Although the import of this passage can be minimized as rhetoric directed against Jewish businessmen in black communities, the fact is that anti-Semitism was a frequent feature of Black Arts poetry. Virtually every participating poet wrote at least one anti-Semitic poem, and some wrote more, though the level of virulence varied considerably. For Baraka it was partly personal; he had been close to Jewish poet Allen Ginsberg during his Beat period, and now he was disavowing both the cultural and the personal connections. But for others the Jews were a convenient scapegoat, as well as a way to revile whites without risking broader cultural consequences.
Editor’s note for Amiri Baraka’s “Black Art,” from Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry (Nelson 428).
In thinking about how to approach this week’s blog post, I (very) briefly entertained the notion of producing a type of imitation poem. However, I immediately decided it felt wrong; whatever content I imagined as potential poetic inspiration—though I too have grievances to express toward our country right now as well as from a perspective of someone with an Italian American heritage—surely could be justifiably viewed as well short of the type of deeply felt and complicated subject matter the Black Arts poets write about. In other words, I felt I had no right to venture into the literary terrain of the Black Arts Movement, that I should probably stay in my lane, so to speak, as the deep history of racism, systemic oppression, violence, and outright hatred that these poets sought to address are well beyond the scope of anything I could contribute, nor even should I attempt to; I would hate to create the impression that I thought for a single second that I would legitimately compare my grievances with theirs, nor that I can do any more than imagine (probably without even coming close to reality) the experience of the Black communities in America.
For similar reasons, it felt somewhat wrong to attempt a close reading of their works, which would likely necessitate my venturing into the territory of the poet’s pain, anger, society (societal ills), etc., the underlying mentality driving the work; this too seems like it’s not quite my place to comment, even though I often felt some of the frustration, anger, and despair in much of their work as if it were my own. Despite the fact that I am furious at our society over its failings, particularly regarding the racist roots relentlessly refusing to finally wither away, despite the fact that I would cherish an opportunity to shout alongside these poets and the heroic activists still fighting against such (obvious, to me) discriminatory, illiberal realities in our society, there are certain instances where I feel it is simply not my place, a blog post being one of these instances.
Then, I thought, maybe I’ll just write a reflection, similar to what I’m currently writing, addressing some of the complexities of these works, their content, and their writers. I wrestled with that idea for a while, even though I am aware it does not align with the guidelines for these posts. Ultimately, there was an element apparent in some of these works that I couldn’t shake from my mind. It was the overt anti-Semitism, and the editor’s note quoted in its entirety above only further perplexed me. I couldn’t immediately come to any strong notion pertaining to why the Black Arts poets would include anti-Semitic comments in their work. Of all the populations, one might think the Jewish communities could most relate to/empathize/even sort of understand the struggles through atrocities past and present, especially so shortly after the Holocaust, when the Black Arts Movement began to rise.
This led me to Robert Reid-Pharr’s, “Speaking through Anti-Semitism: The Nation of Islam and the Poetics of Black (Counter) Modernity.” In this essay, Reid-Pharr works through not precisely why anti-Semitism became a feature of black nationalist rhetoric (particularly the Nation on Islam’s rhetoric), but he offers some suggestions on understanding such anti-Semitism. Though he does not focus on the Black Arts poets, I believe the same logic that Reid-Pharr presents may similarly apply to these poets.
Reid-Pharr begins with a quote from Khalid Mohammad, who was minister of the Nation of Islam, from a speech he made at Kean College in 1993. Mohammad says, “You’re not the true Jew. You are the Johnny-come-lately-Jew… You’re not from the original people,” and Reid-Pharr selects this specifically to highlight one of his central points. He argues that anti-Semitism among Black communities (specifically black nationalists and the Nation) results from social/cultural alienation, from the construction of ideology within modernity. He first clears the field for his own analysis, saying, “More spiritually or philosophically minded commentators tend to focus on the presumably intense Christian religiosity of the black community, while those who favor structuralist approaches generally prefer underdeveloped explanations of Jewish/black client relationships” (134). This brought to mind Nelson’s editor’s note, suggesting the possible explanation of Baraka’s anti-Semitic passage as “rhetoric directed against Jewish businessmen in black communities.” Though there may be some truth to that notion, there must be more to it, as Reid-Pharr suggests.
