For my entire life, especially in my online writing life, I have been accosted by paranoids of all sorts. One particular individual comes to mind. I recall that there was an X in his capitalized pseudonym. All of his paranoia came down to one stentorian conclusion, which was that black Africans required the Bomb. A nuclear African nation, he reasoned, would pose enough of a threat to shut down all of the recidivist KuKluxers worldwide. Nothing short of the Nuke of Negritude would suffice. In 17 years of blogging he was one of three people I ever had to ban.
Recently I’ve encountered a couple such paranoids who have made it their business to remind me of my inescapable blackness and the dread consequences of my political inaction in the imminent racial apocalypse of Trump V2.
On the other hand, having grown up in Southern California, I was a complete stranger to anti-semitism of any consequential kind. Some of the black paranoids would often use rhetorical devices as comparing blacks to Jews: “Jews got their shit together, and you niggas ain’t shit.” But such insults only rarely resulted in any organizational action. For the most part it just fell into the backdrop of Hotep-speak one could reliably hear from salt-and-pepper bearded black men who looked as if they used to dance to Sam Cooke but haven’t danced since they came back from ‘Nam. These words of advice were always best intended to light a spark under such presumed lazy asses, but never directed towards harming any actual Jews. I never saw anything beyond such in-house rabble-rousing until I moved to Brooklyn where Jew identification was something of a pseudo-scientific pastime. This was, not coincidentally, on the eve of the LA Riot and in the wake of the murder of Yankel Rosenbaum.
What was more common was the kind of static I received and occasionally do receive as a pseudo-anonymous black man on the interwebz. This is of the general form of “You think you’re high and mighty, but the white man is going to take you down.” “Alternatively, what kind of buck-dancing boogaloo do you think you’re doing for the white man.” Interestingly, l haven’t bothered to categorize my contempt for these insults. And quite honestly, I have forgotten the insult of this variety I got last month sometime, which was the incident got me started on these paragraphs. Ultimately, the defensive and paranoid are plagued with fear, and while I sense that they are canaries in coalmines of their own histories, I haven’t much bothered with their tweets. But in the very same way the plague of anti-semitism never quite registered with me until I was shocked into its Brooklyn reality, I can’t say that I ever saw the parallel between black paranoia and Jewish paranoia. That’s because I grew up always expecting to overcome, and I never feared white people.
You might say that if I was a Jew, I would have been a fearless Zionist. So I am reminded of the film The Debt that came out in 2010 about the dark secret three old Mossad agents kept about a mission in their youth. I had but one such radical fantasy in my entire life, and it was in the wake of the Rodney King beating, I wanted to execute the following mission. Let’s find and kidnap a young white male police officer and cut off the index finger of his strong hand. He will never shoot a black man. I imagined myself as cold, calculating, merciless yet polite to my captive. I would have a doctor on hand. We would release him to tell the story. Symbolic bullshit I know, but you’ve got to admit it would have been a hell of a symbol in 1991. Nevertheless, I’m much more glad that the year after the Riot, black men began embracing each other, a chapter in our history many people forget. Still it was my responsibility to be stronger, smarter, tougher as a young black man. I took all that seriously, and I’m happy to have benefited from the overkill. It makes me more desirous to be zen today than I might have been otherwise. The overkill prepared me for the profound disappointment not only of the Woke mind virus, but the tragedy of Multiculturalism gone wrong. The overkill made me think of why seeing through the semiotic swamps of society was a necessity. It never was to be prepared for a rage-filled racial reckoning, but the whimper of reason.
Lost Ancestry
I recall two stories from Granta which I read avidly at the time. One was about a young woman who found herself feeling great shame for not having learned to speak Italian like her grandparents. The other was about someone living the the shadow of a Holocaust survivor whose suffering made them both immune to first world problems and all of its charms, ever reminded of a horrible past. Somehow I had negotiate my own heritage and that’s something to do when you turn 30, I guess.
Black Rage
We black Americans in our great numbers have been able to collectively blackmail America with the politics of rage. I’ve always said that without qualification, and yet today as I write it I know it’s just some particular specie of white middle class American who prided themselves on their liberalism on whom such drama works. I’m trying to imagine Spencer Tracy disarmed by Sidney Poitier who came to dinner but then Poitier suddenly and unexpectedly goes BLM ballistic. You would be surprised, or perhaps you wouldn’t by the number of fragile and fearful individuals who dream themselves into such a demonstration of black rage. But we all know that there are plenty of non-Spencer Tracy Americans who have no patience for that kind of tantrum. So black rage, while still expected from the Kendrick Lamar crusty bedroom, is limited to being the junior sidekick of the DEI evil eye. At least when Obama did it, he used Black Eyed Peas and those were happier, sappier days. BTW, I haven’t kept track of who won the big diss-fest of Lamar vs Drake or what anybody is supposed to think about it. Neither one of them is more talented than Nas or MC Lite, so whatevers to all that shite. Bottom line, I don’t think America on the whole likes vindictive people, even when they’re only mau-mau signifying vindictiveness. I guess I’ll have to follow up viz Tulsi Gabbard’s indictments of Kamala Harris’ indictments.
