Om bara ett drygt halvår, den 30 augusti, fyller Crumb 80 år. Vi kanske kan ge tråden ett litet lyft redan nu, inför bemärkelsedagen?
Jag hittade för någon tid sedan på webben ett par snällt sagt kontroversiella (det vill säga rasistiska) seriesekvenser, som verkligen fick mig att rycka till - de var ju av Crumb! När jag så kom i håg hur undergroundartister från 1960-talat kan förutsättas tänka, skrattade jag gott ...
Nu beslöt jag att kolla upp om serie-episoderna blivit nämnda på FB. Visst tusan har de det, den eminente Guldbyxan tipsade redan för drygt 14 år sedan om dem i
en annan tråd.
Citat:
Ursprungligen postat av
Pojken med guldbyxorna
Crumb har ju ibland varit lite besvärlig för skrumphjärnor på bägge sidor av det politiska spektrat eftersom han inte är tillräckligt entydig. Serier som
When the niggers take over America och
When the goddamn jews take over America i
Weirdo fick kritik av en del läsare som läste dem bokstavstroget, och denna möjlighet utnyttjades även av den rasistiska tidningen
Race & Reality som belåtet pirattryckte dem.
Klicka på länkarna, de fungerar utmärkt.
Naturligtvis är Crumbs skildringar av ett Amerika i ni**rernas och judarnas satir, en hejdlös drift med folks fördomar. Men Crumbs vita och katolska bakgrund tycks ändå framträda lite väl skarpt, om man får tro en och annan serierecensent.
https://hyperallergic.com/502784/the...omix-magazine/Crumb went too far here; there’s too much of a gleeful anger in these comics, making what was ostensibly intended to read as a satire of racist bigotry indistinguishable from bigotry itself. Taking them at face value, a Massachusetts-based neo-Nazi magazine even reprinted these comics without Crumb’s permission, prompting mainstream media scrutiny of Crumb’s work (“Is Crumb a neo-Nazi bigot?” read a headline in the San Francisco Examiner). Writing for The New Yorker in 1994, Hilton Als reported on these comics in a brief piece titled “When Comics Aren’t Funny,” giving Crumb space to defend his work as satire. “I just had to expose all the myths people have of black and Jews in the rawest way possible to tilt the scale toward the truth,” Crumb said.
http://highlowcomics.blogspot.com/20...rdo-years.htmlThat brings us to the last piece in the book, the infamous "When The Niggers Take Over America!" This piece of trenchant satire has been appropriated by hate groups as a noble example of fighting against the dangers of non-white races, much to Crumb's horror. It is clear that this piece is meant to play on the worst fears and excesses of white America in imagining a plot by African-Americans (pushed along, of course, by Jews, the second part of the piece) to systematically destroy and enslave white Americans. This fear, spoken out loud, is at the core of much of the opprobrium hurled at President Obama today and Crumb dug down deep to generate every frightening image he could conceive to carry the piece. The problem with the story is that it's perhaps a bit too convincing in the sense that part of Crumb (perhaps through his upbringing) believed some aspects of his satire.
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Fear is born out of ignorance, and it's clear that rather than being an overt racist, Crumb's lack of exposure to people of color outside of an entertainment context left him susceptible to this kind of emotive response. The text itself is clearly satire, but the subtext (especially the way in which Crumb gleefully draws the most hateful, stereotypical portraits of African Americans and Jewish people possible) is such that intent is much more difficult to parse. Like in his comics about women where he admits that he's a misogynist in terms of what he chooses to draw and how he chooses to act out his desires, these comics reveal Crumb as someone inadvertently admitting to and struggling with racist attitudes inculcated long ago.