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No black and white
presentation
by Håkon Harket,
Aftenposten, Norway, September 21st, 1995
Original Norwegian text
Jacob Holdt has visited Oslo with his American pictures.
His anti -racist shock therapy should benefit the whole people
Context: Jacob Holdt was hired by the Norwegian Immigration
Department to try to counter the rising racism against immigrants.
Students from schools all over was literally forced into the Black
Box (a theater) as well as high schools in the rest of Norway
for a whole school day to go through his therapy. Afterwards the
students were often interviewed about the impact on them. In
Hönefoss some Nazis said in the media that it had changed them away
from their Nazi sympathies.
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When you
get out at the other end of Jacob Holdt’s American presentation in
the Black Box Theater, you don't go out in the light. This is not
because the clock is approaching midnight and that the daylight has
long since taken the evening. This is because you have spent an
uncertain number of hours in the company of night-black prejudices.
You probably came in voluntarily, but soon understand that you are
forcibly committed with the diagnosis "racist" of a therapist who
knows all the escape routes before you seek them.
He has returned to Oslo now. In the last possible moment, one could
be tempted to say. For a long time, he thought it was of no use to
show the pictures in Europe. These are American images, but it was
never anti-American feelings Jacob held in his heart. And when he
experienced that it was "the other people's" racism we Scandinavians
experienced in his gloomy epic in the late 70's, he once again
packed the American suitcase and moved it all over there, where he
has since toured with his Socratic show. Finally, he felt he had to
come back anyway to thematize our own racism.
Slaves
and debt slaves
The pictures and black music rinse you in a stream of
pain and misery that lasts. We hear the latest slave tell his story.
Charles Smith said he was 134 when Jacob met him. At the age of 13
he was lured on board the white ships. He never saw his mother
again.
We meet
Woody who talks freely about all the niggers he has dispatched with
his brothers Sammy and John. How many? Asks Jacob Holdt. More than
he has fingers and toes, Woody replies.
We see pictures from the Immokalee, where the slave camps are run as
in antebellum time, and from the tobacco plantations where the
landlords' palace is erected over the living corpses of the poor
debt slaves. Freedom can be purchased, but already the price level
in the ruler's monopolized grocery store makes it a thought flight.
Debt binds the workers to the ancestors' slave fields, and all
attempts at unionizing them are beaten down with brutal hand. Or
with bullets, as was the case with Jacob’s friend, Popeye Jackson,
who was murdered in his struggle for the rights of the poor.
It is only on the surface a journey between hell and heaven Jacob
takes us on when commuting between the black underclass and the
white upper class. In reality, we are constantly in the purgatory,
now to speak a little medieval. We meet the wealth of the poor and
poverty of the rich, but without getting the chance to seek refuge
in the fantasy of poor happiness. It is the common human despair in
the violence of racism that again and again is exposed. We see how
the black despair is connected to the white, where the children
lives trapped in luxury for fear of the wrath of the poor. In a
society where the virus of race hatred has been ravaging for
generations, no one goes free of infection.
Not even the liberals. We liberals. When Jacob Holdt exposes the
mindless fury in the white lower class, you know your own rage in
your stomach. And thus, the liberal racist is revealed in your guts.
We make the noisy racists into scapegoats for our own xenophobia and
arrogance, while we make the screams of the black despair into art
and entertainment. It is a strange experience. The pictures and
music go in your body, while you are trying hard to
polemize
against the concepts "Repressive tolerance", "Structural violence".
Isn’t this a well-known language? Leftist litany and power language.
That is precisely what is intended. The therapist closes the
intellectual escape routes, while bombarding you with impressions
that lead you right into the trap of racism. As an audience, you are
oppressed by images, text and sub context where “the others" carry
the word while you sit locked up in the shame.
Urgently current and important
If there
is a way out of racism, it is Jacob's claim that it goes through
insight into your own racism. Therefore, his American account is
also so intrusive for us. While the racism debate has been
characterized by mutual accusations and attempts to circle in the
actual sources of infection, Holdt teaches us to take in the term
without force; Take it easy. We are racists. All of us.
That's not where the distinction goes. The distinction goes between
those who want to resist their own xenophobia by opening their homes
and minds to the encounter with strangers, and those who choose to
join the black mass of racism. And both spokesmen carry the word in
most of us, not so often in the newspaper columns and in the square,
perhaps, but in the quiet life of the chamber.
Racism
has come to stay. Therefore, it becomes crucial that we learn to
live with it as the disease it is. The Directorate of Immigration is
wise to bring Jacob Holdt back and involuntarily commit the
Norwegian people on his divan. We know that there is a
life-threatening virus in circulation that we are all infected with.
There is hardly any better vaccine than an evening with Jacob Holdt.
Should anyone oppose, we can just tell them that there is nothing to
be afraid of. Remember, they do it in America.
Copyright © 1997
AMERICAN PICTURES; All
rights reserved.
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