New Article: "Charles Blow Goes Full Ta-Nehisi Coates and Other Notes on the Black-Ashkenazi Alliance"
David Shasha
Charles Blow Goes Full Ta-Nehisi Coates and Other Notes on the Black-Ashkenazi Alliance
Reading New York Times columnist Charles Blow’s Monday entry was a bit like hearing an African-American Alan Dershowitz:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/opinion/activists-feel-the-bern.html?ref=opinion
We all know that Dershowitz trafficks in hyperbolic language when it comes to Israel. His most recent outburst demanded that the Iran deal be treated like World War II:
Blow has done something that appears to be very similar: compare Martin Luther King, Jr.’s statements about White moderates in the 1960s to the current situation as if the two things were the same.
One of the difficult problems that we now face in the emerging Black activism, represented in many ways by Ta-Nehisi Coates and his nihilistic Garveyism, is the way that is has sought to flatten out and even reject King’s integrationist philosophy and to return to a more confrontational and separatist activist style.
In his August 9th column Blow echoes the Coates thesis and blames the system for all our problems:
The cumulative effect of these columns is to drive a wedge between Blacks and Whites in a way that refuses to acknowledge the gains of the Civil Rights movement. The idea of personal responsibility in the African-American community is not discussed, or in the case of Coates is completely rejected.
Unlike Coates who explicitly rejects the positive effects of the Civil Rights movement, Blow remains somewhat circumspect in his language, but largely hews to the same conclusion: we should see things in terms of a systematic problem and blame Whites for everything. Bernie Sanders – a socialist radical who quickly capitulated to the Black Lives Matter insurgents – is viewed as a “White moderate” akin to the people that MLK was dealing with in his struggle back in the 1960s.
Such historical comparisons are not only unhelpful, but are downright damaging in a world that has been forever transformed by the many gains of the Civil Rights Movement. The problems of the African-American community have been deeply impacted by socio-economic issues as our legal system has generally been reformed through the activism of iconic leaders like MLK.
Tellingly, we do not hear from Blow and Coates about the corporate culture(s) that have decimated Black people and other vulnerable communities by promising cash in exchange for debased behavior. Blow does not refer to the many articles of his NYT colleague Jon Caramanica that promotes this corporatism and the degenerate activity that is so central to the new culture.
Black elites have avoided dealing with their own responsibilities as the community of poor and incarcerated increases exponentially. The silence of such intellectual elites only serves to further obscure and polarize the problems we face as a society.
And I was not at all surprised to discover that Ta-Nehisi Coates is a big fan of Ashkenazi Jewish writers:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/books/review/ta-nehisi-coates-by-the-book.html?ref=review&_r=0
His favorite novelist is E.L. Doctorow, while he rates the pro-Zionist historian Barbara Tuchman very highly.
Here is a reminder of Tuchman’s racism on the matter of Israel and Zionism:
Coates’ Garveyite sympathies do indeed seem to be of a piece of both Zionism and the Ashkenazi experience. It is certain that he has no sense of the Sephardic Jewish tradition or the Convivencia model of Islamic Spain.
He might consider reading the excellent book God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe 570-1215 by the great African-American scholar David Levering Lewis instead of the Zionist Tuchman:
http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Crucible-Making-Europe-570-1215/dp/0393333566
It would teach him about the complexities of pluralistic societies and the role of Religious Humanism in civilization.
As it stands, Coates’ view is rooted in racial nationalism and an ethnic nihilism that rejects the most basic principles of democracy and pluralism. Reading his book recommendations only serves to confirm these prejudices.
A recent post from Tikkun magazine shows us the ways in which Ashkenazim do not seem to understand the problem they have created:
For David Harris-Gershon it is only the Right Wing Zionist Jews that are the problem in the Black-Jewish alliance.
Left Wing Jews are not the problem.
Sadly, Ashkenazim battle with each other and yet continue to exert their hegemonic control of the Jewish discourse. Whether it is on the Left or the Right, the Jewish voices we hear are limited to Ashkenazi ones.
The idea that there might be Jews who are not Ashkenazim is not deemed possible under the circumstances.
This has led ignorant Sephardim to actually try to claim that they are “Jews of Color”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/davidshasha/tAiEuDhhrPw
None of this will save a Jewish culture that has remained Whites-only and which presents a contentiously divided face to the world.
Indeed, the fabled Black-Jewish alliance has taken on a life of its own and is now stuck in a world of exclusion and nihilistic values. It is a far cry from the pacific vision of inclusion and tolerance preached by Martin Luther King, Jr.
David Shasha