Statistical Representation
Still, no black paranoia compares with what’s real and recent with regard to the clear and present danger and deeply embedded worldwide antipathy to Zionism - against the very idea of a nation for Jews. What I didn’t mention and at this moment I recall in my black nationalist youth, how my father took me to the LA Convention Center which held an exhibition about Israel. The one thing I remember most vividly was my father’s reverence for David Ben-Gurion and his gawping at the modernistic apartment complex that was modeled at the exhibit. I can imagine these were architected as new settlements, but I’m slightly upset that the internet is shallow when it comes to online searches for “israel exhibition la convention center 1970s”. I think I would have to ask some people I know who no longer live in LA.
Be all that as it may, I’ve been thinking despite what I know about hate crime statistics (Jews are demonstrably more hated, if statistics are the demonstrations) that Jew hatred is something of a first world problem. Like crime in Baltimore, just don’t go there. But I have been reminded how quickly things can go to shit in the land of the free when the brave stay home. Hmm. FBI UCR says something different, but I know what I saw, and I’ll get you more stats - the problem with the ones I have is that they’re absolute counts, not weighted per victim population.
At any rate what the bulk of these hate crimes consist of intimidation. These are 300 thousand crimes over about 23 years, and most of these crimes are against black Americans, unweighted.
According to Wolfram Alpha, Jews are 1.8% of Americans and black Americans, which is a term it doesn’t recognize, are 12.7%. What I could not determine was which percentage of which group lived in which region of the country. Because the following chart piqued my interest. Given that ratio, all other things being equal, which they clearly are not, any crime number you see against Jews should be multiplied by roughly 7.05 to be on the same basis as black Americans per capita. I think that it’s obvious that proportionately more Jews live in the Northeast. But all of this splitting hairs is tiresome.
That rather dovetails with my experience in Brooklyn, but then when I moved to Atlanta, OMG everything was about Mary Phagan. I could see why few Jews would want to live down there. Which reminds me of a story from a Jewish friend of mine who literally called me to let me know he was safe in Atlanta back when he met his fiance’s family, all way back in the early 90s.
OK that alley has been wandered down. I managed to confirm some of my biased memory. Proportionately speaking, Jews get more shit. Blacks do more political intimidation than get intimidated although there’s a lot of intimidation going around. Still, at the felony level, all the change is rather chumpy.
So are we intimidated? It’s an interesting question. Neither black or Jewish Americans are intimidated into silence or second-class citizenship. There are nasty traditions of successful intimidation, and while those traditions live on, we’re a newer generation and we’re not gonna take it. I speak of GenX of course. Millennials are intimidated by peanuts. But for those of us who started off in the post-civil rights era, nobody was intimidated in high school that I knew. We said, bring it. The overwhelming majority of us stood down in integrational peace.
So what?
While it is relatively easy for me to get this kind of data and flip it around until it makes sense, the free AIs and search engines for the masses are not prepared to do so. So outside of this spot and a few others, relevant facts are going to be hard to find. Those found will probably serve populist political purposes that we grownups don’t pay attention to. So I pay attention to my Jewish friends sentiments to a certain extent, and I pay attention to the health and welfare of people I see on a daily basis, as well as that material I watch them consume.
What do we need to survive? That is the question. Does our paranoia make our predictions about what threatens us more or less accurate? Did Trump build a wall? Did Obama make America post-racial? Is Israel tempting a nuclear exchange with Iran? Are the various derangement syndromes and defunding efforts actually succeeding in draining our life forces down to a weak, defeated people? Hell no. I wish you could hear the blasé cant to my voice as I say ‘hell no’. It’s more like “Hells no, dude. We’re freakin’ amped.”
And yet we know that loud minorities who claim our ethnic and other heritages are busy doomsaying and pretending that ‘we’ will never be safe without authoritative representation. They’re the ones wielding the Sword of Damocles. Swat it from their grubby hands.
Edification
Almost every day, and certainly every week, I find something rewarding about the life of memories I have. Like today I found new music by the saxophone player David Boyce from the Braun Fellinis, as well as a young woman named Chelsea Carmichael whose playing immediately reminded me of Boyce when he went by the pseud of Black Edgar Kenyatta. Chelsea studied under Courtney Pine back in the day, and guess who didn’t screw the hiphop pooch? A cool gang of folks called the Crown City Rockers.
So you’ve caught me out. I can’t dwell on the categories and weight of black and Jew and intersect them with crime to see if America has the right sense of violation. I can’t measure our senses of outrage outside of the sense of fear and insecurity that some people feel regardless of the reasonable estimates of whether or not such fears will be realized. Maybe its simply enough to hear the paranoids out. How well have they predicted this month, this future? My eyes are clear. My powder is dry. My stereo is on.
I revert to my mean of cultural edification, Stoic calm and balance.