The most intense debate about race and theater in the country right now is revolves around two Seattle icons, one living and one dead. Bart Sher, the artistic director of Intiman and resident director at the Lincoln Center, has been chosen to direct a Broadway revival of Joe Turner's Come and Gone by the late August Wilson. Some people are pissed.

This will be the first Broadway production of a Wilson play that hasn't been directed by an African American. In an interview with the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Marion McClinton (who has directed two Wilson plays on Broadway) described the decision as "straight-up institutional racism."

"I am not saying a white director cannot direct a black play," he said. "What I am saying is, are they coming at it with the same respect and diligence of study as they do O'Neill, Brecht, Chekhov?"

In this case, yes.

Sher dives into Chekhov and Molière with as much audacity as he dives into opera or musicals. He is confident when working out of his socio-cultural-historical context, a prerequisite for any good director. And arguing that August Wilson plays only work when directed by black Americans confines them—they should (and probably will) be performed everywhere, from Tokyo to Nairobi, for decades to come. Whey-faced Sher is just one baby step in Wilson's long, universal legacy.

Awkwardly, Wilson, who died in Seattle in 2005, probably would have disagreed. His project was to build a repertory by and for black Americans, apart from the double consciousness of making token black plays for mostly white audiences. To that end, Wilson strenuously opposed cross- color casting and always preferred his plays to have black directors. From his 2005 essay "The Ground on Which I Stand":

"I am what is known, at least among the followers and supporters of the ideas of Marcus Garvey, as a 'race man.' That is simply that I believe that race matters—that [it] is the largest, most identifiable, and the most important part of our personality... because it is the one that most influences your perception of yourself."

Wilson's achievement outstripped his own project. Race matters, but the greatness of his 10-play cycle of African Americana (one for each decade of the 20th century) does not rely on race alone.

Later in the Pioneer Press article, St. Paul actor James Williams said: "If this meant that everything was fair game—if it meant that Marion [McClinton, the director] would get to direct Cherry Orchard at the Guthrie, that would be one thing," he said. "But that's not what this means." Of course: Everything should be fair game, but it isn't, which is what makes the argument I believe in ("Let Bart direct!") feel uncomfortably appropriationist.

That is the real problem—not Sher's whiteness, but the blinding whiteness that surrounds him.