Yes, it had been idealistic! Make sure to get that message across! Now the characters have grown up. They established "priorities." Families and careers! Concern about the plight of others is not one of those "priorities." Unless you happen to be an odd balls still teacher "those Harlem kids."
Alex's suicide just cannot be understood! If the doctor or the lawyer or the actor tries to discuss Alex, the subject is changed. The changing of the subject becomes habitual.
Needless to say, Black Americans do not make an appearance in The Big Chill. No Black even appears in the background. There is a friendly police who, we are told, has kept the house from being burglarized more than once! Maybe there were Black friends at Michigan when it might or might not have been fashionable to have Black friends. Whatever disturbed Alex enough for him to take his life may be linked to the absence of Blacks among the group of friends. And in the film! But not one actor is assigned to utter a profound statement regarding this absence. As the late critic Roger Ebert noted, the film's ending provides no resolution. And worse, it suggests that the friends (that is, white liberals in general) made a mistake "back in the day." The Blacks ("scum"?) never deserved the support, morally or otherwise, from white America! I suspect this message was intentional.
Of course, the "outsider," who, like Alex, was merely a surrogate outsider, is invited in. There are opportunities for him to re-join the family of American winners. He accepts, and all ends well for the newest generation of the American white liberal class.
During this era of "the big chill," I returned to the university to work on a master's degree in English/creative writing. I remember a professor, formally my graduate adviser, in class, look my way when he first informs the class about his stocks. Yes, stocks! This was a graduate-level course in the English department of a major, predominantly white university in Illinois, and the white male professor made a point thereafter to "educate" us about the progress of his stocks on the Market. This was the 1980s. It was all over by then! Reagan and family values was in! And Black Americans were not all in the family !
Jordan Peele's 2017 film, Get Out, captures what it is like when you are Black and, suddenly begin to feel unsettled, surrounded by people whose practice of whiteness is as deplorable, committed for "your own good." Rather matter-of-fact, of violence! Good violence ! Violence that weaves in, ever so smoothly, with the fabric of any American flag waving proudly from porches of the "Forgotten."
In the past forty years, the white liberal class could have vigorously struggled in solidarity against white supremacy, racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, and corporatism; instead, it has become a recognizable characteristic of the class to reminisce on past involvement with the Civil Rights Movement and the Anti-War Movement while playing the either or game in hopes of remaining on top.
And now Trump, and this narrative of the "Forgotten"? I can only echo Guehenno: only a "clever" writer could have come up with such an "excellent serial," requiring the "faculty for forgetfulness"--an "instinctive violence" in and of itself ( Diary of the Dark Years, 1940-1944).
Do Americans really want to know?
I think the majority of Americans, white as well as Black, do not.
I am seeing car stickers that read: "I'm Proud to Be A Deplorable!" I went online and discovered that anyone can purchase T-shirts that read: "I am a deplorable and I'm proud." It is a free country. When you are a star, the world just lets you do it!
But somewhere if you wear a hoodie while Black or wear a T-shirt with the words "Black Lives Matter" while Black, you could be suspected of a conspiracy to terrorize Americans. It could happen that you are shot. You could lose your life if you, too, decide to express yourself without the benefit of being white. It is profitable and therefore acceptable to rap or play football while Black rather than to think and thus challenge the normalization of white supremacy. The only expression of Black lives that corporations value is that which makes America great--Again! Because fear believes in waging war in seven, now, seven Arab nations. It believes in the death penalty. It believes no safety nets should be made available for the poor and homeless. Fear believes the deportation and separation of Black and Brown families will bring about safety and peace. Fear, too, is contagious; it drives victims of white supremacy to seek relief in a mythical future that promises to defy death! In the end, fear de-legitimizes the right to exist of anyone who thinks outside the framework of ideology and dogma, and that in turn, makes it easier for the deplorable to become, once again, normalized. Humanity is here because liberals have done well at repressing resistance and embracing willful ignorance.
It is less painful for white Americans to discuss fascism and the Holocaust--until you remind America that Nazis studied the US enslavement of Blacks.
There is a passage in historian Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (2017) that reminds me of our yesterday or is it our today ? Snyder is discussing the year 1933, the year in which Stalin's starvation campaigns were at their peak, and, in Germany, the Nazi Party has just come into power.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
5
4
3
