← SAPIR Conversations
SAPIR Conversations
S12E3: The Roots of Black Antisemitism with Coleman Hughes
Loading summary
Transcript68 lines
- [00:03]
Brett
So, Coleman, thank you so much for doing this. I think we should get started. This is the latest installment and something we've tried to do with Sapir from the very beginning, which is to take at least a few of the authors we're fortunate to publish in our journal and go a little deeper with a conversation like this, which is done somewhat deliberately, in an. In an informal style for our readers who are. Are. Have been dedicated to what we do. So you have written. Actually, it's over a month. A month ago that we. We published the latest issue of Friends and Foes. It is. It is our 12th issue. It is our biggest issue. And I think you wrote, among many luminous essays, you wrote one of the most interesting and probably given what is happening on campus right now, one of the most timely. You wrote about black radicalism. So I want to welcome you to this conversation. Thank you for writing. And before we get to your essay, I want to take advantage, Coleman, of the fact that you are, I think, a 2018 graduate of Columbia.
- [01:28]
Coleman
2020. Sorry, 2020.
- [01:31]
Brett
My gosh, you're even younger than I thought.
- [01:33]
Coleman
No, I'm not. I'm not. Because I started two years later than you're assuming.
- [01:37]
Brett
Ah, okay. Okay. At any rate, you are a relatively recent graduate of Columbia, at least for those of us who are now approaching our 30th. Our 30th anniversaries of graduation. But I want to ask you this. I'm sure you. I know, seeing from your social media posts, I know you've been following closely what's happening up in Morningside Heights. Given your experience as a student at Columbia, does anything that you are seeing now surprise you, Shock you? Or would you say that you could. You could have seen it coming, given where the school was a few years ago?
- [02:28]
Coleman
Yeah, there's. There's nothing at all that. That has surprised me what I was at Columbia between 2016 and 2020 and 2015 and 2020, the climate around the Israel Palestine issue was precisely the same as it is now. It's just that there was no major war in Israel or the occupied territories at that time. Had there been a war, we would have seen something very similar every year at Columbia when I was there, probably still there's one week where you had the students for justice in Palestine would protest all week, and these were actually peaceful protests. Lots of chanting and there were just, you know, that was a huge group of students. And then you would have a tiny group of Jewish students. I forget what the Jewish group was called. Probably less than 1/10 the size, maybe, you know, 1/50 the size that would counter protest on the other side of campus, kind of separated by a hundred yards or so. And we would have that week every single year. And I think in my junior or senior year, I had one or two friends in the Jewish group because I, I was in a debate club called Colloquia and there was one, there was some crossover between those two groups. So I walked by them during, during that week and I said hi to them and started chatting with them outside Butler Library. And a student from the palace, the SJP group, came up to the Jewish table, opened her laptop and had it read out the word shame a thousand times in a row, something like that in the computer voice. And so that's what the state of conversation, if we could call it, was when I went there. So nothing I've seen in the past few weeks has surprised me.
- [04:17]
Brett
Let me ask you, I mean, I think you could go back even perhaps 10 years, a dozen years earlier, when Barry Weiss was on campus and the film Columbia Unbecoming was made. It's, it's, it's a long story, but to what extent do you see this as kind of student driven idealism? Or is it maybe, and is it faculty led radicalism, some symbiosis in between perhaps? But where, where is the energy coming from? Because I, I get the sense as an outsider that this is as much faculty driven as it is student driven.
- [04:59]
Coleman
Yeah, I think that it's a, it's symbiotic. Absolutely. You have lots of faculty members that are on one side of the issue and egg students on in class, signal their approval for the pro Palestinian side of the equation and their disapproval for, for the pro Israel side of the equation. And on the other hand, you have an enormous amount of student led activism as well. I think when I was a freshman, Students for Justice in Palestine would go knocking door to door on, on freshmen's doors and you'd open your door and they'd have a flyer and they said, we're sjp. We're, we want to make you aware that there's an apartheid state and there's a colonial entity called Israel and we really care. Right. And they just go door to door to door. And this is how they recruit a lot of people and create like generally an atmosphere that there is a, you know, that there's an issue akin to apartheid South Africa. This is the apartheid issue of our generation. And everyone's got to be on the, on the right side of it. So There's a symbiotic relationship. Absolutely.
- [06:07]
Brett
One, one difference between, well, I don't know, certainly between when I went to college in the early 90s and the present, is that there is on every campus, and certainly every elite campus in America, a large DEI apparatus, both administratively and ideologically, on every campus. And you have written about this at length. I should mention here that just a couple of months ago your book the End of Race Politics came out. And I encourage everyone to order the book as soon as we're off. Done with this conversation. But one claim that is made by opponents of DEI is that there is something within it ideologically that breeds not just an anti Israel mentality, but frequently bleeds into a kind of anti Semitic mentality. And I'd like to ask you to sort of explore the extent to which that claim strikes you as, as a valid one or, or not.
