The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [69]
So far as I can determine, on none of these occasions was the anti-Semite black. To judge by stories in the news media and reports from advocacy groups, apparently I have a phenomenally skewed sample. Blacks, we have been led to believe, are America’s preeminent anti-Semites. When I conducted a search of databases for major U.S. newspapers, magazines, and network news programs for the eight-year period beginning in 1990 the vast majority of stories about anti-Semitism were on two topics: attacks on Jews in Eastern Europe following the demise of communism and anti-Semitism by African Americans. The sorts of anti-Semites I and my students most often encounter—bitter white people—received relatively little attention.
Even their most fanatical cousins went largely unnoticed. In 1993 white supremacists terrorized Jews, blacks, and other minorities in Billings, Montana, for months on end. A swastika appeared on the door of a synagogue, bottles and bricks were tossed at homes of Jewish families, racist and anti-Semitic literature appeared on windshields and in mailboxes. Yet according to a study by the sociologists Joe Feagin and Hernán Vera of the University of Florida, only four stories on the violence appeared in the nation’s news media. “In contrast,” Feagin and Vera report, “during the same period more than one hundred national media stories focused on anti-Semitic remarks made by Khalid Muhammad, until then a little-known minister of the small religious group, the Nation of Islam.”18
Indeed, the coverage of Khalid Muhammad provides a textbook illustration of how a small story, when placed in a heated media environment, can explode into a towering concern. Initially, Muhammad’s description of Jews as “hook-nosed, bagel-eatin’” frauds was heard only by the few dozen students who bothered to turn out one night in November of 1993 for his speech at Kean College in Union, New Jersey. During that address Muhammad lashed out at gays, black leaders he disliked, and the “old no-good Pope,” about whom he suggested, “somebody needs to raise that dress up and see what’s really under there.” The intense coverage and commentary that followed focused, however, on his anti-Semitism. For months it went on, with New York Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal and Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen enjoining black leaders to renounce Muhammad.19
By February 1994 the commotion had begun to die down when Christopher Farley of Time magazine kicked it up again by running a report on the resentment of some African Americans at white journalists and politicians who, as Farley put it, “feel a need to make all black leaders speak out whenever one black says something stupid.” A month earlier, when Senator Ernest Hollings, a white man, joked about African cannibalism, there had been no pressure put on white leaders to repudiate him, Farley observed, much to the annoyance of A. M. Rosenthal. “Politicization, distortion, ethical junk,” he labeled the Farley article in a convulsive column in which he went on to compare the Nation of Islam—a minority movement within a minority community—to Stalinism and Nazism.20
A segment on the CBS newsmagazine “Eye to Eye with Connie Chung” several weeks later propelled Muhammad’s star still higher. At a speech at Howard University the producers had filmed not only the minister’s anti-Semitic tirade and the audience enthusiastically cheering him and another anti-Semitic speaker but also individual students declaring that Jews spied on Martin Luther King and arranged for his assassination. One of America’s premier African-American