Project Ideas - Cameron Case

I want to create a project with the goal of bringing communities in America(many of which appear to be distant polar opposites of each other) together. My plan currently is to focus on ways to directly fight racism in America; specifically targeting white supremacy and privilege. My current idea on how to do this is through community engagement and a collective theater experience. My opinion as of right now is that many of the problems we have with racism in this country stems from the many small white communities in this country that are uneducated, unaware, and segregated in regards to the issues of race in this country. I think many of these communities are kept in their little safe bubbles of whiteness and in turn this become the breeding ground for things like Trump winning the presidency and incidents like the one in Charlottesville. These incidents come from a misunderstanding of what their privilege is since they are constantly told that white is normal and are never shown or get to experience anything outside from that knowledge. My hope to fight this is to go to these communities, those that fall under the descriptor of small, white, rural, and conservative, bringing a diverse group of artist and attempt to establish some kind of collective theater experience there. My hope is through the art of theater we can expose to people stories outside from their own and in doing so begin to expose to them their own privilege. It's really important for me to think of the collective experience of people telling stories, like the common image of people sitting around a campfire sharing their stories. This to me is what I want to achieve the idea of people coming together and acquainting themselves with each other and growing stronger because of this; all through stories.

One of my obvious and biggest question is how to make sure that I'm not continuing to empower these white communities and not giving them a louder voice when that should be going to the underprivileged in our society? How can I ensure that these communities take the power this practice would give them and turn it against their own privilege thus in turn (hopefully) giving more space to the oppressed of our society?

I know it seems like an obscure idea, since these are communities of privilege but I do worry about what kind of gentrification might occur in these communities, how can I make sure that doesn't happen?

I really don't want this to become about politics, I mean that in the way that my goal isn't to enter these communities and change everyone there to democrats or liberals; I want them to keep their views and beliefs, just not the hurtful and damaging ones to our society. How do I keep that balance?

My last big question is that I feel that many of these communities would not be open to this kind of engagement, how can I help to get them interested in the experience