Founded by a few Slovenian artists, the concept caught on and spread, with international users from the United States to India signing up within the first few months. It is run on a volunteer basis for the time being by its founders, with hope that the Ministry will continue to fund its expansion.

The principle of ArtOpen is this: It opens up art criticism and trade to anyone around the world, of any background. All you have to have is an interest in art and a willingness to engage and share your opinion.

Here’s how it works: Artists create social media-style profiles and upload their art to the site. Other users can create profiles without uploading art. Then all of the users can vote, each month, on their favorite art that was uploaded, in various categories (works on paper, paintings, graphics, etc.). The process includes a jury of some arts professional and experts (I’m one), but every user, regardless of expertise, has the same vote. Evaluations of the art are made based only on digital images, which is of course not ideal—truly great art should be seen in person. But since this is logistically prohibitive, digital is an adequate solution.

In the past, I’ve described ArtOpen as a Tinder for art lovers, which proved to be apt. In the future, ArtOpen plans to be available in a Tinder-style app.

Whichever art has the most “likes” wins that month and is a candidate for Artwork of the Year. ArtOpen has recently begun to allow users to sell their art directly through the site, receiving 100 percent of their asking price. ArtOpen adds a 20 percent reservation fee to the author’s price, paid for by the buyer, auction house-style.

You can argue about ArtOpen just like you can argue about art. But the site undoubtedly cuts out the middle men, the critics who like to shape opinion and the gallerists who do likewise for their 50 percent fee.

The naysayers will argue that allowing the masses to decide is, in theory, good, but doesn’t always result in the cream floating to the surface. That is a sound argument, but one that suggests that the masses need to be better informed, rather than that decisions should be kept away from them. And a tool like ArtOpen can be one method of better informing the masses.

Reformations are good things—the religious one decentralized and democratized Christianity—and the empowerment of the 99 percent can only be progressive. Art should be opened up.

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