Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

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The far greater political and economic power of Jews in the United States
compared to that of Blacks helps to explain the pointed emphasis among Black
radicals on an argument for a greater Black moral power. Arguing from the point
of view of the historical uniqueness of the oppression of American Blacks, these
Black radicals articulated a common and enduring belief shared by innumerable
Blacks and their staunchest allies for centuries. Thus, for example, for Stokely
Carmichael, the horrors of anti-Semitism and six million Jewish deaths in the
Holocaust and its consequences are tragic, undeniable, and unspeakable. Clearly,
Jews, too, speak from a lofty moral perch. For Carmichael, however, that perch
had been sullied by the politics of the establishment of Israel, the displacement
and repression of Arabs, and growing evidence of Israeli ties to reactionary
regimes like South Africa. Zionism, in his eyes, had tarnished Jewish moral
capital. 25
Even before the Black Power imperatives of Carmichael and his cohorts, a
Black nationalist belief in a superior Black morality undergirded the nineteenthcentury
Black freedom struggle invigorated by the likes of activists like David
Walker and Sojourner Truth. In our own century, this nationalist belief animated
the civil rights movement inspired by Rosa Parks, led by King, criticized by
Malcom X, and personified by the likes of the towering Mississippi activist and
ex-sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer. That not all of these individuals or even most
Blacks who identified with the movement also saw themselves as Black nationalists
is beside the point. Instead, Black nationalism has historically shared
with the wide-ranging, broad-based, and enduring Black freedom struggle a
powerful sense of Blacks as "a nation within a nation." This special nation had
been endowed with a God-given mission: "to redeem the soul of America." This
extraordinary belief has profoundly shaped African American consciousness and
history. 26
That this vision has been reinforced by the strong identification of many
Blacks with the Old Testament travails and triumphs of "God's Chosen People,"
the Jews, is important. As a result, the African American liberation struggle has
often reinvented and represented itself as the modern and New World equivalent
of the traditional and Old World Jewish quest for peoplehood. The historic patterns
of conflict and cooperation between American Blacks and Jews have clearly
had very real economic (or material) as well as political and social origins and consequences.
Intimately interwoven with those patterns, however, has been the
intense symbolic ties between the historical sense of divine mission among both
Jews and Blacks. Deeply implicated in the nationalism of both groups, this sense
of a special and higher spiritual calling has colored the separate histories of both
groups in addition to the history of Black-Jewish interaction. Regrettably, the
moral authority emanating from histories responding to that calling has been
diminished among both groups by the narrow and often stultifying demands of
nationalism.