Reid-Pharr points out the “noble history of black and Jewish cooperation in the struggle for expanded civil rights and civil liberties” but contends that relationships between the two groups (particularly among elites) have been contentious for “at least the last thirty years” (134 – Note: Reid-Pharr’s essay was published in 1996). He poses the question: “What is it about the figure of the Jew that so suits him as the bete noire of a certain black nationalist project, when indeed the relationship of black Americans to both white Protestants and white Catholics arguably has been and continues to be much more oppressive and demeaning[?]” (135). This question sets up Reid-Pharr’s arguments, since there must be something more going on here than lashing out at oppressors. He argues that we must try to understand “anti-Semitism as an ideological structure, not as a species of false consciousness but instead as one of the fictions by which many people… express their alienation within modern society,” and he points out the paradox inherent in this line of thinking, saying, “though (black) alienation is a real and pressing matter, its articulation through anti-Semitic rhetoric ultimately leaves us trapped within the very ideological structures by which and through which alienated black subjectivity has been constructed” (135).
To explain this position, Reid-Pharr quotes Louis Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” saying that “Althusser forces us to an understanding of the fact that we create ideology… imaginary representations of our social condition, precisely because the social condition is itself alienating,” and that “it is ideology, through the complex process of interpellation, or hailing, that produces us as modern subjects” (135). Therefore, if we consider anti-Semitism as an ideology, then, Reid-Pharr argues, “the work of anti-Semitism, particularly as it has been expressed by some representatives of the Nation of Islam, is to express black alienation within the dominant narratives of modernity, narratives in which Jews and Jewishness figure centrally, if only as ‘threats, interlopers, or third subjects’ within the dominant structures of modern life” (136). In part, he suggests, such anti-Semitism, precisely because it is viewed as “destructive, dangerous, and, most important, irrational,” could be a way for Black leaders to express “antipathy for the structures of reason and civility” that have determined what in our society counts as hateful, dangerous speech; “What the Nation of Islam has done…then, is to reshape the anxiety that the black subject exists only on the periphery of Western modernity into a general antipathy for the very structures of modernity, including the notions of civility and rationality that mitigate against anti-Semitic discourse and practice” (136).
However, this is apparently counterproductive; “the focus on the Jewish subject…simply reiterates the tendency within the modern West to insist upon the bifurcation of the in and the out, the self and the other,” and, furthermore, the anti-Semitism among Nation of Islam leaders and other black nationalists is not a result of “various ‘real world’ differences between many blacks and Jews, but, on the contrary, because they are not different enough (136-37). Part of the tendency defining modernity, according to Reid-Pharr, “the unrelenting desire, on the part of its architects, to order the world, to clearly delineate the good from the bad, the self from the other,” which leads to another factor possibly contributing to the anti-Semitism among these Black leaders; “The Jew is the interloper who disallows the easy delineation of the nation, the race, the people. As a consequence, he must be cast out if ‘we’ are to take form. ‘You’re not the true Jew. You are the Johnny-come-lately-Jew” (137, 139).
Mohammad’s comments reflect the notion that African Americans, as opposed to the Jews he speaks about, are not newly formed but contain ancient energy/consciousness carried through the millennia. Reid-Pharr points to writing by Henry Louis Gates Jr., saying that “Gates…has identified a second strain within black intellectual life… stressing… a black ontology that both predates and supersedes white Western culture. For Gates this line of thinking is represented best by the Black Arts Movement and Negritude, both of which were concerned with delineating the parameters of an ancient black consciousness that is carried about literally within the bodies of the individual members of the African diaspora… in this way, blackness becomes a powerful living entity” (138). Considering this, Mohammad’s anti-Semitic remarks begin to become a bit clearer. With the ontology just mentioned in mind, denying the same lineage for Jewish people then sets the Black communities apart, higher on the social ladder than the Jews, which ideologically allows for the potential of bitter resentment.
Reid-Pharr notes that in the time just before and during the rise of the Nation of Islam (more accurately, its predecessor the black Muslim movement), America and the world went through economic crisis with the Depression, then WWII, as African Americans “had themselves just begun to turn the tide against both economic violence and systematic attacks by white terrorists,” and that following WWI, Black soldiers returned patriotic with a heightened sense of self, only to be “resented and resisted by their white compatriots. Lynchings continued apace…several returning soldiers being tortured and killed while still in uniform” (138). This alienation, even despite honorably serving the country in war, including literal segregation within society, set the stage for the rise of charismatic speakers, like W.D. Fard, “telling them they belonged to a tradition that was older, more noble, and ultimately more democratic than the system of Western rationalism and universality that they recognized as so clearly flawed,” and Fard “found an audience altogether ready to receive and accept his message” (138). Fard’s mission later developed into the Nation of Islam, and the era also saw the growth of other organizations, including Marcus Garvey’s, the Moorish Science Temples, the United African Nationalist Movement, and Rastafarianism; “all of these movements stressed the need for blacks to reintegrate themselves into a tradition of what one might think of as black nobility, while severing there enervating and demeaning connections to whites” (139). Reid-Pharr argues that “it is this will to separate, to define oneself in contradistinction to whiteness, that stands…at the center of the anti-Semitism that has emanated out of the Nation of Islam (139).
