ANTISEMITISM AND RACISM: THE SAME YET DIFFERENT

Dear Professor Lipstadt:

Thanks for your letter. I understand that antisemitism and racial prejudice have important things in common but are also, in equally important ways, very different manifestations of hatred. Watching cell phone videos of acts of violence committed against African Americans by police officers makes me sick to my stomach. But does that mean that it’s wrong for us to try to point out the commonalities, to try to find common cause with victims of racial prejudice, or to call attention to what Jews face?1

Yours,

Abigail

Dear Abigail and Joe:

Abigail, you have zeroed in on an important and much misunderstood question. Today, African American parents live with a gnawing and persistent fear of their children being brutalized at the hands of those who are sworn to protect and to serve. Ta-Nehisi Coates painfully expresses this in Between the World and Me, a book of letters to his son. “And I am afraid,” he writes. “I feel the fear most acutely whenever you leave me.” Coates knows that for a disproportionate number of African Americans “the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body.”2 Though Coates speaks of frisking, there are more ominous possibilities, including physical violence and, in certain cases, even death.3 The prevalence of this type of violent interaction between law enforcement officers and African Americans has been well documented. A study by John Jay College of Criminal Justice found that while police use force in less than 2 percent of their interactions with white civilians, when those civilians are African Americans the use of force is more than three times as high.4

I was recently privy to a conversation between a Jewish parent and her high school–age son that starkly illustrated the differences between the perception white kids and minority kids have of the police. The previous night the young man had attended a party that ended late, in a neighborhood where there is a serious drug problem. The young man told his mother that she needn’t have worried because he’d left the party with a group of friends and, more important, a patrol car was nearby. The officer inside the car told the kids he would watch them until they were safely on their way. “So, you see, Mom, all was fine,” he said. I couldn’t help but wonder if a group of African American kids would have been similarly reassured by the presence of that police car. Not long ago, after a black man was fatally shot by a police officer, his grief-stricken mother stressed in a television interview that she had “always taught him to ‘comply’ with law enforcement.” Does a white mother have to give the same sort of instruction to her son? I was reminded of the fact that what is considered youthful indiscretions for young whites—sneaking into a private pool or playing basketball in a park at night when the park is closed—can be death traps for young blacks.5 Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor articulated this in a case involving police officers conducting warrantless searches.

For generations, black and brown parents have given their children “the talk”—instructing them never to run down the street, always keep your hands where they can be seen, do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.6

I am not, by any means, condemning all, or even most, police officers. That would be to engage in the same kind of stereotyping that I have been decrying. Police officers have an important and dangerous job. But in recent times there have been enough incidents to erase any lingering doubts that people of color—both men and women—face a particular liability when confronted by those law enforcement officials who might harbor these stereotypes. It’s an institutional racism that makes many people see an African American male as a potential threat. It is not just some police officers who fall prey to these prejudices. In the summer of 2018, a young black woman who was a student at Smith College, an elite school, was sitting in a common room eating lunch. A white college employee saw her there and called the campus police to report a “black male,” who looked “out of place.” The five-foot-two, 120-pound young woman, the first in her family to attend college, was on campus as a teaching assistant in a chemistry program. She had a teddy bear perched next to her. Sadly, this was not an isolated incident.7

Fear of violence at the hands of the police or being declared “out of place” because one wore a kippah or some other Jewish accoutrement is not a current reality for Jewish Americans. It is precisely because of this that Jews bear a special responsibility to speak out against not only this particular type of prejudice but also against all forms of discrimination. As the victims of prejudice ourselves, we know from personal experience how important it is to have the support of other communities when we fight prejudice against us.

I don’t think there’s any point in playing the “my discrimination is worse than your discrimination” game. Threats against Jewish institutions—which have resulted in the placement of screening machines at most American synagogues, Jewish community centers, and Jewish museums—are real and are scary. In recent years, people have died in this country in attacks on Jewish venues.

Long thought to have been eradicated from American society, antisemitism is back when Jewish college students are reluctant to affiliate with Jewish student organizations because they don’t want to spend their university years fighting Israel-bashing or confronting Jew-hatred.8 Whether it comes from those on the political left or political right, from Christians or, as is the case in many European countries, from Muslims, it is antisemitism when Jews are attacked—verbally or physically—because they are Jews. Antisemitism exists when parents are afraid to enroll their children in a Jewish preschool because they fear for their safety. Is this fear on the same level as that of the African American mother who sends her teenage son off to school in the morning and wonders if he will come back that afternoon? No, but why does this have to be some sort of macabre competition? Why can’t they both be considered terrible by-products of senseless hatred?

Thus far, I have been giving your Mutterer the benefit of the doubt, assuming that he just got it wrong and didn’t understand the nature of antisemitism because it presents so differently from racism against people of color. But there’s another possible explanation. The Mutterer’s response may not have been a matter of confusion; it may originate in the theory that an act of prejudice or discrimination occurs only if a powerful, privileged Goliath is either literally or figuratively beating up on a David who is a member of a racial or ethnic minority. Let’s call this the Corbyn Syndrome. Jews—for the most part white, privileged members of the elite—cannot possibly be considered victims, according to this theory. If anything, they are victimizers. And so when Jews bring up antisemitism in a discussion of discrimination and prejudice, people like the Mutterer not only find their claims illegitimate but also believe that they are “freeloading” on the legacy of the genuine suffering of racial minorities.9 I believe these people are more than tragically misguided, and I really wonder if it is possible to change their thinking. I hope I am wrong.

Yours,

DEL