Blacks and Jews (Continued) – I would have put this as a comment on my previous post, except that enetation, our comment engine, has either died or gone fishing, and YACCS, another popular commenter, is apparently so popular it is taking no new subscribers. This may force us out of Blogger and into Movable Type or something else, which would be too bad; I thought we were done with all the template fiddling, etc. Looks like Jessie may have to go to work again, here. (She just completed a 12-week summer internship at the National Institute of Standards & Technology, and returns to Bryn Mawr next week. So it’s not like she’s been idle.)
Anyway, the more I think about it the more depressed I become that so much of what passes for black leadership these days equates “black” with pro-Muslim, anti-Israeli views. If they did not, how could they assert that Jewish opposition to candidates with those views — but support of other black candidates! — has produced black-Jewish tension?
Most people recognize, say, that Israeli opinion is not uniform, that one could support Ariel Sharon’s opponents without being anti-Israeli and especially not anti-semitic. Similarly, Democrats are not anti-American because they supported George W. Bush’s opponent, nor are they anti-American when they oppose his policies now. It doesn’t seem too difficult to grasp this point, even though people who are anti-Israeli or anti-American also oppose Sharon and Bush. Why, then, do so many black leaders insist that blacks who are not in lockstep agreement with the leadership, i.e., themselves, are somehow not “authentic” blacks (to use Lani Guinier’s unfortunate description again) and that Jews are anti-black when they support black candidates who agree with them, or who at least do not support their enemies?
Once again, it appears that black leaders value diversity everywhere except in the black community. (See here for an earlier discussion of this point.)