- [07:27]
Coleman
Okay. This, I think, is, is the crux of the issue. And it's a great question. I want to answer it though, by, by talking a little bit about my experience at Columbia and how students thought about this issue. So when I was at Columbia, you would hear someone make an offhand comment about white people denigrating probably every week, white men in particular, sometimes white women too, white people, just all kinds of casually denigrating comments towards white people as a whole white society all the time. In my four years at Columbia, I don't think I ever remember someone saying an anti Semitic comment or making a. Making an actually saying anything analogous really about Jews in general. And what that tells me is that the way kids think about all these issues are through the prism of whiteness and blackness, oppressed, equated with blackness and Hispanicness, oppressor equated with whiteness. And that they, because, you know, as an American, 99% of the Jews you know, are Ashkenazi Jews who look white. I think that people have made the equation between Jews and white people and then, and therefore Jews are oppressors because they're white. Right. That's how the thinking goes. Now when it comes to the issue of Israel, Palestine, I think the reason they are so invested in this issue is because their entire moral prism is oppressed versus oppressor. And that I want to put a fine point on. What I mean by that, what I mean by that is I remember years ago when I was reading the history of the, the slavery debates in the 1850s between pro slavery and anti slavery intellectuals, it struck me that everyone framed their argument in Christian terms. The people that were against slavery were against it because for Christian reasons. And the people that were pro slavery were pro slavery for Christian reasons because their whole, whole, their whole moral universe was Christianity. Every argument had to be framed that way. It wouldn't have made sense to frame an argument using other concepts. Analogously the, the way that kids think morally in terms of what is good, what is bad is entirely based on, on intersectionality, oppressor versus oppressed, whiteness versus blackness. That's their whole, whole moral universe. It's the only tool, really moral tool that they have in their toolkit. And so they've been persuaded that the Israel Palestine issue fits right into that. It's, it's the paradigm case of a quote unquote white group oppressing a brown group. And so what motivates it is not that classic European anti Semitism per se, though I think ironically it can create that. It can, it can push people towards that. And I think we're seeing it now. But the core of the motive for them is that this fits right into their ideology of oppressor versus oppressed. And of course what they don't understand is anything about the history of Israel, everything about the history of the settlement of Israel by Jewish refugees, which makes it dis. Analogous to all the other examples of, of colonialism. But that's really at the core and that's why, you know, DEI is the way, way you asked the question. DEI and intersectionality are essentially the same ideology. And I think Jews are always going to be identified as oppressors in that framework.
- [11:18]
Brett
By the way, I should add to those tuning in, there is a Q A function at the bottom of your screens and as Coleman says, things that spark a question in your, make it a question, add it to the Q and A function. And then in the last hopefully 20 minutes of this conversation, I'm going to turn to as many of those questions, those questions as I can. I want to turn to your, your essay Coleman, which is really just a, I think a wonderfully on point sharp and relevant essay because you are exploring the question which on the surface ought to be mysterious as to why there is this animosity between the Jewish and black communities and why we find in surveys depressingly higher levels of antisemitism in the American black community than you find in other communities. I think one of the figures that you cited, which I found very striking and depressing was a YouGov poll which found that something like 55% of African Americans think that questioning whether the Holocaust ever happened wasn't, wasn't anti Semitic. But So, so your, your essay really takes the form of a kind of an exploration of why two communities that should have so much in common in terms of a history, not only a joint history of oppression, but oppression by white supremacists. Right. Which also has a joint history of joint struggle against white supremacy going back to the founding of the NAACP or later to the Civil Rights movement. And the arm in arm walk between Dr. King and Rabbi Rabbi Heschel, why that relationship has been. And become such an embittered one. And you start, and I want you to explore this for our audience, if you don't mind. You start with a famous. I think it's a 1967 op ed in the New York Times from James Baldwin. So tell us what Baldwin's thesis is and why you don't think it's an adequate thesis.
- [13:48]
Coleman
Yes. So Baldwin actually wrote this a month before the Six Day War broke out. And the essay was titled Negroes are Anti Semitic because they're Anti White, which was very similar to the point I was just making about why kids at a place like Colombia care so much about Israel that it's their anti Semitism, if you can call it that, is just a special case of anti whiteness with the proviso that Jews are white, which is a controversial and not so obvious statement, but is taken for granted as true by black Americans, by students and so forth. So basically his argument was a bit more complicated than that. His argument was that, yes, part of it is that black Americans have deep anti white feelings as a result of the history. That is too obvious to have to go into. His argument also went further. It said that when he was a kid growing up in Harlem, which would have been in the 1930s and 40s, Jews operated a lot of the shops in Harlem. They operated. He met Jews in the context of being his landlord, his grocer, his butcher. And he said that that created a kind of natural friction. When you have the majority of a neighborhood being black, but the majority of the stores being, or positions of local authority, if you could really call it authority being operated by another ethnic group, you're going to have friction always. So it's not that the Jews were Jews, it's that the social role they played in that context, even if they were Italian, it would have, it would have been the same thing.
