Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Blacks, Jews, and Gender \\ 395
schooled us to believe that an aggrieved party has a right to demand a retraction
and obtain redress. In contrast, experience with slavery and Jim Crow has taught
African Americans that insults must be ignored, that in a sense, ignoring an
affront invalidates it. Black people let today's abuse roll off their backs because
they may need to work with their abuser tomorrow. As David Shannon, a minister
from Atlanta, put it, "If we'd permitted ourselves to respond to every insult,
we'd all have been dead by 1619."
"We don't even criticize our own for what they do to us," added Bernice
Powell. "When Mayor Wilson Goode dropped a bomb on Black people in
Philadelphia, not one Black spoke out."
Bottom line: the Jewish heritage puts the burden on the insulter to retract
while the Black heritage puts the burden on the insultee to refuse to respond.
Defining Ourselves and Each Other
In dialogue, the differences between Blacks and Jews are rarely better delineated
than when each group speaks about its own "survival," a word both use frequently
but with quite dissimilar meanings. For African Americans, survival means factual
physical endurance, staying alive in the face of violent crime, drugs, hunger,
homelessness, and infant mortality rates that are more than triple that of whites;
it means surviving as a viable community when 30 percent of the adults and 75
percent of the young live in poverty, when 44 percent of Black seventeen-year-
olds are functionally illiterate, and when the Black unemployment rate is twice
the white rate. For Jews, survival means keeping a culture and a religion alive
against all odds, discouraging intermarriage, fighting anti-Semitism, and supporting
the security of Israel.
In dialogue, it became clear to us that Blacks worry about their actual conditions
and fear for the present; Jews worry about their history and fear for the
future. Blacks see their survival threatened by poverty; Jews see their survival
threatened by affluence, with its temptations of assimilation and moral corruption.
To Blacks, racism is a bacteria, potentially curable but presently deadly. To
Jews, anti-Semitism is a virus, potentially deadly but presently contained.
Furthermore, fear motivates Jews the way economic and social reality motivates
Blacks. Although safe and relatively prosperous at the moment, Jews are a
people whose vulnerability is seared indelibly into our collective unconscious.
After the Babylonian Exile, four Roman wars, the Christian Crusades, the Spanish
and Portuguese Inquisitions, the Czarist pogroms, Stalin, Hitler, and five Arab
attacks, we expected our dialogue partners to accept our obsession with anti-
Semitism. In turn, our Black sisters expected us to acknowledge the grisly legacy
of slavery, the terrors of the Middle Passage, the inhumanity of white Americans,
and the continuing scourge of racism.
Competitive suffering. Comparative victimology. In some dialogues, the