Paris Review’s first issue, Spring 1953, cost 75¢.

The Paris Review was founded in 1953 by three literary-minded American graduates of elite schools (M.I.T., Yale, and Harvard).

William Styron wrote an editorial statement on the new quarterly’s intentions:

The Paris Review hopes to emphasize creative work—fiction and poetry—not to the exclusion of criticism, but with the aim in mind of merely removing criticism from the dominating place it holds in most literary magazines. […] I think The Paris Review should welcome these people into its pages: the good writers and good poets, the non-drumbeaters and non-axe-grinders. So long as they’re good.

That was then; this is now.

The latest issue of the Paris Review, June 8, 2020, features an editorial titled, Let It Burn, by one Robert Jones, Jr.

The United States of America is, by its very nature, anti-Black.

It isn’t the only anti-Black nation and it isn’t only anti-Black (it also despises the Indigenous, the queer, the trans, the poor, the disabled, and many others). But anti-Blackness is, indeed, the American fact. The nation was constructed on the notion that white people are the only fully human beings on earth, and that humanity exists on a spectrum that moves from the “purity” of whiteness to the “impurity” of Blackness. This isn’t merely some abstract idea; it’s the foundation of every American institution and what animates every American person. It’s what allows, for example, the American media to uphold the pretense that pro-Blackness and anti-Blackness are equal moral propositions or that there can ever be “both sides to the story” when it comes to a state agent murdering a Black person. …

That is the beauty of these uprisings—which are happening in all fifty states; Washington, D.C.; Puerto Rico; and all around the world, joined, surprisingly, by non-Black people who I can only imagine could no longer suffer under the strain of the guilt that is their blood memory (but not only memory). They hint at the possibility of Black liberation. It will not be achieved, of course. The United States of America would unleash the full fury of its military might upon its own citizens before it would allow that to happen. An America without its proverbial knee on the necks of the Black populace is not America at all. And that is their greatest fear: the collapse of all they hold sacred, which is held together, really, by the fiction that Black people are not people.

We must resist even if defeat is imminent.

I don’t believe we will be liberated from the American regime through superficial and incremental reforms (do you reform a lynch mob by giving them a willow tree instead of a sycamore from which to condemn the hanged?). That is the sacred knowledge that Assata Shakur prophesied for the flock to receive. What is required is a reevaluation, a dismantling. And no nation will go down quietly—especially not one whose character is no different than that of a tick, sucking the blood of the warm body to which it has attached its mandibles until it’s engorged, leaving disease in its wake. When I was a child, I was told that one way to remove a tick was to light a match and hold it near.

So, the reader might suppose that the author is a poor, constantly persecuted minority, living in fear, forced to do hard labor, and surviving barely above starvation level in some hovel.

Not really. Robert Jones, Jr. is actually a comfortable haute bourgeois homosexual living in Brooklyn, writing for ethnic magazines and the New York Times, and travelling nationally and internationally.

He got a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College, and he has a literary agent and his first novel will be being published by Putnam’s next January 5th.

This particular “editorial” is, of course, one of countless pieces of current African-American political manifestos comprised of totally hyperbolic, utterly paranoid, self-indulgent, malicious, fantastical nonsense, peddling limitlessly inflated historical grievances and expressing the most pernicious, offensive and insolent sorts of racial animosity and group chauvinism.

Reading it the second time, in the light of my just-acquired familiarity with the author’s bio, I could not help but smile, as I recognized that all this hypertrophied ebullition of hysterical complaint and rabid racial hatred was nothing real at all.

All this essay is is a classic example of over-the-top homosexual self-indulgent emotional dramaturgy. The homosexual struggles with identity and views the world in terms of theatrical scenes and roles. Mr. Jones is not really oppressed. Black blood is not really flowing down his gentrified Brooklyn street. Mr. Jones does not really hate America or hate white people. He is just pouring all of his ever-too-available emotional energy into a role: the role of the Angry Black Man.

Take that, whitey! You were afraid that the Big Bad Black Man was going to start the Revolution, waving a machete, and coming after you with a big Kalashnikov. In reality, if you looked Robert Jones, Jr. in the eye, and cried: Boo! The fierce guerilla fighter would instantly wilt and melt into tears.