- [15:31]
Brett
And you wait 60 years later. I remember the movie do the Right Thing, Spike Lee's movie. It's, it's black Korean tension in that case.
- [15:39]
Coleman
That's right. That's right. And I pointed that Out. You see, you've seen violence against Korean stores in many race riots as a result of the same feeling of sort of, why are you guys operating the stores in our neighborhood?
- [15:53]
Brett
Yeah.
- [15:53]
Coleman
Now, of course, you could flip the whole thing on its head and point out that Harlem was a Jewish neighborhood. It was a Jewish and Italian neighborhood before the first black, I guess you could say, migrants from the south arrived there. So that's the reason Jews were operating stories, is because it was a Jewish and Italian neighborhood a few decades prior. But anyway, this is Baldwin's thesis is that swap in any group for. For the Jews in Harlem and. And you'll. You would get black feelings of resentment towards that group. Right. Reason I don't think that this really explains it is because black antisemitism has long survived the social scenario he's talking about that obtained in the 1940s and 50s. It hasn't been true for a very long time that Jews operate a majority of the businesses in Harlem. I lived in Harlem for two years and just above for two years, and every deli was run by a Yemeni or a Dominican. My landlord was Dominican. I don't really remember meeting any Jewish people in those contexts any longer. And yet black anti Semitism persists. So I don't think it's actually the crux of the explanation at all. It's also a national phenomenon. It applies to black people that didn't even grow up in cities where there are any. There's any Jewish population. And so I think it. I think it. That's not the core of. I think Baldwin was wrong, that that's at the core of black anti Semitism, properly understood.
- [17:32]
Brett
So your next thesis, which I think has a lot of power and it really goes to the heart of your argument, is that it comes from a corner of black politics which is radical black politics, which has been with us for, you know, a long time, like, as in almost any. Any community, but particularly the Nation of. Of Islam and from Elijah Muhammad then to. To Louis Farrakhan. But, you know, I used to live in. In South Chicago where the Nation of Islam had its headquarters. In fact, Louis Farrakhan was my neighbor, funnily enough,
- [18:19]
Coleman
on.
- [18:19]
Brett
On Woodlawn Avenue in. In Hyde Park. But the Nation of Islam is not exactly. I mean, it's an enduring phenomenon, but it's not a large phenomenon. Right. I mean, it's not overwhelmingly black America is a Christian community. Overwhelmingly. It does not support Louis Farrakhan. So how has had. How has he and his followers had such an enduring influence in this particular respect.
- [18:47]
Coleman
Yeah. So Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam, you're right, they've never been a large portion of black Americans by the numbers, but they've punched far above their weight in their influence on the culture. I don't know exactly how that's happened, but one thing I do know is that almost every rapper, famous rapper of a certain generation was highly influenced by Louis Farrakhan, Snoop Dogg, Jay Z, Kanye West. You can go down, down, down the line. All of them have a great respect for Louis Farrakhan. Rappers that grew up in, you know, the 90s and 2000s. And.
- [19:28]
Brett
Is this the Million Man March? What, What?
- [19:31]
Coleman
Yeah, I think that era was sort of the height of Louis Farrakhan's influence in the black community. And much of his message resonated far outside the circle of actual adherence of Nation of Islam. And, and, and, and then, you know, through kind of getting the respect and admiration of every famous, black, black, famous rapper of that period, his message, I think, has, has dispersed and been far more powerful than the numbers would suggest. You know, his message has seeped into. So of all of these people from Jay Z to, to Yay. And it formed the, that kind of anti. Semitism formed the waters in which the tastemakers and, and culture makers in the black community Swam in the 90s and 2000s.
- [20:27]
Brett
Well, let me ask you in particular about Ye, better known to most people as Kanye west, because when he had his anti Semitic outburst, I don't know, 18 months ago or so, a lot of people said he's got some mental challenges, I think, or mental illness even. This was a line that was frequently repeated which may or may not be true. But what you seem to be suggesting is this is not coming from just the kind of unwell mind of one particular person that it's, it's, it's a much broader phenomenon.
- [21:07]
Coleman
Yeah, I think it can easily be both. And it can be that ye has mental illness, but that it's not a coincidence his mental illness yielded an obsession with the Jews.
