From: fano@zoo1.ils.nwu.edu (Andy Fano)
Subject: Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars
Reply-To: fano@zoo1.ils.nwu.edu (Andy Fano)
Organization: The Institute for the Learning Sciences
Date: Tue, 21 Jul 1992 16:35:53 GMT


Following is an essay by Henry Louis Gates that appeared on the op-ed
page of the New York times on July 20, 1992.

If you followup, when you quote, please be sure to attribute the
quoted text to Professor Gates, and not to me.  All comments that
appear between parentheses are his, not mine.  The essay appears in
its entirety and the text has not been edited in any way.

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		Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars

		     By Henry Louis Gates Jr.

			The New York Times
			   July 10, 1992



During the past decade, the historic relationship between
Arican-Americans and Jewish Americans - a relationship that sponsored
so many of the concrete advances of the civil rights era - showed
another less attractive face.

While anti-Semitism is generally on the wane in this country, it has
been on the rise among black Americans.  A recent survey finds not
only that blacks are twice as likely as whites to hold anti-Semitic
views but - significantly - that it is among the younger and more
educated blacks that anti-Semitism is most pronounced.

The trend has been deeply disquieting for many black intellectuals.
But it is something most of us, as if by unstated agreement, simply
choose not to talk about.  At a time when black America is beleaguered
on all sides, there is a strong temptation simply to ignore the
phenomenon or treat it as something strictly marginal.  And yet to do
so would be a serious mistake.  As the African-American philosopher
Cornel West has insisted, attention to black anti-Semitism is crucial,
however discomfitting, in no small part because the moral credibility
of our struggle against racism hangs in the balance.

When the Rev. Jesse Jackson, in an impassioned address at a conference
of the World Jewish Congress on July 7, condemned the sordid history
of anti-Semitism, he not only went some distance toward retrieving the
once abandoned mantle of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s humane
statemanship, he also delivered a stern rebuke - while not
specifically citing black anti-Semitism - to those black leaders who
have sought to bolster their own strength through division.  Mr.
Jackson and others have learned that we must not allow these
demagogues to turn the wellspring of memory into a renewable resource
of enmity everlasting.

We must begin by recognizing what is new about the new anti-Semitism.
Make no mistake: This is anti-Semitism from the top down, engineered
and promoted by leaders who affect to be speaking for a larger
resentment.  This top-down anti-Semitism, in large part the province
of the better educated classes, can thus be contrasted with the
anti-Semitism from below common among African-American urban
communities in the 1930's and 40's, which followed in many ways a
familiar pattern of clientelistic hostility toward the neighborhood
vendor or landlord.

In our cities, hostility of this sort is now commonly directed toward
Korean shop owners.  But "minority" traders and shopkeepers elsewhere
in the world - such as the Indians of East Africa and the Chinese of
Southeast Asia - have experienced similar ethnic antagonism.
Anti-Jewish sentiment can also be traced to Christian anti-Semitism,
given the historic importance of Christianity in the black community.

Unfortunately, the old paradigms will not serve to explain the new
bigotry and its role in black America.  For one thing, its preferred
currency is not the mumbled epithet or curse but the densely argued
treatise; it belongs as much to the repertory of campus lecturers as
community activists.  And it comes in wildly different packages.

A book popular with some in the "Afrocentric" movement, "The Iceman
Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man's Racism, Sexism, and
Aggression," by Michael Bradley, argues that white people are so
vicious because they, unlike the rest of mankind, are descended from
the brutish Neanderthals.  More to the point, it speculates that the
Jews may have been the "`purest' and oldest Neanderthals-Caucasoids,"
the iciest of the ice people; hence (he explains) the singularly odious
character of ancient Jewish culture.

Crackpot as it sounds, the book has lately been reissued with
endorsements from two members of the City College of New York, as well
as an introduction by Dr. John Henrik Clarke, professor emeritus of
Hunter College and the great paterfamilias of the Afrocentric
movement.