Anti-Semitism, Reid-Pharr suggests, is likely a result of the tendencies of modernity. The tendency of modernity toward binary categories, toward strict definitions, traps us “within an endless cycle of definition and redefinition… the phenomena that the modern subject must struggle against, must seek to erase, are not those things that can be defined clearly as bad, or evil, but instead those that cannot be defined at all—Jews…represent a threat to the structures of modernity…precisely because they somehow seem to escape the yoke of definition… The logic of anti-Semitism proceeds, then, not simply from the fear that Jews represent a nation within a nation…but indeed that it is impossible to pinpoint exactly what they represent” (139-40). Reid-Pharr points out that “the belief that Jews are not white stands at the center of much of anti-Semitic thought… this conflation of blackness and Jewishness is precisely the site of ambiguity that has been reacted against to vigorously by members of the Nation of Islam” (140).
Reid-Pharr then goes on to discuss a rather intensely anti-Semitic book, published by the Nation of Islam, called The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews. In the book, the purpose of which, according to Minister Farrahkan, was to “rearrange a relationship that has been detrimental to us,” the authors declare that Jews were among the most numerous and prominent, even among the most brutal, slave owners/traders; they are essentially blamed for initiating the slave trade, and even blamed for the holocaust—“In a bizarre twist of logic, Jews cease to be the victims of holocaust and become instead its perpetrators” (140, 144).
Reid-Pharr suggests that what we gain from considering the book “is a better understanding of the ideological work that the text is designed to do” (142). Reid-Pharr says, “the authors of The Secret Relationship have found it necessary to project the alienation by which their own narratives of black reality are so overdetermined onto some third party. It follows therefore that the real indictment of the Jewish stranger, the interloper, is that he keeps the black nation from finding itself” (142). Reid-Pharr says that “there is a sense of bewilderment, of hurt that one hears in the voices of black people…when we ask ourselves, If the Jews could do it why can’t we?” (143). He argues that “the response… by some black nationalist intellectuals has been… to suggest indeed that the horror of modernity should not be represented by the black, but by the Jew” (143-44). According to Althusser, “ideology acts or functions in such a way that it recruits subjects among the individuals… by… interpellation or hailing,” which Althusser says can be imagined as “Hey, you there!” (142). Reid-Pharr states that “the obvious response… would be that the authors of The Secret Relationship are attempting to hail the Jewish subject. ‘Hey You, you are the one who stole us from Africa, stripped us of our dignity, and kept your foot solidly on our necks.’ What is less obvious is the manner in which the black subject himself is being hailed” (142). This notion made me think of Baraka’s poem, “SOS,” which could easily be read as such ideological recruitment.
Reid-Pharr closes his discussion by pointing out that more scholars should consider this complex arena of anti-Semitism as it intersects with racism and ideology, particularly “to think through the implications of slavery and the Holocaust at the same time. The fact that so little real work has been done on this issue has left not only black and Jewish intellectuals but all of us concerned with understanding the nature of modernity in a sort of no-man’s-land in which there is a largely unspoken, if widespread, resentment that our tragedy is not recognized as the tragedy. This reality leads…not only to the strange pseudoscholarship represented within The Secret Relationship but more importantly to the continuation of the false binarism, the us-and-them mentality, that allowed for these horrors to be visited upon our various peoples in the first place” (145).
Although Reid-Pharr does not specifically discuss the Black Arts poets, it is difficult to imagine that they were not in some ways influenced by these ideological collisions occurring during the writing of their poetry. As discussed, the alienation, the hope for a better nation, the potential resentment resulting from not being viewed as similarly or even more tragic, the persistence of divisions and delineations symptomatic of modernity, the fact of oppression and being cast aside by ones society (having violence constantly inflicted, even after valiantly serving your country), and then hearing strong voices hailing you into the promise of a nobler existence, a nobler identity, all of these factors combined begin to add up in a way that makes the anti-Semitism in the Black Arts poetry something that we can begin to come to a form of understanding. It certainly doesn’t justify it, nor make it right or even less paradoxical/contradictory, but I believe that Reid-Pharr’s discussion is at the very least one convincing approach toward comprehension of the underlying tensions and ideology that formed the backdrop for anti-Semitism in the Black Arts Movement.
Works Cited
Nelson, Cary. Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, Oxford University Press, New York/Oxford, Vol. 2, 2nd ed., 2015, p. 428.
Reid-Pharr, Robert F. “Speaking through Anti-Semitism: The Nation of Islam and the Poetics of Black (Counter) Modernity.” Social Text, no. 49, 1996, pp. 133–47. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/466897. Accessed 27 Sep. 2022.
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