- [21:17]
Brett
Yeah, yeah. So let me, let me ask you now a somewhat more contemporary set of questions, which is that the question of Jews and the role they play in the United States is one thing, but now we have a foreign policy question. The, the New York Times recently had a story about how black churches in the south have become increasingly militant in their pro Palestinian and anti Israel commitments. This has become a much, a much larger phenomenon. And, and so I guess a double barrel question. The first is how to what extent do you think this will become a broad and mainstream view within the black community that Israel represents a kind of a uniquely pernicious apartheid like state that is inimical to the interests of nevermind humanity or whatever, but specifically to the, to the, the black community in the US and then I'd also like you, and maybe this is a larger reflection to address the question of like, what do we, what do we. Who don't want anti Semitism to become more pervasive, who don't want anti Israelism to become more pervasive. What are the sort of steps we do to, to deal with it? I think that's especially on the minds of the Jewish community. We're scratching our heads and asking what's the right approach?
- [23:04]
Coleman
Yeah, I, I fear that it is going to become more widespread because, you know, in my view, again, the crux of the issue is white oppressor versus non white oppressed group. That is the model people have in their head and in their souls. And they've been sold the meme that that's what the Israel Palestine issue is. And unfortunately none of them know anything about the history of the Israel Palestine issue. But superficially it looks enough like that that most people don't think they have to look into it anymore. So it would not at all surprise me, unfortunately not at all surprise me if it becomes more and more popular with black Americans to view Israel Palestine as a simple issue of white colonizers and racists oppressing another group of, of brown people. An issue that is all too familiar to our psychology and our story of ourselves. Sadly now the question is what can people do to dislodge this? Well, you know, if I had that, that's the million dollar question, you know, if I had the answer, I would be shouting it from the rooftops. But I would say anything that can. I mean, this is part of reason. I wrote, I wrote a column in the Free Press called, I think it ended up being called, you know, the Palestinian issue has nothing to do with, with the black struggle or something like that. Pointing out all the many differences between the Israel Palestine issue and what we think of as white colonizers, European colonialism, American slavery and resistance to it. Because I think the most important thing is for people to understand that it's actually not. It's not, it's not an issue like the civil rights movement where not even Malcolm X was at his most radical ever advocated taking over the entire country. Right. He, in certain moods he would say, okay, give us Georgia or actually we'll go to Liberia. Right, but, but there was, there was, and to say nothing of Martin Luther King, there was never as a fundamentally zero sum view of the conflict on one side, Whereas with, with Israel and Palestine, you have one side that has made pretty good faith efforts to reach a peace along a two state solution, and one side that simply doesn't accept that as within the realm of possibility, accepts really nothing less than full control from the river to the sea. There's nothing analogous to that in the black white story in America. And, and so what, whatever can be done to dislodge this simplistic equation between Israel and Palestine and the issues from our own racial history that, that even goes to just educating people about how is it that the Jews ended up in Israel? Were they coming on, you know, going there on behalf of some motherland, colonizing and pillaging the natives? Well, no, they were refugees with, with nowhere else to go. Right. I mean, so anything that can be done to educate people about the differences, even, even things as, which are really not the crux of the issue, like the fact that half of, half of Jews in Israel are not Ashkenazi Jews, they're from the Middle east and Arab countries. Everything that, everything that can be done to dislodge that association is, is the way that I think people should be arguing to stop this trend.
- [27:00]
Brett
Yeah. One of the points that I often make is that the only black faces that you see in the conflict in Gaza are Ethiopian, Israeli, Jewish, Ethiopian soldiers in, in uniform. And as you pointed out, more than half, actually it's more than half of Israelis are essentially indistinguishable from Arabs because their background is in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Morocco and so on. There's a tremendous amount of, I think, ignorance about the facts and a kind of a very simplistic, almost imperialistically American way of trying to graft an American story on a conflict that is not an American conflict. I mean, it's just this kind of a, kind of a unthinking cultural imperialism where we assume that the particular dynamics that shape American society have to have exact analogues in other societies. This brings me to something that you say towards the end of your essay, which is really, I think, very profound and also extremely difficult to solve, which is the way in which, as you put it, the, the Jewish American story profoundly challenges a story that black America has told about itself in ways that are discomforting and hard to, hard to kind of even speak about, much less deal with. As, as I read your, your essay, you know, you note that the black American story is that all other groups that came to the United States, whether they were Italian, Irish, Greek and so
- [29:03]
Coleman
on,
- [29:05]
Brett
came as immigrants wanting to come here. And of course the African American story is a story, with a handful of exceptions, of people coming originally coming or their ancestors coming in chains as slaves. And that, that profoundly explains the disparities in outcome between the relative success of some groups and the, and the success of African Americans in the United States. Say another word about this thesis. And how does the thesis shape black Jewish relations?
