From: kraft@bit.csc.lsu.edu (Don Kraft)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.jewish
Subject: From Rebecca Kushner - the NY Times Op-Ed:  Black Anti-Semitism
Date: 24 Jul 92 19:33:38 GMT
Reply-To: <kraft@bit.csc.lsu.edu (Don Kraft)>
Organization: Nysernet

_The New York Times_ OP-ED Monday, July 20, 1992

_Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars
By Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Cambridge, Mass.

   During the past decade, the historic relationship between African-Americans
and Jewish Americans - a relationship that sponsored so many of the concrete
advances of the civil rights era - showed another and 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 beleagured 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 discomforting, 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. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s humane statesmanship,
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 of 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 "Afro-centric"
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 the oldest Neanderthal-"Causasoids," the iciest of the ice
people; hence (he explains) the singularly odious character of ancient Jewish
culture.
   Crackpot as it sounds, the book has been reissued with endorsements from two
members of the Africana Studies Department 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 Muhammmad and Khallid Muhammmad address community
gatherings and college students across the country purveying a similar doctrine.
   College speakers and publications have played a disturbing role in
legitimizing 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 Muhammmad,
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
be one of the most influential books published in the black community in [the]
last twelve 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 department of
the Nation of Islam.  It charges that 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 that 2 percent, a finding sharply at odds with the
Nation 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 that 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 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 or 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 reparation.  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 relationship with
another group has been detrimental, it only makes sense to sever it as quickly
as possible.  In short, by "rearrange," he means to convert a relationship 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 of 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 ground 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 puzzled 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 neglect, 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 escapable network of mutuality," he told us.  "Whatever
affects one directly affects all indirectly."  How easy to forget this - and how
vital to remember.

----------------------------
Henry Louis Gares, Jr. is professor of English and chairperson of the
Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard.