From: cytron@helios.dfci.harvard.edu (Andrew Cytron)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.african.american
Subject: NYT OpEd: Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars
Date: 30 Jul 92 08:44:13
Organization: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
Distribution: world
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This article was previously posted to soc.culture.jewish.
On suggestion it has also been posted to this newsgroup.

Reproduced without permission.

Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars

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 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 discomfiting, 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 confer-
ence 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 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 divi-
sion.  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 Mans 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 Neanderthal-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 en-
dorsements 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 pa-
terfamilias of the Afrocentric movement.

Dr. Clarke recently attacked multiculturalism as the product of what
he called the "Jewish educational Mafia." And while Dr. Leonard Jef-
fries'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 publicaton 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 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 can 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 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 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 unequivocally 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 big-
otry 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 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 rank of
the civil rights struggle.

For decent and principled reasons, many black intellectuals are loath
to criticize "oppositional" black leaders. Yet it has become ap-
parent 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
inescapable network of mutuality", he told us.  "Whatever affects one
directly affects all indirectly." How easy to forget this -- and how
vital to remember.  o
---------------------------------

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is professor of English and chairman of the
Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard.


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