“Open up your hearts and your minds to the words of Professor Derrick Bell.”
- Barack Obama
If we were to open our hearts and minds to Professor Derrick Bell, what would we find?
“Bell was credited with developing “critical race theory,” which
suggested that the U.S. legal system was inherently biased against
African Americans and other minorities because it was built on an
ingrained white point of view. He argued in his many books and lectures
that the life experiences of black people and other minorities should be
considered in hiring decisions and in applying the law.
Bell maintained that the standards for promotion and tenure at law
schools – and Harvard, in particular – were inherently discriminatory
and excluded a broad group of minorities. By hiring only graduates of
top-tier law schools who had clerked at the Supreme Court, he argued,
academia was populated by a uniform a group of standard-issue
professors, most of them white men.”
And why are we not surprised that he was a Farrakhan supporter?
He said of Farrakhan:
"Some scholars, both black and white, challenged Bell’s
ideas, as well as his strong support of Nation of Islam leader Louis
Farrakhan. Nonetheless, Bell remained one of the country’s most
outspoken public intellectuals until his death.”
He said of Farrakhan:
"Smart and superarticulate, Minister Farrakhan is perhaps the best
living example of a black man ready, willing and able to 'tell it like
it is' regarding who is responsible for racism in this country …. every
black person important enough to be interviewed is asked to condemn
Minister Farrakhan--or any other truly outspoken black leader."
- Derrick Bell on Louis Farrakhan
and:
"Even those who
strongly disagree with some of [Farrakhan's] positions must ask whether
the negatives justify total condemnation."
- Professor Derrick Bell on Louis Farrakhan
Farrakhan, of course, has said many outrageous things over the years. One of the most offencive things that Calypso Louie has ever said, he said on numerous occasions:
"The Jews don't like Farrakhan, so they call me Hitler. Well, that's a
good name. Hitler was a very great man. He rose Germany up from the
ashes."
- Louis Farrakhan
Some will say that we shouldn't judge Obama or Bell by their friends and associates. Would we say the same about friends and associates of David Duke? Of course not.
“How can you call yourself an intellectual and not find anti-Semitism nauseating?”
- Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, Jr., denounced Bell's anti-semitism
In a New York Observer interview published on 10 October 1994, Bell
denounced Henry Louis (Skip) Gates for writing a New York Times op-ed
condemning black anti-Semitism
From the same interview:
Khalid Muhammad was Farrakhan’s right hand, who made a name for himself referring to Jews as, among many other things, “bloodsuckers” whose “father was the devil.
Bell, in the same interview:
Author James Traub voiced this opinion in his 1993 piece on the professor:
"I was furious. Even if everything he said was true, it was inexcusable not to mention what
might have motivated blacks to feel this way, and to fail to talk about
all the Jewish neoconservative racists who are undermining blacks in
every way they can."
From the same interview:
"We should
really appreciate the Louis Farrakhans and the Khalid Muhammads while
we’ve got them.”
Khalid Muhammad was Farrakhan’s right hand, who made a name for himself referring to Jews as, among many other things, “bloodsuckers” whose “father was the devil.
“We kill the women. We kill the children. We kill the babies. We kill
the blind. We kill the crippled. We kill the crazies. We kill ‘em all.
We kill the faggots. We kill the lesbians. We kill them all.”
- Khalid Muhammad
"While these guys talk a lot, they don’t do anything. The new crop of
leaders are going to be a lot more dangerous and radical, and the next
phase will probably be led by charismatic individuals, maybe teenagers,
who urge that instead of killing each other, they should go out in gangs
and kill a whole lot of white people.”
- Professor Derrick Bell on Louis Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad
Bell, in the same interview:
“Blacks will simply never gain full equality in this country.”
Author James Traub voiced this opinion in his 1993 piece on the professor:
“That’s Derek Bell’s bottom line: if it comforts whites,
it’s bad; if it comforts blacks–i.e., Farrakhan–it’s good. Bell, along
with Farrakhan and so many others, offers victimization as a
consolation.”
A few of Professor Bell’s more notable quotes (all of them from his 1992 book Faces at the Bottom of the Well) on the subject of race include the following:
“Despite undeniable progress for many, no African Americans are
insulated from incidents of racial discrimination. Our careers, even our
lives, are threatened because of our color.”
“[T]he racism that made slavery feasible is far from dead . . . and
the civil rights gains, so hard won, are being steadily eroded.”
“… few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.”