Dr. Clarke recently attacked multiculturalism as the product of what
he called the "Jewish educational Mafia."  And while Dr. Leonard
Jeffries's views on supposed Jewish complicity in the subjection of
blacks captured headlines, his intellectual cohorts such as Conrad
Muhammad and Khallid Muhammad address community gatherings and college
students across the country purveying a similar doctrine.  College
speakers and publications have played a disturbing role in
legitimating the new creed.  Last year, U.C.L.A.'s black newspaper,
Nommo, defended the importance of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
the notorious Czarist canard that portrays a Jewish conspiracy to rule
the world.  (Those who took issue were rebuked with an article
headlined: "Anti-Semitic? Ridiculous - Chill.")  Speaking at Harvard
University earlier this year, Conrad Muhammad, the New York
representative of the Nation of Islam, neatly annexed environmentalism
to anti-Semitism when he blamed the Jews for despoiling the
environment and destroying the ozone layer.

But the bible of the new anti-Semitism is "The Secret Relationship
Between Blacks and Jews," an official publication of the Nation of
Islam that boasts 1,275 footnotes in the course of 334 pages.

Sober and scholarly looking, it may well be one of the most
influential books published in the black community in the last 12
months.  It is available in black-oriented shops in cities across the
nation, even those that specialize in Kente cloth and beads rather
than books.  It can also be ordered over the phone, by dialing
1-800-48-TRUTH,  Meanwhile, the book's conclusions are, in many
circles, increasingly treated as damning historical fact.  The book,
one of the most sophisticated instances of hate literature yet
compiled, was prepared by the historical research department of the
Nation of Islam.  It charges the Jews were "key operatives" in the
historic crime of slavery, playing an "inordinate" and
"disproportionate" role and "carv[ing] out for themselves a monumental
culpability in slavery - and the black holocaust."  Among significant
sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new
philosophy of black self-affirmation.

To be sure, the book massively misrepresents the historical record,
largely through a process of cunningly selective quotation of often
reputable sources.  But its authors could be confident that few of its
readers would go to the trouble of actually hunting down the works
cited.  For if readers actually did so, they might discover a rather
different picture.

They might find out - from the book's own vaunted authorities - that,
for example, of all the African slaves imported into the New World,
American Jewish merchants accounted for less than 2 percent, a finding
sharply at odds with the Nation's of Islam's claim of Jewish
"predominance" in this traffic.

They might find out that in the domestic trade it appears that all of
the Jewish slave traders combined bought and sold fewer slaves than
the single gentile firm of Franklin and Armfield.  In short, they
might learn what the historian Harold Brackman has documented - that
the book's repeated insistence that the Jews dominated the slave trade
depends on an unscrupulous distortion of the historic record.  But the
most ominous words in the book are found on the cover: "Volume One."
More have been promised, to carry on the saga of Jewish iniquity to
the present day.

However shoddy the scholarship of works like "The Secret
Relationship," underlying it is something even more troubling: the
tacit conviction that culpability is heritable.  For it suggests a
doctrine of racial continuity, in which the racial evil of a people is
merely manifest (rather than constituted) by their historical
misdeeds.  The reported misdeeds are thus the signs of an essential
nature that is evil.

How does this theology of guilt surface in our everyday moral
discourse?  In New York, earlier this spring, a forum was held at the
Church of St. Paul and Andrew to provide an occasion for blacks and
Jews to engage in dialogue on such issues as slavery and social
injustice.  Both Jewish and black panelists found common ground and
common causes.  But a tone-setting contingent of blacks in the
audience took strong issue with the proceedings.  Outraged, they
demanded to know why the Jews, those historic malefactors, had not
apologized to the "descendants of African kings and queens."

