AIDS, Racism and Homophobia

Ich zitiere hier mal die ganze Seite aus Kobena Mercers “Welcome to the Jungle” von 1994. Fiel mir ein, weil Momo sich richtigerweise über den Zusammenhang von Rassismus und Homophobie aufregt:

“As a new kind of disease, AIDS has undermined traditional confidence in the authority in medical knowledge. In the absence of a known cure or a clear-cut scientific explanation, the prerational search for someone to blame has taken precedence over rational debate on how best we can protect ourselves. Between 1981 and 1983 there was an awakening sense of anxiety directed mainly at the white gay male community and the response was to percieve the disease as a ‘gay plague’. But around 1984 to 1985, when its transmission within the heterosexual population was reluctantly acknowledged, black people were them scapegoated as its ’cause.’ When media queer-bashing reached its peak, somewhere around the time of Rock Hudson’s death, racism took its place – Haitian migrants were blamed for ‘importing’ AIDS to the United States; researchers claimed AIDS originated out of Africa; in Britain, Tory M.P.s argued for the compulsery screening of immigrants arriving from the Third World . Medical, media and government responses have veered from hysterical moral panic to causual indifference, but rather than come to terms with living with this new disease in our collective ecosystem, official responses have consistently amplified a message of fear whose only effective outcome is to reinforce racism and homophobia as ‘acceptable’ outlets for mass anxieties.

Black people are not somehow immune from the media-led panic around issues of HIV infection. Indeed, where some silently submit to fear, or even internalize racist misinformation, our vulnerability is revealed. Such morbid fatalism is as life-threatening as the vitriolic homophobia that seems a more prevalent reaction in some quarters of the black communities. It was this homophobic response, noisily voiced from the floor by belligerent activist Kuba Assagai, that errupted at the recent conference on Racism and AIDS organized by Brent Council and the London Strategic Policy Unit (LPSU) held at the Commonwealth Institute in London in November, 1978. In the afternoon I led a workshop on moral panics which was frequently disrupted by the moral panic going on next door! Some men in the “Women and AIDS” workshop provoked outraged and angry protest as they simply refused to believe that lesbians and gay men exist in the black community – although we were there in front of their very eyes.”

Mercer, Kobena (1994) Black Masculinity and the Sexual Politics of Race, in: ders., Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, S. 154 f.

Happy Birthday, Kalle!

Da blättert man wie jeden abend beim Kaffee in der Zeitung und entdeckt ganz plötzlich unter “Vermischtes” eine Geburtstagsanzeige für einen unserer Ahnherren: Karl Marx halt.

Scheint ‘ne Anzeige von Mitgliedern und Abgeordneten der Linkspartei zu sein; die beiden Zitate, die sie da drucken ließen, die sind so schön, die kann ich nicht vorenthalten. Es gilt:

“Alle Verhältnisse umzuwerfen, in denen der Mensch ein erniedrigtes, ein geknechtetes, ein verlassenes, ein verächtliches Wesen ist.”

Und:

“An die Stelle der alten bürgerlichen Gesellschaft mit ihren Klassen und Klassengegensätzen tritt eine Assoziation, worin die freie Entwicklung eines jeden die Bedingung für die freie Entwicklung aller ist.”

Wie jetzt? Was jetzt? Wollte der nicht die Menschheit durch Staatswirtschaft knechten, erniedrigen und versklaven? Ja, wo laufen sie denn?

Gut, beide Zitate doch sehr sloganisiert, Werber würden’s lieben, aber was konkret das heißen könnte, dafür bloggen wir ja … und daß die Freiheit des Anderen die Bedingung meiner eigenen ist, nicht deren Hindernis oder einfach nur Grenze, das gehört ja ganz alltäglich proklamiert. Amen.

Hauptsache dagegen

Mich treibt die Frage um, ob es der natürlichen publizistischen Barriere zwischen Verlegern geschuldet ist, dass es nun mindestens zwei große Netze gegen Nazis gibt? Oder ist das einerlei, Hauptsache dagegen?