Jack Salzman, Cornel West Struggles in the Promised

Blacks and Jews: A Personal Reflection \\ 409
running institutions of this sort on anything like the same scale, but there is no
reason why they can't or shouldn't do so—through their churches or other communal
organizations—except for their political and economic weakness. And that
is a weakness that will only be overcome by greater integration.
At this concrete level, it is obviously wrong to claim that Jews want these
kinds of institutions for themselves, but not for Blacks. An extensive network of
hospitals, day care centers, and so on, run by the Black community would make
American society stronger overall; no one has any reason to oppose this. We
should think of it as "meat and potatoes multiculturalism," because these welfare
institutions, and the churches and philanthropies and mutual aid societies that
underwrite them, create real space for the everyday enactment of a culture and for
the cooperation and camaraderie, the common celebrations and consolations, of its
members. By contrast, contemporary Afrocentrism with its anti-white and, often,
its anti-Jewish rhetoric, is the gestural version of cultural politics. It doesn't prepare
the children, who are its chief audience, for political or economic integration,
and so it opens no paths toward a serious cultural independence. Or, rather, it
points only to a sectarian separatism, like that, perhaps, of the Hasiclim or the
Ainish—and there is no evidence that most Black Americans, anymore than most
Jews or white Protestants, really want anything like that.
Given an inclusive politics and an open and fair economy, the United States
can afford a great deal of cultural diversity. We can expect Blacks and Jews to be
among the leaders in working out the theory and practice of this multiculturalism.
But they won't succeed in their efforts unless they work together at the same
time for political inclusiveness and economic fairness. Both groups have a history
here that pushes them leftward in roughly similar ways. Despite the writings of
Jewish and, more recently, of Black neoconservatives, egalitarian commitments
continue to orient and shape the everyday politics of both communities. They still
can't, and don't have to, forge a formal alliance; coalitional politics in a democracy
is more rough and ready than that. Indeed, the voting record of Blacks and
Jews in recent elections suggests that in some rough and ready way, the coalition
already (or still) exists. But its full articulation, and the good feeling this would
bring, await a serious campaign against gestural militancy and Jew-baiting in the
Black community.
The burden falls that way right now, though few people talk about it openly
in these terms. If I insist on them here, it isn't in order to deny that political work
is necessary in the Jewish community too, to sustain the old commitment to racial
equality. I put the fight against Black anti-Semitism first because it is so visible
in American politics today and because I believe that there are Black intellectuals
and political leaders ready to take on this fight, ready to take the crucial step
toward an American left-liberalism that might, by reckoning with its recent past,
give itself a future.