So, the question becomes: how naive, how stupid, how infantile has the elite American establishment become when the editor of Paris Review cannot distinguish a ridiculous piece of homosexual role-playing fantasy from a serious statement of supposed factual observation and political analysis and intent?

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— Robert Fryer (@RobertF49999387) May 28, 2020

Theater critic Hedy Weiss

Kyle Smith, at National Review, reflects on the over-the-top reaction from Chicago theatrical circles to some modest remarks in defense of the local police by one of the windy cities leading critics.

In Chicago, where there were more homicides last year than in Los Angeles and New York City combined, expressing any support whatsoever for the police is now considered an outrage. Should you point out that, say, a play seems to suggest cops are evil crackers, you may find yourself denounced as a racist and targeted for abuse and ostracization.

A theater writer has just found that out. In what the website American Theatre dubbed “the review that shook Chicago,” adding in a subhead that “Local theatre artists rise in revolt,” veteran theater critic Hedy Weiss of the Chicago Sun-Times criticized a new play called Pass Over, which I haven’t seen but is being described as a kind of update of Waiting for Godot filtered through the sensibility of Black Lives Matter. The play, by Antoinette Nwandu, was mounted by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, perhaps the most celebrated outfit of its kind outside of New York City. Weiss found its racial politics to be a bit reductionist, and offered these thoughts in her review:

No one can argue with the fact that this city (and many others throughout the country) has a problem with the use of deadly police force against African-Americans. But, for all the many and varied causes we know so well, much of the lion’s share of the violence is perpetrated within the community itself. Nwandu’s simplistic, wholly generic characterization of a racist white cop (clearly meant to indict all white cops) is wrong-headed and self-defeating. Just look at news reports about recent shootings (on the lakefront, on the new River Walk, in Woodlawn) and you will see the look of relief when the police arrive on the scene.

Cue unbridled rage. Steppenwolf charged her with “deep-seated bigotry.” An actor named Bear Bellinger announced that he would not perform if Weiss showed up at a workshop production he was appearing in. An ad-hoc coalition that might as well have dubbed itself the Blackball Hedy Movement (but is actually called the Chicago Theater Accountability Coalition, or CTAC) launched a petition via change.org to organize the theater world of Chicago against Weiss by denying her invitations to its plays. Several theater organizations have publicly agreed to join the blackballing effort, and dozens have offered noncommittal statements of support. The group’s broadside against Weiss reads, “Over the last few years especially, we have joined together to make it clear that inappropriate language or behavior does not have a place within our community, and that prejudice of any kind will not stand.”

Wait a minute — inappropriate behavior? Inappropriate language? Weiss cannot reasonably be accused of either of these things. She isn’t disrupting plays. She isn’t using curse words and slurs in her reviews. She isn’t, as far as I know, belching loudly during shows nor unwrapping candies during quiet moments. CTAC should be honest with itself and admit that its charge against Weiss is that she is thinking inappropriate thoughts. It was less than two years ago that Steppenwolf mounted a stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. Do these people not recognize their kinship with the thought police? Do they not see that “Shut up” is not an argument?

To join the Hedy Weiss Resistance seems self-defeating on the one hand and pointless on the other — she could, after all, simply buy tickets to the plays, and pass along the cost to her employers (the Sun-Times pledged such support in its editorial defending her). Moreover, if she actually were successfully kept away from plays in Chicago, those plays would lose the publicity fillip of being written about in a widely read newspaper.

And what part of Weiss’s review is indefensible? Is not most of the violence perpetrated against blacks in Chicago, and elsewhere, carried out by other blacks? Of course it is. I won’t bother to cite statistics because everyone knows this. Do not ordinary law-abiding black citizens respond with relief when mayhem is answered by the arrival of police? To say otherwise would be to charge black communities with valuing bloodshed more than order. As for whether the portrayal of the cop in the play is meant to indict all police officers, or whether that portrayal is simplistic and generic, I couldn’t say, not having seen the play. But expressing opinions on the depth and subtlety of a play is what all theater critics do. …

The theater world is a place where being “subversive” and “transgressive” are considered the highest of all virtues. But what’s going on in Chicago is a reminder is that greasepaint revolutionaries can barely handle even mild intellectual opposition. They picture themselves riding bravely into the battlefield of ideas. But if anyone shows up to fight for the other side, they cry meekly, “Excuse me, I don’t think you’re allowed here.”