Against Racial Panic

Is there a 'Black Antisemitism' and does it warrant extra concern?

Discourse today about race is both religious and reluctant. It has the confusing quality of being ecstatic, in the mystical sense, but anxious to the degree that many will disregard or distort even plain problems for which an incisive analysis may court heresy.

This becomes clearest when one minority group victimizes another. I’ve written about contemporary “Antiracist” thought and how it’s structured to erase, excuse, and even encourage Antisemitism. But the shortfall of a myopically power-focused analysis of race—that is, the peculiarly American analysis—leaves vulnerable more than Jews.

From the 1992 LA riots—which included a forgotten pogrom where rioters walked six miles to pillage and destroy the enclave of Koreatown, wreaking about half of the riot’s total damage of ~$900M on that small community—to the recent surge in anti-Asian violence, which has produced viral images of perpetrators-of-color, Asian Americans have also been caught between scapegoating by the downtrodden, and abandonment by politicians and officials who see them as a negligible constituency and progressive elites who believe, effectively or literally, that only white people can be racist.

“The No. 1 enemy for us was Koreans, who we felt were oppressing us… We wanted to hurt [Koreans] physically, economically, raise their insurance rates, anything we could for payback…”

"I didn't even see Koreans as people.”

—1992 Los Angeles rioter Todd Eskew, now Najee Ali, a community activist

One way to apologize for racism by the oppressed is to reimagine it as a function of “class”.

The mob's primary lust appeared to be for property, not blood. In a fiesta mood, threadbare looters grabbed for expensive consumer goods that had suddenly become "free." Better-off black as well as white and Asian-American businesspeople all got burned. "This wasn't a race riot," said urban sociologist Joel Kotkin of the city's Center for the New West. "It was a class riot."

—Excerpt from a 1992 Newsweek article about the LA riots

Another is to Mad-Lib presumably-white people in place of the perpetrators, as when Bill De Blasio blamed rising Antisemitic violence in New York City on a conspicuously invisible “right-wing movement” taking cues from Trump’s White House.

Or consider Jennifer Ho, an Asian American Studies professor, who shifts blame to a “white supremacy” she imagines as a kind of ectoplasmic force transcending the Black people who attack Asians.

The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it. —Jennifer Ho, University of Colorado Boulder [emphasis mine]

Thanks to these distortions, “up-punching” racism gets lost in the moral lacuna left by the weight of American history, in which white oppression of Black Americans is our original sin.

So what to make of a recent report, issued by the Hate Crimes Accountability Project of Americans Against Antisemitism, an organization founded by former New York State Assemblyman, Dov Hikind?

Dov Hikind @HikindDov

NEW: Hate Crimes Report by @AmericansAA & @IsraelBitton finally confirms what we've long known anecdotally: 94% of Anti-Jewish Assaults in New York City (2018–2022) Were Against Orthodox Jews; and 97% Were Perpetrated By Other Minorities. For the full report, watch this clip:

Hikind isn’t shy about headlining “what we’ve long known anecdotally”—that is, the report’s support (based on a sample of 99 victims) for the sense among many that most people attacking Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn are Black.

There is an empirical basis for that sense: In 1991, just 8 months before the LA riots, the Brooklyn neighborhood of Crown Heights, where Hasidic Jews live side-by-side with a Black community, erupted in a three-day riot which, as echoed in the transcription of a 911 emergency call, many Jews experienced as a pogrom. And in the years since, Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn enclaves have continually suffered street harassment and violence, which are reflected in news stories and surveillance video that, again, feature a large percentage of Black perpetrators.

The Hate Crimes Accountability Project’s report comes at a time when Antisemitism by high-profile Black figures is in the news, namely the Kanye West and Kyrie Irving controversies. That has helped it gain momentum, being cited or alluded to in follow-up news and opinion. Meanwhile, groups of Black Hebrew Israelites contemplate their next demonstration.

Add to all that the burgeoning consensus on the Right—as I was among the earliest to adumbrate in my criticism of the Left on Antisemitism—that “Wokeness” is inimical to the welfare of Jews.

I’m concerned that these factors might lead us down a dark and divisive road in which the nature and threat of “Black Antisemitism” are distorted and exaggerated.

The truth is, at the national level we have crappy data from which to draw demographic conclusions about the perpetrators of hate crimes. That’s because regional and local data aren’t much better. There’s a host of problems. Some victims don’t report or report unevenly, meaning that the numbers we wind up with are incomplete and naturally distorted. Statistical collection isn’t standardized; perpetrator demographics, for example, might be recorded in one place but not another. Categories aren’t standardized either; the boundaries of “Hispanic” and “Black” may overlap or shift across sets of data. Classifications can be questionable; are hate crimes against Jews “ethnic” or “religious” in motivation? How do you reliably disaggregate attacks against secular and visibly-identifiable Jews? Timetables for reporting data vary. Perhaps worst of all for drawing sensitive conclusions about groups of people, sample sizes are too small and fluctuations yield dramatic-sounding percentages.

Cognitive fallacies stand on this unstable statistical ground. I don’t need to explain how viral videos satisfy confirmation bias arising from racial bigotry. But more insidious in this case is the effect of the availability heuristic. When people think about an issue—say, Antisemitism or racism against Asians—their evaluation is colored by the data they can most readily bring to mind. Viral videos of Black and brown people assaulting Orthodox Jews and elderly Asians certainly suggest that there’s a serious problem of a specific hue! But most of these videos are captured in dense, urban settings where surveillance cameras are ubiquitous. While crimes are recorded throughout the country, city blocks now are effectively television studios.

These are also areas where minorities have had decades of inter-communal tension living near or right next to each other. I haven’t reviewed the NYPD data, but I wouldn’t be surprised to confirm the finding of the Hate Crimes Accountability Project that most people in New York City who attack Orthodox Jews are Black and brown. All of the (Ashkenazy) Orthodox enclaves in the city are mere blocks from Black or Latino communities. I would also be unsurprised to find similar patterns among anti-Asian attacks in New York City and urban parts of California. To return to the LA Riots, Korean small business owners established their beachhead in Black South Central Los Angeles during the aftermath of the 1965 conflagration in Watts.

So thanks to traditional and social media, the availability heuristic imparts a strong sense that these inter-minority patterns are predominantly reflected in hate crimes nationwide, and that simply has not been established.

If the data are unclear, so too is the idea of “Black Antisemitism”. We should clarify: are we talking about standard Antisemitism expressed and practiced by Black people, or a uniquely Black type of Jew-hatred?

The vast majority of Antisemitism is the same and will be expressed by white and Black people. That’s because conspiracy theories, including Antisemitism, may appeal to anyone. So while culture and politics often predict the language and tropes an individual uses to express them, it’s merely a novelty that this Black woman sounds precisely like David Duke when talking about Jews.

But there is, in fact, an authentically Black Antisemitism. You will only hear Black people advance the conspiracy theory that they are the “original Jews” whose religious birthright was stolen by white “imposter” Jews seeking to empower and enrich themselves at their expense. That is a fantasy rooted in Black American religion—originally Black Christianity, and then later New Religions of Black Judaism and Black Islam formed in urban storefront churches during the Great Migration.

Though it has parallels in British Israelism and the thought of some Japanese Christians, Black Israelism has given us a uniquely Black form of Jew-hatred. It remains to be seen how consequential Black Antisemitism, thus defined, will become. We should resist—with urgency—racial demonization and panic. Yet decades of animosity toward the Jews of Crown Heights suggest that the “up-punching” racism of the oppressed mixes caustically with a paranoid theology to produce substantial violence.