Cultural Impact
The phrase "radical chic" has entered into the political and cultural lexicon to describe the adoption of radical or quasi-radical causes by members of the wealthy high-society and celebrity class. Both essays were later reprinted in Wolfe's collection The Purple Decades, indicating that he considered them among his best work.
The "Radical Chic" essay was seen as exploring the complexity of race relations, much like the 1967 film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, which examined the superficiality of race relations when social-segregation was still the norm. With "Radical Chic" interracial harmony was only achieved through complete white submission.
Read more about this topic: Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing The Flak Catchers
Famous quotes containing the words cultural and/or impact:
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“Conquest is the missionary of valour, and the hard impact of military virtues beats meanness out of the world.”
—Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)