“[D]iscrimination in the workplace is as vicious (if less obvious)
than it was when employers posted signs ‘no negras need apply.’”
“We rise and fall less as a result of our efforts than in response
to the needs of a white society that condemns all blacks to quasi
citizenship as surely as it segregated our parents.”
“Slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”
“Tolerated in good times, despised when things go wrong, as a people
we [blacks] are scapegoated and sacrificed as distraction or catalyst
for compromise to facilitate resolution of political differences or
relieve economic adversity.”
“Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even
those Herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than
‘temporary peaks of progress,’ short lived victories that slide into
irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white
dominance”—in the realization that “white self-interest will prevail
over [B]lack rights.”
That’s who Obama was rallying for in his speech. That’s for whose words
and work he wanted the crowd to open their hearts and minds…a man, who
believed that racism was permanent and that blacks and whites could
never live in harmony and equality.
Bell believed that the civil rights movement was a fraud and that, while white liberals helped blacks, they only did so because of their own self-interest. He thought that civil rights law, affirmative action programmes, and actions to address institutional discrimination were only an attempt by whites, including Progressive whites, to keep their power while "paying" minorities to remain cooperative. Payments were made in the form of jobs at prestigious universities like Harvard for "token blacks" and welfare for the majority of African-Americans....anything to keep them from rioting and trashing the white liberals' lawn.
He knew that this was a lie, but said it anyway. He believed that American law could not be colourblind. He believed that racism was permanent in America, as it was founded and as the law was made even in the 21st century. There was no way, in his opinion, for America to wash away its "original sin."
Bell's problem was more than "skin deep." If a school had professors like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on its faculty, he would not consider it to have "black" professors. Because they do not "think black," they are not black. This was really what was at the basis of the protests at Harvard in the early 1990s. Bell, his colleagues and followers argued that the legal systems in America were irretrievably broken and inherently patriarchal and racist. The American legal system, as well as its economic and society, had to be ripped out by the root and rebuilt.
''Even liberal white scholars ... have to imagine that they are not
oppressors. Black people have stories and experiences that provide the
basis not only for their lives but for their scholarship. It's not that
they can't, but they do face barriers to their ability to explain the
reality of racism in America.''
- Derrick Bell
- Derrick Bell
Bell believed that the civil rights movement was a fraud and that, while white liberals helped blacks, they only did so because of their own self-interest. He thought that civil rights law, affirmative action programmes, and actions to address institutional discrimination were only an attempt by whites, including Progressive whites, to keep their power while "paying" minorities to remain cooperative. Payments were made in the form of jobs at prestigious universities like Harvard for "token blacks" and welfare for the majority of African-Americans....anything to keep them from rioting and trashing the white liberals' lawn.
American law, Bell argued, was at its core racist. It
could not be made race-neutral. On videotape, he once said:
“It’s
a tough case to make because our courts, our system, only understands
discrimination if somebody comes in and says ‘no n1ggers allowed.’ And
the law school has not done that at all.”
He knew that this was a lie, but said it anyway. He believed that American law could not be colourblind. He believed that racism was permanent in America, as it was founded and as the law was made even in the 21st century. There was no way, in his opinion, for America to wash away its "original sin."
Bell's problem was more than "skin deep." If a school had professors like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams on its faculty, he would not consider it to have "black" professors. Because they do not "think black," they are not black. This was really what was at the basis of the protests at Harvard in the early 1990s. Bell, his colleagues and followers argued that the legal systems in America were irretrievably broken and inherently patriarchal and racist. The American legal system, as well as its economic and society, had to be ripped out by the root and rebuilt.
From Breitbart:
"Bell was one of the chief proponents of Critical Race Theory, a
radical doctrine that holds that American legal institutions—including
our civil rights laws—perpetuate white supremacy.
Bell’s ideas were not only radical, but bizarre. After leaving
Harvard (he resigned in 1992), he wrote a racialist, antisemitic
fictional essay titled “The Space Traders,” which Ninth Circuit judge Alex Kozinski described in the New York Times with disgust:
"Imagine, if you will, that space aliens land in the United States and
offer ''untold treasure'' in exchange for surrendering all black
citizens to them. What does white America do? It votes to accept the
deal by overwhelming margins. So says the law professor Derrick Bell,
who poses the question in an allegorical tale he calls ''The Space
Traders.''
