RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2021/07/a-threat-assessment-for-american-jewry-part-one/

Which of the following samples of anti-Semitism—all having occurred in the last few months—is the greatest threat to America and the Jews?

1) Hamas-style gangs pursuing and attacking Jews in New York and Los Angeles.

2) Campus intimidation of the kind that makes the chancellor and provost of Rutgers University retract the statement they had previously issued against acts of anti-Semitism.

3) Elected members of the U.S. Congress who abet the war against Israel in this country.

4) Open letters by dozens of rabbinical students “in tears” over Israel’s forcible removal of Palestinians from their homes, and by scholars of Jewish studies and Israel studies who “share the pain of Gazans.”

The good news is that Jews are no longer alone in identifying the danger. Donna Brazile, former chair of the Democratic National Committee, is one of many political commentators who now warn that anti-Semitism has reached, as she put it to the Wall Street Journal in May of this year, “pandemic proportions.” Speaking as someone who has herself experienced discrimination, she writes that anti-Semitism is based on the same belief as racism and other forms of prejudice, namely that “the other” is inferior and not entitled to the same rights as alleged superiors. She empathizes with the pain of Jews “in the same way that Jews sympathized with the racist oppression” suffered by black Americans.

Her acknowledgment of the danger of anti-Semitism is welcome and indispensable. At the same time, she mischaracterizes the problem. The legacy of slavery presents a very different challenge to Americans than the one presented by the organization of politics against the Jews, and those differences call for opposite responses. The idea driving the abovementioned attacks is not the Nazi claim that Jews are biologically inferior but the claim of Israel’s adversaries that Jews occupy other people’s land. In fact, Brazile’s anxiety was probably quickened by some of her fellow black Americans who include Jews in their attack on white supremacy and the Jewish state. Today’s attacks accuse Jews of their unfair superiority.

These distinctions in no way subordinate one set of injuries to another, but each requires its own diagnosis. Assessing the dangers that anti-Semitism poses to the Jews and America may help to clarify what it is and isn’t. I discuss them in ascending order of threat.

https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/why-im-not-writing-black?token=

A small part of me has always sensed that black when referring to race might be capitalized. The racial concept of black is so far removed from the core meaning of the color that it qualifies as very much a proper noun, a concept in and of itself, of a kind that suggests being couched as a label.

And if we’re in for a renovation of the term we use for referring to black people – and given how such things go it was about time: Negro yielded to black in the late 1960s; African-American settled in 25 years later; since the mid-2010s I’ve been wondering what would be next – Black is a damned sight better to me than African-American ever was.

* * *

I never liked it, and have only ever used it when grace required it. Black has always been good enough for me. For one, since the 1990s so many actual Africans have emigrated to the U.S. that the term African-American is increasingly confusing. Is a descendant of slaves in America “African-American” in the same way as the child of parents who grew up in Ghana and speak Twi at home? And let’s not even get into that white Africans in South Africa sincerely feel themselves, when relocated here, to be “African-Americans,” as do people from Africa of South Asian descent.

And overall, the African connection feels too distant to me to justify an ethnic designation. Opinions will differ on this, but to me, black Americans are not remotely “African” in the sense that, say, the Sopranos were Italian-American. Without the languages, with only extreme refractions of the music (as jazz and rock) or food, with different tastes and even values, I find the “African” designation forced – especially considering that “Africa” is no one thing (note how vacuous and depersonalizing it sounds to call white people “European”).

When “African-American” settled in, a critical mass of black people felt differently. The idea was that calling attention to our “roots” in Africa lent a certain sense of legitimacy, indicating that slavery was not the root, the essence, of what black people are. But this always struck me as an oversimplification of black history, and perhaps even a symptom of internalized dismissal. My “roots” are with the black people of my ancestry who forged lives right here in America, racism and the rest be damned. We might even respect what our ancestors thought. Black people even a generation past slavery who had known slaves born in Africa did not tend to think of themselves as “African.” I’m pretty sure my great grandfather John Hamilton McWhorter II, of whom one photo survives, did not. My great aunt T.I., trotting in the 1980s up the steep staircase at the North Philadelphia train station in her nineties, was not “African” in any sense: she was an American black woman.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/07/07/scapegoats-boogeymen-and-hobgoblins/

The world may be increasingly baffled by 2021 America, and its sudden scapegoating of “white supremacist” hobgoblins for problems it cannot or will not solve. 

Roughly 400 Americans were shot over the past July 4 holiday weekend. About 150 of them were killed. The majority, both of the shooters and the victims, were inner-city, African-American males. The level of violence approaches the bad casualty days of the recent Afghan and Iraq wars. 

Meanwhile, during the carnage, progressive black leaders, from Representatives Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) to Cori Bush (D-Mo.), blasted America’s foundational holiday and the country at large for its white supremacy and the current supposed lack of freedom for African Americans. 

During 120 days of rioting, arson, and looting during the summer of 2020, the country suffered about $2 billion in property damage, roughly 25 deaths, and some 14,000 arrests. 

Rioters burned down a Minneapolis police precinct. They set afire a federal courthouse in Portland. And they tried to incinerate the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church next to the White House. Downtown areas of Portland and Seattle were taken over by rioters, who occupied entire city blocks with impunity. 

Most of those arrested during the violent summer were either released or eventually had their charges dropped or vastly reduced. Although many of the Antifa and BLM rioters shouted revolutionary slogans, called for violence against the police, and carefully organized their rioting on social media, neither the media nor the government ever declared the rioters to be conspiracists or insurrectionists. 

In contrast, when roughly 500 renegade Trump supporters, in buffoonish fashion, broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the media and government immediately claimed it was a carefully planned “armed insurrection.” But no one was arrested for possessing or using a gun. 

Headlines blared of five killed. But four died of natural causes and three of those deaths were among Trump supporters. The only violent death was also of a Trump supporter and military veteran, lethally shot by a Capitol police officer while entering through a window. Her shooter remains unidentified.