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Yet the residual bumping and grinding of struggles for ethnic succes–
sion between blacks and Jews doesn't fully explain the demagogues' allu–
sions, for no other white group has given more than the Jews, individu–
ally and collectively, in dollars, votes, activism, and moral witness, to
black struggles for justice.
In
a curious way though, this side of the story,
too, helps to explain the anti-Jewish obsession. Simply put, the dema–
gogues understand that Jews are white folks whose skin you can get un–
der. Baiting them gets a rise out of at least a part of the white establish–
ment, no small thing for aggrieved blacks to whom no one listens. Out
of their peculiar mix of insecurity and idealism, Jews do listen. They are
the first among whites to take alarm at black rage. Others show far less
concern, and, truth to tell, some of them don't care much for Jews, ei–
ther. That takes a lot of the risk out of the posture of defiance, and I
think it points up something important: There is a kind of mind-game
going on here that is more a testimony to black impotence and to a
certain kind ofJewish weakness than to black power.
Consider Steven Cokely, the aide to former Chicago Mayor Eugene
Sawyer, who first charged that Jewish doctors were injecting AIDS into
black patients. Why didn't he attack Chicago's much larger Polish or
Irish communities? The answer is that Cokely understood intuitively
what buttons he could push to get a response. At the risk of reinforcing
an ethnic stereotype which Eugene Genovese alluded to only partly in
jest, if you attack the Poles or Italians, you meet a wall of contemptuous
indifference or a hail of blows with baseball bats. Attack the Jews, and
they hold a conference at the 92nd Street Y.
At the same time, the monumental indifference of most whites to
blacks helps explain the black community's long tradition of pyrotechnic
rhetoric divorced from any sense of responsibility for its consequences.
For a couple of centuries, black political rhetoric has tended to be flam–
boyant precisely because it was weightless, unable to move the walls of
white ignorance and indifference. It's the ethos of being a "tree shaker,
not a jelly maker," as Jesse Jackson puts it. The subtext is, "It is our duty
to evoke and provoke;
it
is always someone else's duty - the real
grownups? - to determine the truth and set matters to rights. We will
spin our pain into webs of racial narrative and metaphor. Someone else,
always someone else, will turn them into politics and policy."
State Senator David Paterson of Harlem, an accommodator of the
Nation of Islam but also a canny observer of the problem, puts a some–
what different spin on this question of language: "[n Jewish history,
words of antagonism were often the catalyst for something much worse.
Jews understand that language sets people off.
It
strikes terror and fear
about what's coming next. Black bondage was physical before it was
verbal. We didn't even speak the language of the slave traders, so what-