There is opposition, however. Jews condemn the trade as genocidal and
organize the Anne Frank Committee to try to stop it. Empathy from
another group that has suffered oppression? Not according to Bell.
Instead, Jews worry that ''in the absence of blacks, Jews could become
the scapegoats.''
Such parables pass for legal scholarship these days…
Consider the ''Space Traders'' story. How does one have a meaningful
dialogue with Derrick Bell? Because his thesis is utterly untestable,
one quickly reaches a dead end after either accepting or rejecting his
assertion that white Americans would cheerfully sell all blacks to the
aliens. The story is also a poke in the eye of American Jews,
particularly those who risked life and limb by actively participating in
the civil rights protests of the 1960's. Bell clearly implies that this
was done out of tawdry self-interest. Perhaps most galling is Bell's
insensitivity in making the symbol of Jewish hypocrisy the little girl
who perished in the Holocaust -- as close to a saint as Jews have. A
Jewish professor who invoked the name of Rosa Parks so derisively would
be bitterly condemned -- and rightly so."
The essay was not too offensive for Hollywood, however—or HBO, which turned it into a TV movie, Space Traders, in 1994 as part of a “bizarre, thought-provoking” blaxploitation trilogy, Cosmic Slop.
Bell received a writing credit for the short film."
Derrick Bell's Blaxploitation Movie "Cosmic Slop Space Traders"
Part I
Part II
Part III
Following the teachings of his mentor Robert L. Carter, Bell understood well that integration offered blacks nothing
but proclamations of equality without daring to question the white
supremacist organization of society. While the Black bourgeois continue
to market the suffering of poor, disenfranchised, brutalised and
terrorised black people as a means to gain visibility and compassion
from white gatekeepers, Bell lived a life that demonstrated struggle
amidst the permanence of white supremacy, not because he believed in a
“mythical hope” in whites’ moral character, but because he saw
Afrolantica and knew just as his hero Paul Robeson that Blacks could
create a world here in America unseen by the tyrannical gaze of whites
and unrecognisable to those who simply cannot “THINK BLACK.”
Bell's radicalism was not simply based upon bringing attention to racism and discrimination. As he said throughout his life:
There is a certain visceral hate beneath Bell's professorial demeanor. He doesn't want to find a way for the races to live in harmony and equality. He believed that it was impossible. A strain of black separatism runs deep in his theories.
Who does Bell think is good at upsetting, "a hell of a lot of white people," and a "great hero for the people? Louis Farrakhan.
Bell's radicalism was not simply based upon bringing attention to racism and discrimination. As he said throughout his life:
"I live to harass white people."
There is a certain visceral hate beneath Bell's professorial demeanor. He doesn't want to find a way for the races to live in harmony and equality. He believed that it was impossible. A strain of black separatism runs deep in his theories.
Who does Bell think is good at upsetting, "a hell of a lot of white people," and a "great hero for the people? Louis Farrakhan.
Derrick Bell endorsed a journal dedicated to the
“abolition of whiteness,” called “Race Traitor,” whose motto is “Treason
to the white race is loyalty to humanity.”
“[Derrick Bell has] an egregious toleration of bigotry."
- Harvard Law Professor, Randall Kennedy, who is also African-American
From a review of Derrick Bell's book "Afrolantica Legacies":
"The mythic island of Afrolantica is resurfacing equadistant from the U.S. and Africa. It’s previous appearance prompted African Americans and members of the African Diaspora to pack up their lives and attempt to establish a free society on the island oasis only hospital to black people. Instead, they received a list of 7 principles with which to confront oppression and empower themselves while the island returned to the ocean.
As the nation and the world prepare for its return, several parties prepare for critical discussions about race and what it will mean for black people to leave N. America for good over inequality. Among them is a speech by the President of the United States, Bill Clinton, apologizing for racism and the author of the speech, Derrick Bell, and his alien/sorceress colleague Geneva Crenshaw, outlining illustrations of the 7 principles to light the way.
[snip]
Unfortunately, he is less successful in discussing antisemitism and the conflict between some Jewish people and some African Americans. His essay/story “Shadowboxing” dispenses with any pretense of science fiction or even much fiction in order to posit a conversation between Bell and a fictional Jewish colleague who Bell feels is unreasonable and slightly racist. Hirsch, the colleague, comes across as a hyper-sensitive, self-obsorbed, colleague invested not so much oppression olympics as oppression eclipse in which only Jewish people suffer. In other words his character is an offensive stereotype. Worse the way that fiction Bell interacts with him about race and ethnicity exempts antisemitism while holding Jewish people accountable for racism. I’m unclear what is worse in this chapter, the insistence that Jewish people overreact to antisemitism to the erasure of other forms of oppression by a character who is guilty of the exact same thing, or the fact that important events in which Jewish boycotts of black leaders and companies led to their demise are eclipsed by the profoundly negative narrative of this chapter. It took me days to push through this chapter and its presence in the collection ensured that I could not recommend this book or gift it to anyone else."
