Now that you have finished Sweat, how do you feel about it? What is sticking with you? How has reading it changed the way you think about race and class in America?
After reading Sweat, I was shocked by how its themes of race, socioeconomic status, and upward mobility still have relevance to 2019. The events in the story, which takes place in both 2000 and 2008, occur roughly one and two decades prior to now. We get a sense of the era the characters are operating in based on newspaper headlines and reports. The part of the play that stood out to me the most was the tension between Tracy and Cynthia regarding the higher position in the company that they both strived for. Tracy’s accusation towards Cynthia about getting the position because she’s black, i.e. affirmative action, is an ongoing issue that still finds relevance today. The most notable example that comes to mind is college admissions, where one student who is an underrepresented minority may be chosen over a student who is white/an overrepresented minority. This has in turn caused frustration among those who are not favored because of these policies, which we can see in the affirmative action lawsuit against Harvard University by Asian-American applicants. I think most of my lingering thoughts from Sweat came from our class discussion on Friday. Another point I would like to reiterate is how the dynamics of race in the play create a vicious cycle for the characters involved. While the primary antagonist in this story is the company, since they have decided to move their operations to Mexico and fire the town’s employees, they evade some of the resentment caused by their actions by moving up Cynthia as a scapegoat. The workers then turn their anger towards her, since she is supposed to represent the voice of the laborers in this scenario. However, when the company begins to hire Latinos like Oscar, there is anger directed towards the minorities because they are taking away the worker’s old jobs.