And so the organizer of the event, Melanie Kaye Kantrowitz, did.  Her
voice quavering with emotion, she said: "I think I speak for a lot of
people in this room when I say `I'm sorry.'  We're ashamed of it, we
hate it, and that's why we organized this event."  Should the Melanie
Kantrowitzes of the world, whose ancestors survived Czarist pogroms
and, latterly, the Nazi Holocaust, be the primary object of our wrath?
And what is yielded by this hateful sport of victimology, save the
conversion of a tragic past into a game of recrimination?  Perhaps
that was on the mind of another audience member.  "I don't want an
apology," a dreadlocked woman told her angrily.  "I want reparations.
Forty acres and a mule, plus interest."

These are times that try the spirit of liberal outreach.  In fact,
Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, himself explained the
real agenda behind his campaign, speaking before an audience of
15,000 at the University of Illinois last fall.  The purpose of "The
Secret Relationship," he said, was to "rearrange a relationship" that
"has been detrimental to us."

"Rearrange" is a curiously elliptical term here:  If a relation with
another group has been detrimental, it only makes sense to sever it as
quickly and unequivolcally as possible.  In short, by "rearrange," he
means to convert a relation of friendship, alliance and uplift into
one of enmity, distrust and hatred.

But why target the Jews?  Using the same historical methodology, after
all, the researchers of the book could have produced a damning
treatise on the involvement of left-handers in the "black holocaust."
The answer requires us to go beyond the usual shibboleths about
bigotry and view the matter from the demagogues' perspective,
strategically: as the bid of one black elite to supplant another.  It
requires us, in short, to see anti-Semitism as a weapon in the raging
battle of who will speak for black America - those who have sought
common cause with others or those who preach a barricaded withdrawal
into racial authenticity.  The strategy of these apostles of hate, I
believe, is best understood as ethnic isolationism - they know that
the more isolated black America becomes, the greater their power.  And
what's the most efficient way to begin to sever black America from its
allies? Bash the Jews, these demagogues apparently calculate, and
you're halfway there.

I myself think that an aphorist put his finger on something germane
when he observed, "We can rarely bring ourselves to forgive those who
have helped us."  For sometimes it seems that the trajectory of
black-Jewish relations is a protracted enactment of this paradox.

Many Jews are puzzed by the recrudescence of black anti-Semitism, in
view of the historic alliance.  The brutal truth has escaped them:
that the new anti-Semitism arises not in spite of the black-Jewish
alliance but because of it.  For precisely such trans-racial
cooperation - epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks
and Jews - is what poses the greatest threat to the isolationist
movement.

In short, for the tacticians of the new anti-Semitism, the original
sin of American Jews was their involvement - truly "inordinate," truly
"disproportionate" - not in slavery, but in the front ranks of the
civil rights struggle.

For decent and principled reasons, many black intellectuals are loath
to criticize "oppositional" black leaders.  Yet it has become apparent
that to continue to maintain a comradely silence may be, in effect, to
capitulate to the isolationist agenda, to betray our charge and trust.
And, to be sure, many black writers, intellectuals and religious
leaders have taken an unequivocal stand on this issue.

Cornel West aptly describes black anti-Semitism as "the bitter fruit
of a profound self-destructive impulse, nurtured on the vines of
hopelessness and concealed by empty gestures of black unity."

After 12 years of conservative indifference, those political figures
who acquiesced, by malign negelct, to the deepening crisis of black
America should not feign surprise that we should prove so vulnerable
to the demagogues' rousing messages of hate, their manipulation of the
past and present.

Bigotry, as a tragic century has taught us, is an opportunistic
infection, attacking most virulently when the body politic is in a
weakened state.  Yet neither should those who care about black
America gloss over what cannot be condoned:  That much respect we owe
to ourselves.  For surely it falls to all of us to recapture the basic
insight that Dr. King so insistently expounded.  "We are caught in an
inescapable network of mutuality," he told us.  "Whatever affects one
directly affects all indirectly."  How easy to forget this - and how
vital to remember.