CNN Implodes Over Breitbart's Obama/Bell Video
But, it is Joel Pollak, who is a Jew, was born in South Africa, is married to a black woman from South Africa, and is the father of a bi-racial daughter named Maya (Barack Obama's sister's name) who is the racist…not Professor Derrick Bell, who
dreamed of Afrolantica and fantasised that whites would sell blacks to
aliens and Jews would stand by and do nothing because they only care
about money…not Barack Obama, who praised him and was his friend…not
Soledad O’Brien, who doesn’t seen anything wrong with Professor Bell’s
radical racialism. Yeah, right.
From Powerline:
Last night the spirit of Breitbart lived on with the release of a video showing Harvard law student Barack Obama celebrating the radical “critical race theorist” Derrick Bell. Bell can’t be written off as “some guy in my neighborhood” as Obama did with William Ayers, or sloughed off like Rev. Jeremiah Wright with the “I-didn’t-really-listen-to-his-sermons” excuse. Obama used to assign Bell in his class on “race and the law” at the University of Chicago. Now we know Obama has an affinity for Bell. Let’s see if the mainstream media asks about this the way the media used to ask Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan about their supposed ties to the John Birch Society. I’m not holding my breath.
The case of Derrick Bell is quite useful not so much in illuminating that Obama is not so secretly a radical, but as yet another example of the utter bankruptcy of the liberal imagination. One of Bell’s best-known works is his supposed moral fable about American racism called “Space Traders.” The story, later made into an HBO short film, features outer space aliens coming to the United States and offering to exchange gold and other natural resources in return for taking America’s black population back to the cosmos. We’re all supposed to feel guilty because the story ends with the Power Structure of the nation agreeing to the deal, forcibly detaining African-Americans and handing them over to ET.
The story doesn’t exactly pack the moral force of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to be sure, but we are meant to take it seriously anyhow.
Who would believe such a ridiculous story? Ask yourself this clarifying question: who is it that believes that human beings are a liability, that overpopulation is a crisis, and that physical “natural resources” are the larger asset than human beings who come with two hands and a brain? It is liberals who believe this most fervently, not the advocates of free markets and individual liberty. Liberals have long hooted at Julian Simon and others who argue that people are the “ultimate resource,” and not physical matter, especially not gold. Only a liberal would find “Space Traders” to be a plausible scenario. No pro-life president would ever make Bell’s deal; it would require a liberal president like . . . Barack Obama!
Derrick Bell unwittingly reveals who the real racists are these days, and along the way reveals why it is that liberal guilt exists. Bell curve indeed.
J. Christian Adams:
From Powerline:
Obama and the Bell Curve
Last night the spirit of Breitbart lived on with the release of a video showing Harvard law student Barack Obama celebrating the radical “critical race theorist” Derrick Bell. Bell can’t be written off as “some guy in my neighborhood” as Obama did with William Ayers, or sloughed off like Rev. Jeremiah Wright with the “I-didn’t-really-listen-to-his-sermons” excuse. Obama used to assign Bell in his class on “race and the law” at the University of Chicago. Now we know Obama has an affinity for Bell. Let’s see if the mainstream media asks about this the way the media used to ask Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan about their supposed ties to the John Birch Society. I’m not holding my breath.
The case of Derrick Bell is quite useful not so much in illuminating that Obama is not so secretly a radical, but as yet another example of the utter bankruptcy of the liberal imagination. One of Bell’s best-known works is his supposed moral fable about American racism called “Space Traders.” The story, later made into an HBO short film, features outer space aliens coming to the United States and offering to exchange gold and other natural resources in return for taking America’s black population back to the cosmos. We’re all supposed to feel guilty because the story ends with the Power Structure of the nation agreeing to the deal, forcibly detaining African-Americans and handing them over to ET.
The story doesn’t exactly pack the moral force of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, to be sure, but we are meant to take it seriously anyhow.
