RACISM AND PREJUDICE
AUBREY MATSHIQI: Can collective memory be a monopoly?
‘There was a time when Jews, blacks and dogs were banned, there was a time when black people were accused of breeding like dogs’
In the film Liberty Heights, the Kurtzman family lives in a suburb in Baltimore. One of the Kurtzman children — a boy in the clutches of puberty — is in love with a "negro" girl.
The movie, which is set a decade after the end of the Second World War, has a scene I found funny and tragic. It is Halloween and the boy comes down the stairs wearing a costume that mortifies his parents. They scold him and ask him to go and change. What is the boy wearing? He is wearing a Nazi uniform and, to make sure there is no confusion about who he is supposed to be, he has a neat Hitler-like moustache stuck to his upper lip. In another film, The Believer, a Jewish boy becomes a neo-Nazi who advocates the killing of Jews. Is he anti-Semitic? Can a Jew be anti-Semitic? I laughed when the Kurtzman boy came down the stairs wearing a Hitler Halloween costume. I laughed because, like other scenes in the movie, it was hilarious. Was it anti-Semitic of me to laugh? Did Jews laugh at this scene? Was it anti-Semitic of them? Or, as we say in isiZulu, was it a case of kuyahlekwa noma kufiwe (we laugh even when we are in mourning)?This scene says something very serious about the nature ...
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