- [29:45]
Coleman
Yeah, yeah. So my, my, my theory here is that every, every tight knit ethnic group has a story. It tells itself about who we are. And the story is always oversimplified and one can always challenge it in various ways, but it becomes sacred in in particular tellings. And the telling of the black stories were the only group that came here in chains rather than by choice, lived as slaves for several centuries and then second class citizens for another century after the Civil War. And that it's that history, that unique history which directly explains why it is that black Americans are poorer than white Americans today. The classic challenge to this by, by sociologists is to say, okay, sure, that maybe that may explain some of it, but what do you make of the fact that the Irish came here, you know, many of them fleeing famine, the Italians came here poor and penniless and involved in crime disproportionately and within a few generations rose up into the middle class? Well, one, one part is that they were, they were white skinned. So that allowed them to kind of slip the yoke of prejudice eventually and blend into the ethnic, ethnically white core of the country. To some extent, which is true, but another part of it is, well, they weren't slaves when they weren't slaves for, for 200 years, they weren't oppressed, they weren't a long standing downtrodden oppressed people, right? Like, like we are. Then in come the Jews. The problem here is that nobody sane can say that the Jews are not a long suffering people. The, the trials and tribulations throughout history of the Jewish people are so numerous and so well documented that to seriously doubt it, you, you have to go into the waters of deep insane conspiracy. But the problem is that having arrived in this country, both Western European and Eastern European Jews, waves of migration in the 19th and 20th century, having arrived in this country very poor, trailing pogroms and all kinds of brutal oppression, Jewish Americans have done much better than average in, in the intervening century socioeconomically. And because Jewish, the Jewish history of oppression is so well documented and so undeniable. It presents a kind of implicit challenge to the black story, unsettles our sense of ourselves as the unique sufferers of historical oppression and unsettles the direct link between that historical oppression and the modern relative comparative poverty of the black community. And so I think that what this. It's not an accident that you see that what you see directed at Jewish people in the black community is Holocaust denial. Right. It's. It's because it's an effort to reconcile the story. Well, it must. It mustn't really be the case that the Jews suffered that much. Right. That must explain why they're. That why they're doing so well in America today. It. It's not an accident that you see the. The myth that Dr. Martin Luther King complained about in his final book, which is that Jews must have arrived here with money. The. The people fleeing, I wish, in Russia. They must have arrived. They must have had a lot when they got to these shores, because that's the only way they could really be so successful now. Complete myth. So it's not an accident that all of the myths that you see directed from black Americans to the Jewish community are those myths which prec. Nicely try to reconcile this story to preserve our version of our own story and ward off any potential challenge to it. And in the end, I think that that's one of the reasons why Jewish Americans in particular, are singled out by the black community over and above other ethnic groups is because we don't really feel that someone with British ancestry or German ancestry or French ancestry is. Can make. Would even try to make a claim that they've been oppressed historically. Right. Whereas the Jewish history is right there for. For all to see. And so it presents a challenge.
- [34:45]
Brett
I see our Q and A box is filling up with questions, but I want to ask you one. One question that arises from a conversation I had in. In this form with Richie Torres a few weeks ago. And I think Richie is an incredibly thoughtful guy, just always interesting to listen to. And I asked him, you know, what's your advice to the Jewish community? What those of us who are on the Jewish side of this divide can do to repair the breach, or at least not aggravate the. The rupture in relations between too much of these communities? And one point he suggested, and it's been on my mind, he said, well, you know, you might want to stop taking such hard swings at the very idea of dei. You can take issue with some of the way in which it functions or the way in which it excludes Jews from the diversity and inclusion story. But the kind of hammering away at DEI feels to many black Americans as a kind of a direct threat to their own interests in academia and other, other institutions from which they've been historically excluded. Without, you know, trying to invite a, a rupture between you and Richie, like, what do you think of his, his argument?
- [36:23]
Coleman
You may have a point. So DEI precedes the ideology we are today calling dei. I mean, DEI has been around since, you know, my dad's whole life in corporate America. And what it meant when my dad was my age in the 90s as a young black man, navigating corporate America was not viewing everything in terms of oppressor and oppressed and, and intersectionality injected into the bureaucracy. It was something quite different. It was, you know, at its most benign. It was like if you're a white shoe law firm and you know, all the boys go out golfing every week, like, you know, hire a woman, hire, you know, hire. Look outside of your network, like, don't violate meritocracy to do so, but look outside of your network and make sure you're going to lunch with everyone, not just the boys. Right. There is a version of that that is totally benign and even compatible with valuing meritocracy broadly. And there's a kind of DEI that could be benign and would have nothing to do with this. And the most charitable version of Richie's argument is if you're criticizing dei, you should make clear that there is some version of it that may not exist anymore, frankly, but some earlier version of it that is benign and, and, and worth preserving. Now, the more cynical side of me would say that that idea is basically gone and DEI has become synonymous with the intersectional worldview. But he may have a point. I mean, there's also this. We haven't talked about it, but there's a long standing. You know, a part of the rupture in particular among intellectuals starting in the late 60s was that Jews and blacks could agree about the civil rights movement, but not about affirmative action. Yeah, when that became the new agenda that split it from a self interest perspective, black Americans from Jewish Americans. And I think William Defunis, one of the first flashpoints for the Supreme Court cases around affirmative action was a Sephardic Jew who was claiming discrimination. And there's something similar going on with DEI as well. In terms that there is like kind of a self interest zero sum game. If we're talking about DEI recruitment, for instance.