Who would believe such a ridiculous story? Ask yourself this clarifying question: who is it that believes that human beings are a liability, that overpopulation is a crisis, and that physical “natural resources” are the larger asset than human beings who come with two hands and a brain? It is liberals who believe this most fervently, not the advocates of free markets and individual liberty. Liberals have long hooted at Julian Simon and others who argue that people are the “ultimate resource,” and not physical matter, especially not gold. Only a liberal would find “Space Traders” to be a plausible scenario. No pro-life president would ever make Bell’s deal; it would require a liberal president like . . . Barack Obama!
Derrick Bell unwittingly reveals who the real racists are these days, and along the way reveals why it is that liberal guilt exists. Bell curve indeed.
J. Christian Adams:
Both Obama and Bell demanded that Harvard hire professors on the basis of race. Obama and other students rallied to Bell’s side after Bell quit teaching until Harvard implemented race-based hiring policies. Other archived video tapes I have reviewed reveal Obama’s favorite law professor espouses racial ideas deeply at odds with American values.
The revelation is the latest in a pattern of Barack Obama’s associations with individuals who promoted a racially divisive America. In 2008, America learned that Obama attended, and had his children baptized, in a church run by the black bigot Rev. Jeremiah Wright. After the Obama campaign launched a successful existential war to have the Rev. Jeremiah Wright remain a household name only to Fox News viewers, Americans dreamed an Obama presidency would usher in a post-racial era.
That never materialized.
Instead, Professor Derrick Bell’s racial world view is now manifesting in the policies of the Obama administration, particularly in Eric Holder’s Justice Department. That’s why Obama’s radical associations in the past matter.
That’s also why Senator Obama’s appearance with New Black Panther Party President, Malik Zulu Shabazz in Selma, Alabama, matters. I detail the 2007 Selma event and photographs with Obama and Shabazz in my book Injustice. Andrew Breitbart courageously published other photos of Obama and Shabazz. The Leftist photographer prohibited my publisher (Regnery) from using some of the photos. He knew how incendiary they were, and so did Andrew. Remember, Malik Zulu Shabazz is the very defendant who Eric Holder let off in the New Black Panther voter intimidation case.
Policies of racial division, and racial preference have characterized this administration, even if most in the media have willingly failed to cover them.
Nobody should celebrate this lost chance for national racial healing many voters thought would characterize his Presidency. Nobody should be glad that the Obama administration, for example, turns a blind eye toward racially motivated violence like the mob attacks in Wisconsin or Dayton.
That Obama gravitated toward Bell, Wright, and Bill Ayers and all the others we now know about says something about the man.
Contrary to those who might praise Derrick Bell, America is the worse off because of his ideas.
Bell was a lawyer who would mischaracterize the law to stoke racial strife. I had the opportunity to review the “Obama Tapes” at their source a few weeks ago. Obama’s glowing introduction of Bell is a small part of a bigger story.
In another tape I reviewed, Bell blatantly misrepresents employment law in describing a lawsuit brought by Harvard Law students demanding race based hiring:
“It’s a tough case to make because our courts, our system, only understands discrimination if somebody comes in and says ‘no niggers allowed.’ And the law school has not done that at all.”
This is an outright falsehood. Employment discrimination law recognizes a case in in far lesser circumstances than Bell allows, and Bell knew it. But it demonstrates how Bell, on camera for an audience, would resort to the most incendiary of racial fables to push his racialist agenda.
As I describe in Injustice, Obama resorted to the same dishonest and racially incendiary tactic in his 2007 Selma speech, falsely characterizing the Bush Justice Department’s efforts to stamp out black-only scholarships at the public Southern Illinois University. Not surprisingly, Obama’s Justice Department has adopted a policy with which Derrick Bell would approve, that is, no more cases like the Southern Illinois case. This policy, as we shall see, is straight out of Bell’s world view.
On the tapes Bell paints a devilish portrayal of whites, explaining alleged reluctance to hire Harvard professors on the basis of race this way: “What they are really doing is saying, ‘unless you share our culture, it’s too much of a risk [to hire a black professor].” To Bell, he sees law professors in opposing cultural camps, and one camp finding the “culture” of the other camp uncomfortable. Absent from this world view are notions of human decency, and individual dignity that view each person as unique, and not part of a cultural divide.
