Thoughts on Jews and Black Lives Matter

During the recent debates about the destruction of racist statues, my Facebook timeline featured several posts highlighting examples of antisemitic statues and monuments, mainly from the middle ages, which have never been removed. At first, this reminded me of the deflective responses of some white people to the current Black Lives Matter protests – either complaining about the destruction of property or, more tellingly, saying ‘all lives matter’. But the Jewish response felt decisively different to these attempts to sideline the problem of racism.

Although many (but by no means all) Jews identify as white, our relationship with racism cannot be the same as that of members of the white majority, as we are also a minority and subject to a form of racism – antisemitism. We cannot simply be allies as we also have a personal stake in the struggle. Anti-black racism and antisemitism are different but overlapping phenomena, or perhaps it’s better to say they are subsets of one bigger, overarching problem. How do these forms of racism interact and what does this mean for the relationship between Jews and people of colour (acknowledging that there are plenty of people who are both)? Unless Jews can answer these questions, we’ll lack a firm foundation for our involvement in Black Lives Matter and the broader anti-racist movement.

A caveat – I identify as a white, Ashkenazi (European) Jew and whatever expertise I have is in Jewish history, Jewish thought and the Jewish community. I have very little expert knowledge of the history and culture of people of colour and no first-hand experience of anti-black racism. The following analysis is presented tentatively in the hope it will provoke discussion, feedback and criticism. If it includes misunderstandings or unintentionally causes offence, I absolutely welcome feedback, corrections and further discussion.

A good place to start is Nancy Fraser’s article ‘Social justice in the age of identity politics’ (1996). She says:

In today’s world, claims for social justice seem increasingly to divide into two types. First, and most familiar, are redistributive claims, which seek a more just distribution of resources and goods. Examples include claims for redistribution from the North to the South, from the rich to the poor, and from owners to workers….

(I would add to this category the redistribution of power as well as economic resources.)

Today, however, we increasingly encounter a second type of social-justice claim in the “politics of recognition.” Here the goal, in its most plausible form, is a difference-friendly world, where assimilation to majority or dominant cultural norms is no longer the price of equal respect. Examples include claims for the recognition of the distinctive perspectives of ethnic, “racial,” and sexual minorities, as well as of gender difference.

Fraser goes on to attack what she sees as the false dichotomy between these two modes of progressive politics, arguing that many oppressed groups are in fact affected by economic equality and by cultural domination and non-recognition and are therefore in need of both redistributive and recognition-based political solutions. She weaves these two modes into a unified conception of social justice in which economic and cultural oppression are seen as twin barriers to parity of participation in society.

The distinction between politics of redistribution and recognition can help us understand the relationships between anti-black racism and antisemitism. It’s clear that the racism directed at people of colour means the unfair distribution of resources (economic inequality, poverty, discrimination in education and employment) as well as misrecognition (the example I recently heard of a black barrister being repeatedly misidentified in court as a defendant could not make this clearer, but misrecognition also explains phenomena like police brutality and the denigration of black culture). As Fraser argues, misrecognition often also underpins unfair distribution. Well-documented examples include teachers discouraging and setting low standards for black students, preventing them getting into university, and job applicants with foreign-sounding names finding it harder to get interviews.

In the UK, Jews do not on the whole suffer from redistributive injustice because of their Jewishness. The community is on average the wealthiest ethnic minority group in the UK and most Jews do not experience discrimination in employment and education. This is not to say there is no discrimination against Jews: 11% of Jews across the EU reported facing antisemitic discrimination in employment, education, housing or healthcare (2018) and 19% of UK Jews reported being victims of antisemitic discrimination (2014). But in Fraser’s terms, the main form of anti-Jewish racism is misrecognition: the marginalisation of Jews’ identity, culture and concerns, perpetuation of stereotypes, gaslighting and failing to recognise antisemitism as a legitimate concern, and incidents of vandalism and violence.

So Jews and people of colour face two different kinds of racism: anti-black racism is an unequal distribution of resources and power underpinned by misrecognition, whereas most antisemitism takes the form of misrecognition with no significant economic impact. People of colour are also deprived of power in a way Jews are not, although there are times when political antisemitism threatens the agency of Jewish people too.

Where does this leave the relationship between Jews and people of colour and the role of Jews around the Black Lives Matter movement? Here are some tentative suggestions aimed at my fellow members of the Jewish community.

First, let’s acknowledge that although most British Jews are of European origin, the whiteness of Jews should not be assumed. I don’t want to get into the argument about whether Jews are by definition non-white – we all define ourselves differently. But it’s an objective fact that there are many Jews of colour and these people are likely to experience both types of racism outlined above. We should avoid thinking and talking in ways that assume Jews are white, and some of the first actions we take should be to identify and combat racism in our own communities.

At the same time, we should remember that black people face forms of oppression that white Jews do not. This means that the imperative to listen to and learn from the experience of people of colour is no less important for white Jews than for any other group. The fact that as Jews we experience our own form of racism does not absolve us of this responsibility. This is nowhere more true than when tackling racism within our own institutions. There’s a powerful temptation to assume that as the victims of antisemitism, we can’t possible be racist. Listening to the history and experience of people of colour is the best antidote to this kind of complacency.

Yet the trauma of antisemitism can make it harder to acknowledge other people’s pain and oppression. Some part of us thinks that recognising someone else’s suffering downgrades our own. But suffering is not a zero-sum game. Arguments about who’s suffered more serve no-one. Nor does hypersensitivity towards instances of antisemitism among people of colour, or demands of reciprocity – ‘we’ll help you fight racism only if you help us fight antisemitism’. We need to resist this kind of impulse and draw on our experience of antisemitism to strengthen our empathy and solidarity with another group’s anti-racist struggle. The theologian and psychotherapist Michael Lerner has written compellingly about the need to break the repetition compulsion which is created by the experience of abuse in order to build healthy relationships and work together for justice.

Finally, we need to get the balance right between what Fraser calls ‘differentiating’ and ‘universal’ approaches to racism. On one hand, it’s vital to resist the liberal impulse towards colour-blindness, the idea that if we ignore race then racism will go away. On the contrary, the first step towards combatting racism has to be recognising the unique experiences of different ethnic groups, the centrality of race and the way it shapes our behaviours and institutions.

However, overdoing this kind of ‘differentiation’ risks destroying solidarity and reducing the black-Jewish relationship to one of simple allyship between two groups who have nothing in common. This would be missing an opportunity for something deeper. The corrective is to recast both antisemitism and anti-black racism not only as particularistic problems which isolate their victims from each other, but as twin targets of a broader anti-racist struggle. The challenge is to recognise the uniqueness of each group’s experience while acknowledging what we have in common.