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2022 has not been a great year for Black and Jewish relations in America. Controversy after controversy has laid bare the divisions between our communities and the lack of trust and understanding between groups who have always had so much in common with each other. Kanye West's recent, repeated antisemitic comments and the rush by some on social media to defend him have been deeply disturbing. How did we get here? Has our relationship deteriorated to such a degree that open hostility is now in vogue?
It wasn't always like this. The Jewish community and the Black community used to be very close. Jewish Americans were often on the front lines during the Civil Rights Movement, standing side by side with Black leaders. One of the most infamous murders of that era was that of James Chaney, a Black American from Mississippi, who was brutally killed alongside two Jewish Americans from New York, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, for the crime of registering Southern Black Americans to vote.
Our communities used to have a keen understanding of the importance of our relationship. We used to feel a kinship that was born out of our trauma, with histories of slavery and oppression common in both of our stories. From a religious aspect, most Black Americans, then and now, identify as Christian, and many saw a kinship with the Jewish people as brothers in the Abrahamic spiritual lineage.
We used to live in close proximity to one another, and as a result, we frequently interacted with each other. My own family history is an example of that. After the death of my great-grandmother, my great-grandfather, who could barely write and couldn't read at all, came to Cleveland from the South and was hired by Jews. Several of his children also went on to be hired by members of the Jewish community.
At a time when discrimination against Black Americans was rampant, it was the Jewish community who fearlessly provided an opportunity for my own family to provide for themselves.
But as time passed, the bond that our communities shared started to fracture. The tension of the era and the disproportionately negative conditions that many Black people were living in in those neighborhoods sowed discontent. Unscrupulous provocateurs saw an opportunity and attempted to capitalize on it, damaging our relationship in the process.
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke about the growing divide. Dr. King remarked that at the time that Black antisemitism was largely a Northern phenomenon. Dr. King eloquently addressed this in the book Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? "The urban [Black person] has a special and unique relationship to Jews," writes Dr. King. "He meets them in two dissimilar roles. On the one hand, he is associated with Jews as some of his most committed and generous partners in the civil rights struggle. On the other hand, he meets them daily as some of his most direct exploiters in the ghetto as slum lords and gouging shopkeepers."
"Jews are identified with [Black people] voluntarily in the freedom movement, motivated by their religious and cultural commitment to justice," Dr. King went on. "The other Jews who are engaged in commerce in the ghettoes are remnants of older communities. A great number of [Black] ghettos were formerly Jewish neighborhoods; some storekeepers and landlords remained as population changes occurred. They operate with the ethics of marginal business entrepreneurs, not Jewish ethics, but the distinction is lost on some [Black people] who are maltreated by them."
In his wisdom, Dr. King called out the toxicity of scorning an entire group because of the actions of a few. "Such [Black people], caught in frustration and irrational anger, parrot racial epithets," writes Dr. King. "They foolishly add to the social poison that injures themselves and their own people. It would be a tragic and immoral mistake to identify the mass of [Black people] with the very small number that succumb to cheap and dishonest slogans, just as it would be a serious error to identify all Jews with the few who exploit [Black people] under their economic sway."
Antisemitism is a social poison. Racism is a social poison. It should grieve every single person of goodwill that the two groups who used to understand these facts the most are now divided and fighting amongst each other. Both communities feel that their trauma is being diminished and there's a disconnect as a result.
For example, the Jewish community is rightly horrified by famous Black people like Kyrie Irving appearing to support a film with antisemitic tropes in it, while many in the Black community ask why those who were mad at Kyrie didn't "keep the same energy" for the e-commerce giant Amazon, who as of this writing is still selling and profiting from said film.
One community feels that their sensitivities are being ignored, while the other feels that the response has been unjustly disproportionate.
Because our communities do not interact with each other on a regular basis as much as we used to, suspicion and mutual distrust has replaced the kinship and sense of brotherhood that we used to have to get us through the tough individual moments.
We have to remember that there are more things that unite us than divide us. Our communities need to make concerted efforts to spend more time with one another again. Not as a photo op, but as an opportunity to build real friendships again.
We have to listen to each other, while having the compassion and understanding to know that communication is a two-way street. It is not in the best interest of either community to be divided like this, and we should all do our part to bridge that gap.
But the best advice on how to move forward came from Dr. King himself: "[Black people] cannot rationally expect honorable Jews to curb the few who are rapacious; they have no means of disciplining or suppressing them. We can only expect them to share our disgust and disdain. [Black people] cannot be expected to curb and eliminate the few who are antisemitic, because they are subject to no controls we can exercise. We can, however, oppose them."
Darvio Morrow is CEO of the FCB Radio Network and co-host of The Outlaws Radio Show.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