While science fiction writers can generally be forgiven for implausible plots, it is hard to ignore the racially nutty novel Derrick Bell wrote in the 1990s, "The Space Traders." In it, space aliens land on Earth and seek to remove all blacks from the planet. They find a willing business partner in the Jews, who are eager to help the aliens. The Jews in Bell’s novel help cleanse blacks from Earth in exchange for gold.
It wouldn’t surprise me if Bell’s novel can be found on Louis Farrakhan or Malik Zulu Shabazz’s bookshelf. Who could fault Barack Obama if he also read his favorite professor’s science fiction?
"Henry Louis "Skip" Gates condemned Professor Derrick Bell's dismissal of anti-Semitism."
By
When, in 1992, the Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews—a tract that in the brazenness of its lies and the virulence of its anti-Semitism rivals The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,
itself now also distributed by Farrakhan's group—the black scholar
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. lamented that
“[I]t may well be one of the most
influential books published in the black community in the last twelve
months.”
"Hitler was a very great man."
- Louis Farrakhan
- Louis Farrakhan
Still another “explanation” is proffered here by the black historian
Clayborne Carson of Stanford, who lays the blame for black anti-Semitism
at the feet of Jewish organizations—which, he says, are
“overbearing in their insistence that black leaders publicly repudiate
isolated expressions of anti-Semitism over which the leaders had no
control.” This strange inversion—making the Jewish reaction to black
anti-Semitism its cause—is repeated by the left-wing black intellectual
Derek Bell (formerly of Harvard Law School), who complains that “no
other group's leaders are called upon to repudiate and condemn
individuals in their groups who do or say outrageous things.” But this
is truly a damning admission: what other groups' leaders would need such
prodding?
As is common knowledge, those expressions of anti-Semitism that black
leaders have been called upon to denounce have come not from
“individuals” within the black community but from black leaders and
intellectual spokesmen themselves. Certainly, if the head of a Jewish
organization made outright anti-black statements, other Jewish leaders
would hasten to condemn him. They would do this not only because it
would be politic, but because they would be outraged. In contrast, one
senses that the real reason Carson and Bell and the black leaders they
defend have not denounced Farrakhan, and resent being asked to do so, is
that they are not genuinely offended by the hatred so apparent in his
remarks.
From Bell, for instance, we get insipid euphemisms:
"Even those who
strongly disagree with some of [Farrakhan's] positions must ask whether
the negatives justify total condemnation."
- Professor Derrick Bell on Louis Farrakhan
...while from Cornel West have
come outright rationalizations (Farrakhan, according to West, has spoken
positively of Hitler “because he wanted to talk about somebody who
created a people out of nothing”). With statements like these, it is
hardly surprising that neither West nor Carson nor Bell can offer us any
larger understanding of black anti-Semitism and its roots; to varying
degrees they are enmeshed in it.
One man to whom we can look for a frank accounting is Henry Louis
Gates, Jr., who has had the courage to denounce black anti-Semitism in
an unwavering voice. According to Gates:
"[Anti-Semitism has become] a
weapon in the raging battle of who will speak for black America.”
Within
any politically engaged group, he argues, tactical advantage often
accrues to the faction that assumes the role of the greatest militancy
and obduracy; Farrakhan has demonstrated the validity of this
proposition, and his anti-Semitism is part of that posture. By
successfully staking out the most radical political turf, he has thrown
more moderate black leaders off-guard. Even those who have not been
drawn in must worry that they will be split off from the increasingly
radicalized mainstream. (As if to illustrate Gates's point, the NAACP
and other groups that had remained aloof from the Million Man March
rushed to endorse the “black-leadership summit” announced by Farrakhan
and his partner, Ben Chavis, immediately after the event.)
Gates's interpretation of the tactical utility of anti-Semitism is
persuasive, but it is only the beginning of an answer. Black
anti-Semitism has its source not at the level of political tactics but
at a far deeper place in the psyche. Julius Lester, a black writer who
has converted to Judaism, has attempted to plumb this region. Blacks, he
writes perceptively in this volume, achieve a much greater sense of
power when they direct their wrath at Jews rather than at whites
generically For white Americans are in some basic sense invulnerable to
anti-white prejudice on the part of blacks. “Honky” may be a linguistic
or even a moral analogue to “nigger,” but it lacks the same power to
insult and to offend, a power that would be vividly on display when the
Fuhrman tapes were played before the jury in the O.J. Simpson case.
Jews, however, for all their success in America, and unlike Gentile
white Americans, feel anything but invulnerable, and harsh words
directed at them leave real wounds. Hence the appeal.
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