Black-Jewish Relations: An Omni-American Vision-Part One
Rep. Ritchie Torres (Bronx) and Greg Thomas
Yesterday afternoon, I had the honor of presenting a short address on “Black-Jewish Relations: The Omni-American Vision” to a group of university students and early professionals in the Birthright Excel program, a prestigious, highly competitive business fellowship for young Jewish leaders and leaders-in-the-making.
Other speakers included David Bernstein, founder of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values; Anila Ali, a Muslim civil rights advocate; Rep. Ritchie Torres, New York’s 15th Congressional District (Bronx); and Marc Rowan, Co-Founder and CEO of Apollo Global Management Inc.
I spoke in my capacity as the Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project, during a portion of the program sponsored by the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). In this, the first of two parts, I provide the background and foreground for the topic. In part two, I give a personal account of my relationships with Jewish folk and round it out with an Omni-American narrative of intergroup fellowship and fortitude against bigotry and for the realization of the potential of American democracy.
Greg’s Speech
Greetings and good afternoon.
Context. Perspective.
These two words are guides for our short time together today, as we pursue insights useful for making America and the world better in 2023 and beyond. I contend that indeed our context should be that large and visionary: making America and the world better this year and beyond, before it’s too late.
The lens through which I, as the Co-Director of the Omni-American Future Project, view “Black-Jewish Relations” is multi-perspectival. Here’s what I mean:
Each person here is an individual. Each individual person here is a human being. Yes, so what? Here’s what: each person is a part of the overall category called humanity, while also being a singular entity with a body-mind, and a unique fingerprint and footprint. There is no one exactly like you even if you have a twin brother or sister. But you are also in relationships with other people, other individuals.
Our personhood and individuality, within classically liberal democracy, is an important premise for our theme. It’s a necessary pre-condition for us because bigots such as antisemites and racists, generally, view all Jewish people and all people racialized as “black” in some derogatory or invidious way. So, to counter such vile, low, group prejudice, one way is to consider each and every person as an individual.
However, while that’s necessary, it’s not sufficient. To libertarians among you, I must regretfully inform you that individuality isn’t enough. Why? Because individuals are embedded in relations with family, with historical traditions, with cultures. Some of those cultural traditions are religious, some ethnic, some artistic, with, of course, traditions that combine all of those aspects of life. And that’s why, on the scale of individuality to humanity, just saying we’re all human isn’t adequate. To act together to fight against bigotry and to strive to make the world better—even if that world is primarily your family, neighborhood or town or nation—we must identify with aspects of our shared lives beyond just our shared humanity.
Now we land into the domains of identity and identification. Clearly, if you’ve been attending the Birthright Excelerate gathering in 2023, it’s very likely that you identify as Jewish! How each of you defines your Jewish identity will vary, of course, because, as we’ve said, you have a singular identity. Your experience and lineage and personal and familial history may lead you to identify more with the ethnic than religious or vice-versa. But your being Jewish is important enough for you to be here with others who also identify as such.
I identify as an American of African descent. Throughout American history, the people with whom I identify have been called “colored,” “Negro,” “Afro-American,” “Black American.” Of course, bigots have slurs for the same group of people. And Jewish folks are also familiar with being called out of their names with slurs. But my identification with this group of people is ethnic, cultural, historical, artistic, not racial.
This is an important aspect of the Omni-American vision. If you took a look at the Twitter page of the Omni-American Future Project, you’d see a tagline: “Character and culture, not color.” Race is a concept that in modern times, say since the late 1600s, has been used by persons desiring racial domination to divide and sort people based on phenotypic characteristics and associated negative or positive connotations based on those characteristics. The overall process or system is called “racialization.”
The process begins with selecting characteristics such as color of the skin, shape of one’s skull or the size and shape of one’s nose, hair texture and ancestry, as signs of meaningful difference. In order to then sort and divide people into subpopulations, as if there are different species of human beings rather than one human family, and to make sure that the U.S. population focused on such relatively meaningless physical categories as the basis of identification, these characteristics were then attached to stereotypes.
Racial Stereotypes
These subpopulations were assigned certain traits, talents, and behaviors. “Lazy and shiftless,” “hyper-sexual,” and “athletic but not intellectual” are examples of such stereotypes as applied to my cultural and ethnic kinfolk. For Jewish people, as you likely know better than me, there have been hurtful stereotypes such as “greedy and money-grubbing,” “rootless cosmopolitans,” as well as others regarding Jewish mothers and Jewish girls and boys.
Just because, as it’s commonly said, stereotypes may contain some elements of the truth, and because comedians in our respective groups can joke about those stereotypes in a way that causes us to laugh at those elements of the truth, doesn’t make them less hurtful when wielded by bigots, especially those who will spew venom that turns into actual prejudice and violence against, in this instance, Jewish people and Afro-Americans.
Such stereotypes then become essentialized, which basically means that these groups of “subpopulations” are born with those characteristics, which become immutable, unchangeable aspects of who they are as a people.
The last step in the process of racialization is to act as if so-called “racial” differences justify unequal treatment.
I thank Dr. Carlos Hoyt Jr. for his work, from which I derived this five-step process of selecting, sorting, attributing, essentializing, and acting.
The Omni-American Future Project, which is a collaboration among the Combat Antisemitism Movement, the American Sephardi Federation, and my own firm, the Jazz Leadership Project, decries and denounces racialization and the horrific racial worldview that derives from it. That racial worldview is implicated in both the justification for racism and the idea of race that came to infuse the trans-Atlantic trade in human beings and the so-called “final solution” by the damned Third Reich in Germany during World War II.
Somebody please tell “woke” activists, narrow DEI practitioners, and progressive academics centered on race that sharing light skin didn’t stop Hitler and his minions from enacting the Holocaust because of some shared so-called “white” identity!
So, we are individuals who have cultural identifications and historical experiences that are different but our histories and experiences as groups of people, and as Americans, intersect.
Now, allow me to get personal . . .
We’ll continue with Part Two this Friday. As Jewel mentioned in her last post, we’ll begin a once-per-week posting schedule starting on April 3rd. Our collective and individual work schedules necessitate a downshift in frequency.