Radical Chic 2014

Paneldebatten videre-debatteres - og vi har ikke åbenbart ikke deltaget i/overværet heeeeelt den samme debat - på Promenaden lige nu. Seneste har Rasmus Nikolajsen skrevet et indlæg, og jeg har lidt bistert svaret på det:

Rasmus Nikolajsen, 27. april 2014 kl. 16:43 skriver:

Jeg synes det var en spændende debat. Khash, Athena, Maja og Zoltan fik sagt mange væsentlige ting. Kamilla refererer fint ovenfor. Jeg finder det helt uproblematisk, og jeg forstår bedre og bedre, at Athena vælger at afstå fra at skrive om visse ting. Jeg censurerer da også mig selv, når jeg skriver. Der er noget jeg skriver. Og noget jeg ikke skriver. Af den ene eller anden grund. Men Athenas strategi peger jo på store problemer i vores samfund: Strukturel racisme, fx. Og at vi i så mange år kun har haft en indvandrerdebat/integrationsdebat. Ikke en racismedebat. Det har vi så fået taget hul på nu. I litteraturverdenen i det mindste. Det var på tide. Måske kan vi starte med at stoppe den hetz mod Athena som mistænkeliggørelsen af hendes litterære strategi udgør?

Svar ↓

Lars Bukdahl, 27. april 2014 kl. 19:46 skriver:

Kære Rasmus.
Var alt, hvad jeg sagde, noget uvæsentligt vrøvl? Er det kun, når jeg taler rosende og analytisk om dine bøger (som jeg atter gør i næste nummer af Den Blå Port), at jeg taler fornuft?
Men bortset fra det synes jeg, det er utroligt, at du og man (og allersenest Morten Søndergaard på FB) forholder sig så næsegrus overfor Athena Farrokzhads udsagn, især hendes indlæg hen mod slutningen om, at alt er en uforsonlig kamp af et powerplay om taleretten mod den hvide diskursmagt, som altså også inkluderer alle hendes forsvarere og fans, dig, Rasmus, din kæreste, Julie S-K, Morten S, Olga R, Elisebeth F, Mette M, m.fl., hvis støtte hun (og hendes “brødre og søstre”) kan have pragmatisk nytte af, men til syvende og sidst er I og al jeres solidariske snak klart nok en del af problemet, ikke løsningen. Det minder hinsides 70′er-arbejderisme mest om de radikale sorte pantere, der godt kunne gå til cocktailparty hos Leonard Bernstein og café-konversere med Sartre, men var imod enhver s-h-forsoning (og anså Martin Luther King som en naiv Onkel Tom).

- her er APROPOS et uddrag fra Tom Wolfes klassiske reportage-artikel "Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny's"" fra 1970 om det cocktailparty for de sorte pantere hos Leonard Bernstein:

The Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party has been sitting in a chair between the piano and the wall. He rises up; he has the hardrock look, all right; he is a big tall man with brown skin and an Afro and a goatee and a black turtleneck much like Lenny’s, and he stands up beside the piano, next to Lenny’s million-dollar chatchka flotilla of family photographs. In fact, there is a certain perfection as the first Black Panther rises within a Park Avenue living room to lay the Panthers’ 10-point program on New York Society in the age of Radical Chic. Cox is silhouetted—well, about 19 feet behind him is a white silk shade with an Empire scallop over one of the windows overlooking Park Avenue. Or maybe it isn’t silk, but a Jack Lenor Larsen mercerized cotton, something like that, lustrous but more subtle than silk. The whole image, the white shade and the Negro by the piano silhouetted against it, is framed by a pair of bottle-green velvet curtains, pulled back.
And does it begin now?—but this Cox is a cool number. He doesn’t come on with the street epithets and interjections and the rest of the rhetoric and red eyes used for mau-mauing the white liberals, as it is called.
“The Black Panther Party,” he starts off, “stands for a 10-point program that was handed down in October, 1966, by our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton . . .” and he starts going through the 10 points . . . “We want an educational system that expresses the true nature of this decadent society” . . . “We want all black men exempt from military service” . . . “We want all black men who are in jail to be set free. We want them to be set free because they have not had fair trials. We’ve been tried by predominantly middle-class, all-white juries” . . . “And most important of all, we want peace . . . see . . . We want peace, but there can be no peace as long as a society is racist and one part of society engages in systematic oppression of another” . . . “We want a plebiscite by the United Nations to be held in black communities, so that we can control our own destiny” . . .
Everyone in the room, of course, is drinking in his performance like tiger’s milk, for the . . . Soul, as it were. All love the tone of his voice, which is Confidential Hip. And yet his delivery falls into strangely formal patterns. What are these block phrases, such as “our Minister of Defense, Huey P. Newton”—
“Some people think that we are racist, because the news media find it useful to create that impression in order to support the power structure, which we have nothing to do with . . . see . . . They like for the Black Panther Party to be made to look like a racist organization, because that camouflages the true class nature of the struggle. But they find it harder and harder to keep up that camouflage and are driven to campaigns of harassment and violence to try to eliminate the Black Panther Party. Here in New York 21 members of the Black Panther Party were indicted last April on ridiculous charges of conspiring to blow up department stores and flower gardens. They’ve had 27 bail hearings since last April . . . see . . .”
—But everyone in here loves the sees and the you knows. They are so, somehow . . . black . . . so funky . . . so metrical . . . Without ever bringing it fully into consciousness everyone responds—communes over—the fact that he uses them not for emphasis, but for punctuation, metrically, much like the uhs favored by High Church Episcopal ministers, as in, “And bless, uh, these gifts, uh, to Thy use and us to, uh, Thy service”—