- [38:59]
Brett
Well, I mean, my observation is that if de. If Diversity efforts had been about, you know, essentially stayed in the realm of the nudge. Right. As Cass Sunstein at Harvard puts it, like, when you can, you should like say as a kind of a mentality, shaping it would have been one thing. I think what people began to object to was the sense that it was like a regime. Like, you know, everything had to have a DI component and nothing could move forward without it. And there was something about the going from a kind of a state of mind to a policy with enforcement mechanisms that, that changed it at least changed the perception of it among well intended people who might have been better disposed towards it in a, as you said, in the early 1990s, you know, as I, as, as I remember, let me turn to some of the questions that we're getting. I'm going to go from the bottom here and move up and I'm going to try to get to as many of these as I can. And I'm sorry if I don't get to all of them. James Shapiro, first of all, says one of the best of these I've listened to. Thank you. Thank you, Coleman. Not really a question, but it might be interesting to add to Mr. Hughes's analysis of ethnic own stories. Not just Italians and Irish versus Jews, but also Chinese, many of whom were brought here to work on the railroads. It wasn't slavery, but it was abusive. Okay, that was not a question. Let me ask a question. Chong Win. I hope I, I'm pronouncing that correctly. Chong Win asks. I tried to open up a dialogue with a fervent pro Palestinian in my class, so I'm assuming Ms. Nguyen is a student, but it was unsuccessful. I would like to ask whether such an effort is possible or even necessary. What do you say to Ms. Nguyen?
- [40:55]
Coleman
It's certainly necessary with, with many people, it's impossible. Yeah, I, I found very, very little success having civil discussions with people on the pro Palestinian side of the issue. Going back, just going back even before my life as a, quote, unquote, public intellectual. But it, it's extremely necessary. It's just, I mean, there is this, there's this philosophy that certain things aren't up for debate and that, you know, what's happening to the Palestinians is, quote, unquote, genocide. A claim that's been made long before October 7th and the subsequent war. And how can you debate a genocide? Right. That's the attitude and it's a shame. But we have to find some way to have dialogue. And I had Yusef Munair on my podcast, who is A pro Palestinian one stater. And I, I had a conversation with him. I wouldn't say it was the most civil or the most productive, but I, I've tried my hand at this as well.
- [41:58]
Brett
You know, I, I actually, this is something that I think about a lot, that what bothers me most about some of the college protests isn't actually when it bleeds into outright anti Semitism. It's sort of the illiberalism. It's the absolute refusal to countenance the possibility that there is an opposing point of view and that that view has to at least be respectfully engaged. There's a kind of totalitarian mentality that is that you see in the way in which words are weaponized. I mean, once you call what Israel is doing a genocide, right, there's no discussion about what, about the rightness or wrongness of what Israel's doing. Because you've used this word genocide to blot out all thought or all or all nuance. And it's just depressing to me that this is what is happening on college campuses, which should be one place where you have thought and nuance. But that gets back to the earlier point about what's happening to colleges. Let's see. Elisheva Jassy thanks you and says how do your articles and books get received by the black and Jewish communities as if there were such monolith communities? And how does that make you feel?
- [43:20]
Coleman
Well, my articles on Israel have been received very well by the Jewish community. That's no surprise. I happen to, I happen to think strongly that Israel is on the, the overall, the right side of this conflict, though I would, I would never deny any of the specific allegations of cruelty or going overboard insofar as they're true. But. Yeah, but I mean the, the black community, I mean, I, I think the, to the typical black American, this is not our issue and I don't think the typical black black American has a strong opinion about it to begin with. The worry though is that bit by bit as this story filters out there, that this is a similar issue, this is a black white issue. More and more, the default thinking of a black American will be will, will default towards the Palestinians because they've been equated essentially with, with us. And by, by analogy.
- [44:24]
Brett
Let me ask you something that Mark Sachs maybe getting a little ahead of himself, but he's asking. I'm going to turn his question a little bit, which is that does anything give you optimism that the tide can turn?
