Chris Rock had a bit years ago: “Black people don’t hate Jews, Black people hate white people.” To me that would have been a better title for Baldwin’s essay, because I think that’s what he’s actually saying here. If it wasn’t Jews but Koreans who were the landlords in Harlem, would we have felt any differently about them? Probably not.
CHANDA PRESCOD-WEINSTEIN: We know the answer to that question. We’ve seen it play out in Los Angeles.[2]
MLH: Exactly! That’s why I’m not convinced that Baldwin is actually talking about antisemitism—the hatred of Jewish people for being Jewish—within the Black community. Rather, he’s critiquing a set of problematic and exploitative relationships that happen to include, in this particular case, Blacks and Jews.
Consider the Kanye West moment, for example. When Kanye was describing exploitative relationships in the music industry, I was like, “That’s not Jews! That’s just music execs!” When [the rapper and music executive] Diddy gave people record deals, he offered the same shitty deals that everybody else did. This is an unavoidable consequence of capitalism. Unfortunately, antisemitic tropes tell us that “all the execs are Jews” and that “all Jews are inclined toward economic exploitation.” Unfortunately, Kanye seems to have bought into those ugly antisemitic myths. By descending into antisemitism, Kanye cheapened his analysis and squandered an opportunity to critically interrogate the ugly underside of the music business. But Baldwin describes a far more nuanced dynamic than what we see with Kanye. He is able to hold space for Black critique and Black rage, without painting Black people as collectively antisemitic, which is what so often happens in the discourse.
DM: What you’re laying out, it seems to me, is one of the ways that this essay has been deployed in conversations about so-called Black antisemitism, particularly on the left—which is to say that “Black antisemitism” is not actually antisemitism, it’s anti-racism. But as you note, Marc, it’s not as though Kanye stopped at the capitalist critique. And the essay isn’t called “Negroes are not antisemitic. They’re anti-white.” On the contrary, it seems to me that Baldwin is suggesting that Jews are a target of Black animosity for specific historical and structural reasons.
CPW: One thing I find powerful is how clearly Baldwin is able to articulate that the problem at the end of the day remains white supremacy. There are certainly non-Jewish Black people who are antisemitic, but Baldwin differentiates this from the structural levers of violent antisemitism, which remains within European Christian antisemitism. To the extent that non-Jewish Black people have antisemitic views—for example, buying into stereotypes about Jews handling money or being uniquely power-seeking—that’s where they’ve learned them: from white, Christian perceptions of Jews.