[Peace-discuss] Text of Lecture at Mosque

[David Green]

Dear friends: I read this paper at the mosque several
weeks ago, and I would like to share it with you.
Comments are welcome, of course.

JEWS, MUSLIMS, AND RACE IN AMERICA

David Green

	At the dawn of the 20th Century, the towering
intellectual and activist W.E.B. DuBois made his most
often quoted statement: “The problem of America in the
20th century is the problem of the color line.” But
the persistence of this truism about American society
applies not only to whites and blacks, but also in a
more complicated and less-well understood sense to
non-African immigrants from all parts of the world.
However one may understand the complex and uneven
process by which various groups have achieved varied
levels of collective success and acceptance from the
powers that be in the U.S. economy and American
culture, such progress has been defined and achieved
in the primary context and against the background of
this fundamental racial social division. It is in this
persistent culture of racial subordination that the
“respectable” white classes have continuously judged
the adequacy of all incoming groups. At rhetorical and
ideological levels, a discourse of cultural character
has been called upon to justify the privileges of
whites and the miseries of blacks in personal terms;
invoking, for example: industriousness, family
structure, educational motivation, and religious
values. But this discourse of individualism and moral
character has served to obscure the realities of
fundamental and structural social class conflict in
American society that, for obvious reasons, cannot be
openly acknowledged.  I would suggest that it is still
in this context, although certainly in ways that are
unique and complicated by current global realities,
which Muslim-Americans and related groups have been
and will continue to succeed or fail in their efforts
to be perceived and accepted as truly American.
Historians have usually employed the term “nativism”
to define prejudice and discrimination by the
descendants of earlier immigrant groups against those
of more recent non-black immigrant groups, and to
distinguish this phenomenon from racism more narrowly
construed. In his classic 1955 study Strangers in the
Land, historian John Higham described the patterns of
nativism that determined the experiences of Catholics
and Jews during the 19th century and early 20th
century as they entered a society dominated by
Protestants of Western European origins. His story
ends with the passage of legislation that abruptly
ended this definitive period of immigration in 1924.
Nineteenth century elections were often marked by
accusations of “popery,” even against non-Catholics.
The history textbooks and literature anthologies used
in public schools described the United States as a
Christian (that is, Protestant) nation, and routinely
invoked stereotypes of Catholics, Jews, and Asians as
greedy, deceptive, lazy, and stupid. In the early 20th
century, the development of culturally biased
intelligence tests afforded a “scientific”
respectability to both the nativist and racist claims
of white, Protestant intellectual superiority—used not
only against blacks, but white ethnics.
	There is not time here to discuss at length the
process by which southern and eastern European
Catholics and eastern European Jews were “assimilated”
into the “mainstream” of American society. I would at
least refer to two major misconceptions about this
process, as described by Stephen Steinberg in his book
The Ethnic Myth: first, that it was one of individuals
“pulling themselves up by their bootstraps;” and
second, that it was a process in which educational
achievement preceded economic advancement. Instead,
the “rise of the ethnics” resulted from collective
economic and political organization during the
dramatic expansion U.S. wealth and power to its
current level of global economic and military
dominance, especially in the years after World War 2,
and with the help of GI benefits, labor unions, and
professional associations, and urban political
machines. But more to the point, these relative
successes were accompanied and facilitated by a
cultural re-definition and acceptance of these various
groups as being “white,” as having ascended from the
no-man’s-land of racial ambiguity to the solid ground
of fair-skinned respectability.
	This social passage as it relates to Jewish-Americans
has been recently described by U.C.L.A. anthropologist
Karen Brodkin in her 1998 book How Jews Became White
Folks. Until World War 2, working-class Jews were not
considered to be white by either Protestants or
themselves. Like other European ethnic immigrant
groups, Jews had to earn or be accorded their
whiteness by absorbing the middle-class, secular
Protestant aspirations of postwar American corporate,
consumer, professional, and political culture. Given
the affinity of many Jews for socialist and radical
movements, this especially refers to anti-Communist
political culture, albeit primarily the liberal
version of that culture, as defined by Truman,
Stevenson, and Kennedy. Unlike Catholics, Jews had to
overcome not only class barriers but also the
historical association between whiteness and
Christianity. The result has been the relatively
recent evolution of the term Judeo-Christian in
reference to the essential values of  “western
civilization.”
	Jews, of course, were prominent among supporters of
the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, and the
importance of this support was of course not insincere
and should not be minimized. But it must also be
acknowledged that the fabled alliance between blacks
and Jews was relatively short-lived and in many ways
superficial. It could not survive the movement of the
southern civil rights movement to the north and
subsequent demands for school integration and
affirmative action. It could not survive the rise of
Black Power advocates who questioned the power of Jews
in the movement. And, to refer more directly to the
central matter it hand, it could not survive the
criticism of Israel on behalf of Palestinians and
other Arabs by Stokely Carmichael and other
anti-colonialist black activists after the 1967
Arab-Israeli War, which was of course during the
anti-colonialist Vietnam War. Even most young
left-wing anti-Vietnam War Jewish intellectuals could
not tolerate black criticism of Israel (nor any other
criticism of Israel, for that matter), and at this
point serious ruptures developed that persist today in
both memory and reality.
	Since the 1960s, Jews have not only been accepted as
whites in American culture, they have come to be
somewhat glorified. I would suggest that this has been
due to two factors beyond the economic and
occupational. First has been the evolution since 1967
of U.S. support for Israel as a client state in the
Middle East, accompanied by the now customary rhetoric
of  “shared democratic values.” The second factor has