- [44:47]
Coleman
I don't know. Not, not at the moment. But I, I, in general, I am optimistic because often you don't see the way out of a bad situation when you're in it. And, and time can, can, can, can sometimes do good things in these situations. So, you know, I can't say that I'm particularly optimistic right now. I mean, my hope is that I think people have seen such a breakdown at elite college campuses over this issue. They have seen such blatant hypocrisy in how administrations have handled protests. And this is a point I made on Twitter a few days ago when I was at Columbia. I defended a kid named Julian Von Abile who went on a kind of ethnocentric rant about how much he likes white men. And he, he was banned for, banned from Barnard's campus for doing that. He actually didn't denigrate any other races. He just talked up his own race. And nobody defended him, nobody cared about him. Everyone piled on. And now you have people chanting from the river to the sea. Globalize the intifada. And all the same people have discovered John Stuart Mill and the virtue of unbridled free speech. It's total hypocrisy. And so I hope that because donors, frankly, I hope all the donors to these schools look at the hypocrisy and say, this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. I'm pulling my money and I'm giving it to UChicago. I'm giving it to University of Austin. I'm giving it to these schools that actually try to embody classical liberal values and neutral viewpoint, neutral standards of enforcement. And, and that may create some change in the long run.
- [46:36]
Brett
Steven Elbaum asks, are there emerging and, or growing groups and influential voices within the black community?
- [46:42]
Coleman
Community.
- [46:42]
Brett
Obviously you're one of them that advocate for improved relations with the Jewish community in the US
- [46:51]
Coleman
not that I can notice. Not that I've noticed. Unfortunately, like I said, for, for the typical black American, this is just fully not our issue on one side or the other. So it wouldn't be the most obvious choice for a black American advocacy group to take a stand on, unless it's a really kind of a more fringe ideological group, like a BLM chapter.
- [47:16]
Brett
Yeah.
- [47:17]
Coleman
So
- [47:20]
Brett
let me ask you something. It was striking to many of us how quickly blm, which had the support of large swathes of the Jewish community in the United States, glommed on to not just the pro Palestinian side, but pro Hamas. You mentioned this, actually in your, your essay that I think the Chicago chapter of BLM was posting photographs With. With the paragliders as a kind of a solidarity statement. I'm guessing that came as no surprise to you, but where. Where did that, where did that come from? The ideological color of BLM or what was it?
- [48:09]
Coleman
Yeah, I mean, I, I was a bit surprised by that because I. I would expect them to post, say, a Palestinian flag. Yeah, something like that. I would not expect them to post a paraglider, which can only be a reference to Hamas's attack on October 7th. Yeah, right. Which was a massacre. And so, yeah, I mean, this comes from, you know, BLM has never actually, in their ideology, their, you know, Marxist, and they don't believe in the nuclear family, and they have all these beliefs that are fringe even within the black community, but they have an amazing slogan. And so to the extent they believe in the intersectional ideology, oppressor versus oppressed, Whiteness is inherently evil. Blackness is inherently good. The, you know, decolonial mentality, none of it's surprising that they. That they supported Hamas. What, what was surprising to me was that when you already had video of massacre of people going house to house, burning whole families alive, that you would support not just the. The cause or the people, but you would actually support the massacre.
- [49:23]
Brett
Yeah. Ari Engel makes a really interesting point, and it's connected to a very good question. He says, when it comes to Farrakhan, the reason there is such love for the Nation of Islam and Farakin is because they showed up in the inner cities. They showed up and provided social services and security when that wasn't available. I can attest to this because my neighborhood in Chicago was very secure thanks to my proximity with Louis Farakan. This is why people like Snoop have a positive view of Farakat, even though they're. They may be Christian. So how do we. I think he's referring to the Jewish community. How do we show up? We can no longer rely on the historical bonds between blacks and Jews that existed from the founding of the NAACP through the civil rights era. Any suggestions for Ari?
- [50:13]
Coleman
Yeah, I mean, this is a good. It's a good question, and he's totally right. Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, they would often brag, I think correctly, about how many people they got off drugs, how many people, you know, went from a path of chaos to a path of straight and narrow as a result of joining NOI and so forth, buying goodwill in that way in the community. I think that's right. And then they start going to the church and then hearing the Hitler is a great man stuff, and The Judaism's a gutter religion, and it all feels warm and fuzzy to them because it's. It's, you know, it's. It's coming from a source they've identified as benign. As for how Jews can sort of restore the relationship with black Americans, I'm not sure. I mean, I think most Jews supported Black Lives Matter, for instance, but I'm not sure that that bought any goodwill in reverse. So I'm not really sure what can be done. Frankly.
- [51:15]
Brett
This is a question that has always played in the back of my mind, and sorry for not taking questions for the audience, but there is. Within the Jewish community, there's always been a real desire to be good Samaritans, very active in social justice movements, very engaged, caring, and so on. Do you have a sense that maybe that is more an object of resentment than admiration?
