The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [71]
Even the Best and Brightest Are Bigots
Some surveys do find larger proportions of blacks than whites endorsing anti-Semitic sentiments. Questions beg to be asked, however, about how best to interpret these numbers. Are blacks more negative toward Jews than they are toward other whites, or was James Baldwin correct in an essay he published thirty years ago titled “Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White”? Anti-Semitism may be a subspecies of antiwhitism, and it may be largely limited to particular segments of the African-American community. Hubert Locke, former dean of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Washington, has argued that only at the fringes of African-American communities does serious anti-Semitism exist. In reanalyzing a series of questions from a survey of African Americans Locke found blacks as a group less hostile toward Jews than some researchers have suggested.25
One thing is certain. Black anti-Semitism is not concentrated on college campuses, as much media coverage has implied. “The number of anti-Semitic incidents reported annually on the nation’s college campuses has more than doubled since 1988, the Anti-Defamation League said today,” began an Associated Press story a few years ago that was picked up by the New York Times, among other publications. The ADL “attributed that increase in part to messages of ‘racial hate’ that it said were spread by Louis W Farrakhan, head of the Nation of Islam, and other speakers popular with some black students,” the story said without so much as a rejoinder from an African-American leader or social scientist who might have put the ADL’s findings in perspective.26
As suggested earlier in the discussion about road rage, teen suicide, and preteen murderers, when a problem is said to have multiplied it is a good idea to ask, From what size to what size? When advocacy groups use surveys to draw attention to their causes the reported change—however extreme the organization may make it sound—is often from small to slightly less small. Read the entire article about anti-Semitism on campuses and you discover that “more than doubled” equals 60 incidents. Between them, the nation’s 3,600 colleges and universities reported 60 more anti-Semitic incidents than four years earlier, for a total of 114 incidents. By my calculation, with about 14 million students enrolled in U.S. colleges that comes out to a rate of less than 1 reported anti-Semitic act per 100,000 college students. The story fails to mention how many of these acts were related to Farrakhan and other black speakers, or how the ADL could possibly measure their influence. Even in the unlikely event that black students committed a majority of the anti-Semitic acts, however, only a tiny proportion of black college students were involved.27
Fear mongers did not need many incidents to give the impression that black anti-Semitism flows as freely as beer on college campuses. Subsequent to the speeches at Kean College and Howard came an event in fall 1995 at Columbia University that reporters and commentators made into a bigger deal than it was. The student newspaper The Spectator published a column by an African-American senior who wrote of “evilness under the skirts and costumes of the Rabbi.” He wagered, “If you look at the resources leaving Africa, you will find them in the bellies of Jewish merchants.”28
Judging by the quantity and length of stories in the press about this student’s comments and the dissections of his personal and educational biography, you would have thought there was something special about his column. Maybe he had ushered