been the prominence that the Jewish holocaust has
assumed in our broader culture during that same
period. American cultural elites have “adopted” the
Jewish holocaust almost as if it happened to them, and
it has been repeatedly invoked both explicitly and
implicitly to justify our policies in the Middle East
and elsewhere, as both Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam
Hussein have come to be routinely compared to Hitler.
In sum, the United States has become a Judeo-Christian
culture with the Jewish holocaust as a primary
historical and moral reference point defining the
essential natures of good and evil.
	Meanwhile, the specter of  “black anti-Semitism” has
haunted Jewish relations with African-Americans. On
the left, I have already mentioned Black Power and
anti-colonialism. And while the Black Muslims of
Elijah Muhammad were not initially seen as threatening
to Jews, they became so in the 1960s due to the
inspired rhetoric of Malcolm X and the problematic
rhetoric of Louis Farrakhan--however politically
unrelated these two individuals came to be, and
however unrelated the Nation of Islam came to be from
the Black Muslims. I would also note parenthetically
that the introduction of many Americans of my age to
the concrete reality of Islam was through these
movements in the 1960s and 70s, especially in relation
to the conversion of well-known individuals such as
Muhammad Ali and many other black athletes. At any
rate, what we finally have are Jews—both American and
Israeli, including settlers living in the occupied
territories--being incorporated first into the
whiteness of post-World War 2 anti-communist culture
and then, even before the end of the Cold War, into
the emerging culture of anti-terrorism directed first
against Palestinians, then against Arabs, and now
against Islam, all in the context of somehow
preventing another holocaust. Meanwhile, however small
their numbers, African-American Muslims increasingly
personified one aspect of the “anti-Semitic”--and by
inference subversiv--turn of black political
movements. The complex realities of struggle, success,
and failure in both the South and the North were
simplified and sanitized by on the one hand the
posthumous reverence of the memory of Martin Luther
King, who of course invoked Old Testament Exodus
themes and who incidentally did not live long enough
to come to criticize Israel; and on the other hand
those advocates of Black Power who went “too far,” by
challenging conventional notions of liberal reformist
tactics and goals. But even associates of King like
Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young have since been tarred
with the broad and careless brush of “black
anti-Semitism” as a result of their really rather
tepid support for the causes of Palestinian and Arab
nationalism. Such damage usually cannot be completely
undone, especially in minds of those who prefer to
divide the world into such neat categories and are
invested in character assassination against those who
criticize Israel. 
To summarize: Jewish-Americans have been accorded the
status of whiteness and to some extent changed the
meaning of whiteness in religious and global racial
terms; while blacks, whatever their individual
successes and whatever the marked changes in social
and cultural conventions, have not only remained
racially stigmatized and economically subordinate, but
their blackness has in some minor but real way come to
be associated with the Muslim religious “other” in
American society.
	All of this is interesting and complicated enough
just in reference to racial relations in the U.S., and
to U.S. foreign policy in relation to the Middle East
and the Arab and Muslim worlds. But I would also
suggest that the respect for and tolerance of Muslims
in American society as well as their educational,
political, and economic progress should be at least
partly understood in this problematic domestic
context, although at this point this seems clearly
less important than the global realities of the “war
on terrorism” and its immediate danger to Muslim
well-being. If the past is precedent, then the general
success of Muslim groups in American society will,
unfortunately, depend on their ability to define
themselves economically, politically, and culturally
in similar terms to those historically employed by
white ethnics in order to distance themselves from
African-Americans, and perhaps Hispanics as well. 
Whether such an effort can or should be successful is
another matter. Of course I do not wish to be
deterministic or complacent about this matter, and if
I were I would not be standing here in the first
place, and would not have followed the peculiar path
that led me to be here as a Jewish critic of Zionism
and Israel.  This pattern of group upward mobility has
maintained an increasingly stratified social class
structure and a white power elite since the founding
of this country, and the system is built to primarily
serve their interests. It inhibits the implementation
of social reforms, such as in universal health care,
that other industrial countries take for granted; and
it maintains deeply imbedded structures of
institutionalized racism in our society—for example,
in residential patterns and education. And whatever
the problems in the Muslim world, thank God that
Muslims do not have an Israel to be required to love,
or for that matter a Castro to demonize, by which to
solidify their “ethnic interest-group” identity and
rationalize support for the irresponsible exercise of
U.S. military power. Of course I understand that there
are multiple Muslim populations, overlapping Arab
populations, and diverse visions of the role of
Muslims in American society. And of course I
understand that I have no say in such debates, in the
unlikely event that such matters are even decided by
debates. Nevertheless, as a Jew who is admittedly
frustrated by what I consider to be essential failures
in the pursuit of peace and social justice at home and
abroad, I would humbly ask for some consideration be
given to my nascent and perhaps naive hope by
employing moral reasoning that identifies
“self-interest” with the broader social good; and that
along with other “outsider” groups in American
society, you will consider these problematic ethnic
and racial histories while debating the alternatives
regarding your role in American society, and America’s
role in the world. It is not only that there is
limited room at the top, but that the maintenance of
what room there is by the privileged few has always
involved compromising the best that thoughtful and
consistently-applied moral principles,
religiously-based or otherwise, have to offer.
Finally, this critique clearly relates not only to the
role of Muslims in American society, but also to the
dire consequences of the relationship between the
American Empire and the Muslim world.


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