- [51:46]
Coleman
I think what is an object of resentment is the success. The. The socioeconomic success of Jewish Americans is an object of resentment. And it's an object of resentment doubly, because Jews have a history of oppression. Yeah. And so with. Unless you're going to resort to the conspiracy theories, there's no way to explain away Jewish American success as a result of privilege. And that's a profound challenge to the black American story we tell about ourselves, which was my. My point from earlier. I don't think it's a social and political action per se that is the object of resentment. I think it's the socioeconomic success.
- [52:32]
Brett
Yeah. A question that is asked by a couple of people. David Jacobson and Gabriel Cohen Enriques are asking a kind of a similar question. Let me ask David's. He says, how important has the impact of latent Christian antisemitism been to overall black antisemitism?
- [52:56]
Coleman
It's a good question. My sense is not very important. But you talk to. I mean, I think I heard Michael Oren on a podcast recently, and he was saying wherever it was that he grew up in America, he was used to being called Christ Killer. Yeah. By Italian.
- [53:15]
Brett
I think that was New Jersey.
- [53:17]
Coleman
New Jersey. Okay. Yeah.
- [53:18]
Brett
That's where I'm from.
- [53:18]
Coleman
But that. That was okay. It's probably Italians, you know, that were calling him that. I don't know to what extent that blend of anti Semitism is. Is well subscribed in the black community.
- [53:32]
Brett
Rachel Pritzker, this is. I see. This is more of a suggestion. But funders could also pull their support and instead give it to outside organizations that teach administrators, teachers, and students how to have productive discussions across lines of difference and to Stop seeing everything in binary zero sum absolutist terms. She mentions Bridge usa, Constructive Dialogue Institute, and Interfaith America. And this. Actually, Rachel's question goes to something you were hinting at earlier, which is the people who are now pulling their money from Harvard or Columbia, you know, the Robert Krafts and, and others should be investing in other kinds of institutions, whether they're universities or they are organizations like the ones that she mentions. So. Oh, Coleman, I, I'm, I'm worried you might have froze. Oh, there you are.
- [54:29]
Coleman
I'm there, yeah.
- [54:30]
Brett
Okay. You, you were either very still. I figured that you had frozen. So if, let's imagine you have someone who's listening on this call, who's thinking of organizations that they might better support. Rachel Pritzker had some ideas. Any thoughts on your end about where they might better deploy their financial resources to change this kind of conversation?
- [54:55]
Coleman
In addition to all of those organizations, I'd recommend Braver Angels, which is run by my friend John Wood Jr. Who works on exactly that issue as well.
- [55:03]
Brett
Braver Angels. Okay. And I want to ask, because I watched you on the View, I thought you handled a very hostile desk with a lot of self composure and classiness and just, you did a wonderful job. But were you surprised by how hostile the questions were and how ad hominem they were?
- [55:41]
Coleman
Yes, I was. I mean, I was warned by a producer that Sunny Hostin disagreed with me, so I expected to have a disagreement based on the issue. I was surprised that she wanted to derail the conversation into a kind of interrogation of who I am as a person as opposed to what my views are, which, which is what I was expecting. And I think part of the reason that moment, when I think that moment went more viral than anything I've ever done. And the reason I think what I gather from so many people having approached me about it is you, you, you, you always see on TV kind of pretty performative anger meeting performative anger. But you almost never see performative anger meeting kind of calm, rational analysis on the other side. You certainly don't see that on, on daytime television, not very often on cable news. And so that moment stood out by its difference from the type of political exchanges and performativity that people are used to seeing.
- [56:52]
Brett
It was, it was quite a moment. And it was. If any of you who are listening into this conversation, you could easily find it on a YouTube search Coleman's 10 or 12 minutes on the View, where I thought you got very much the better of that exchange just by keeping your cool in your head and not allowing these ad hominem attacks on you to, uh, to. To get under your skin. So I. I want to thank you for that. I want to really thank you for this conversation. Your essay in again, our Friends and Foes issue, our. Our 12th issue is. Is. Is superb, and it's important. Your book, the End of Race Politics, I think is, is or will be seen as a landmark in this conversation. I'm probably not the first person to say this to you. I can't believe how young you are.
- [57:54]
Coleman
And it's getting less and less true every year now. I'm 28.
- [57:59]
Brett
Just wait a while. But it is wonderful to see you embark at the beginning of, I think, a really important career in the world of ideas and in the cause of making the world a better place for all of us. So I just want to thank you for this hour of your time, and I want to thank our audience for participating in these conversations that we put on Sapir. I think they're important and they're relevant, and you make the world a better place, Coleman. So thank you.
- [58:30]
Coleman
Thank you so much, Brett. I give the admiration right back at you. I've loved reading you for many years, and it was an honor to write for your journal.
- [58:39]
Brett
Thank you. I hope you do so again. Have a great day.
- [58:44]
Coleman
Awesome.