Decompressing Black Identity
Kanye, Kyrie, and how presentism obscures history
There is an interesting dynamic in American society. The higher up you go, the more blatant prejudice you will come across. Poor white people that come into good fortune may see themselves held at arm’s length by white people with longer associations with high status. Black people who work their way into exclusive spaces find themselves the screen for all kinds of prejudices projected onto them by the so-called elite. Girl bosses who can hang with the boys will eventually run smack into flagrant, wealth-armored misogyny on their way up their ladder of choice.
Jewish people, as a religious and ethnic minority, feel the bite of discrimination at times when the most prominent among them are humbled by exclusion and are silently reminded of the persecution, defamation, and oppression that have followed them through the centuries. Though they have enjoyed the status of whiteness for all of their time in America, they have also had to navigate a society that was actively creating and using shifting concepts of race to determine who would be poor and who would be rich.
There is a widespread unwillingness among the reasonably wealthy to lose their socioeconomic footing in America, the economic tower that looms above all towers that exist now or ever have existed. The specter of genocide lurks in the corners of our country: To be treated like the Native Americans or Black Americans is far too close to the horror of the European Holocaust for comfort. And while WASP-y magnates can take an accusation of greed on the chin and lose no clout, Jews receive similar complaints with an anxious foreboding since such statements were useful excuses for their enemies.
As a Black man, I find the reaction to Kanye’s admittedly ungracious comments — that some Jewish business owners can be exploitative — ironic: Capitalism itself is exploitative. To be involved at the highest levels of economic participation is to be directly or indirectly implicated in the global scheme of extraction. The American descendants of slavery are only two generations removed from segregation, which was state-enabled capitalistic exploitation. That some Jewish people have entrenched themselves in such a system is unremarkable, really, in the same way, that some Black people have also entrenched themselves in such systems, including the one that brought us here.
The second wave of reactions, those against Kyrie Irving, go even deeper. In the name of survival, there has been a careful curation of Jewish religion and culture in order to ground identity of a mostly European Jewish population in historical uniqueness. Before getting into why this is problematic, it must first be acknowledged that, in America, being unique is not enough. Black Americans are finding that, despite a unique history in American chattel slavery, carving out a specific Black American identity is difficult unless it is one’s own group that calls the shots. Euro-American elites have long ignored specific history with regard to the Black people trafficked, sold, born, and raised in the United States of America, going as far as to deny that black people globally even have a history. Today, except when making unfavorable comparisons to hand-selected African and Caribbean immigrants, many people who identify as white are not concerned with historical and cultural differences between come-heres and been-heres.
There is a clear, affirmative association between Jewishness and whiteness that is constantly affirmed by many Jews themselves and that shields and validates claims to an exclusive identity: These are they who came out of great tribulation, the people of the Book. Unfortunately, the idea that there have been people who practiced Judaism that was not of Levantine, Germanic, Slavic, or Iberian extraction is an idea that many Jewish men and women themselves find outlandish or offensive since it seems to chip away at the shield of exclusivity.
But it is true nonetheless.
In the Bible, the nation of Israel left Egypt with a mixed multitude, a point that cannot be lost in a discussion about the possibility of their being Black Jews. Egypt was not only the most advanced civilization of its time but was also a diverse society and a proto-empire with distant military outposts. People of various backgrounds were attracted to Egypt, and people of various backgrounds left with the children of Israel.
It is also acknowledged by their own scholars historically that the people of Israel were dispersed by a succession of conquerors throughout the known world, where they would have assimilated with the local populations, keeping their customs and traditions to varying degrees. This is, in fact, why how the Ashkenazim and Sephardim came to be. Is it too much to believe that Judaism could survive not only among Franks and Slavs but also among Dravidians, Han, and Africans?
I’ve written about this before, but it bears saying again: Americans have never really seen either slavery for what it was or Black people for who they are. Imagine a descendant of Levi, chased out of the Levant or sold like Joseph but much farther south. Imagine the descendants of that Levite, keeping what lore and tradition they had as they migrated over the centuries, marrying and giving in marriage in eastern and southern Africa as centuries earlier in Babylon. Imagine now a horde, darker than the Syrians or Chaldeans but no less willing to attack a nearby village and to capture and enslave its young people. Imagine a trek to the sea, a coffle of observant, assimilated Jews of African heritage being marched eventually to a barracoon and then packed into the hull of a ship to be sold in Kingston, in Charleston, in Rio.
Now imagine how few crumbs of the culture would survive. Dietary prohibitions fall by the wayside because, for one, there is no prohibition against cornmeal, meager measures of which become the bulk of her diet, his diet, and their surviving children’s diet. When the enslaved children of the enslaved Africans reach puberty, they are sold again, away from home, away from the humming of half-remembered prayer chants. Barring the curious fortune of being sold to a practicing Jew, most of these youths would live separately on faraway slave rows, neighbors to the children of Muslims, of Ifa elders and mothers, of Kongolese Catholics, and others, all growing more and more estranged from the traditions of their continental past.
But the sons and daughters of Ifa remember a few things here and there about the medicine and prayers of their parents or have the occasion to meet a newly trafficked elder of their religion. They practice in earshot of the descendants of Catholics who are reimagining the version of Christianity they want to continue in the face of the much-truncated version they are being offered. As the African Christians express themselves, the children of the African Hebrews hear familiar sounds and stories: the longsuffering of Job, the wrestling of Jacob, and the deliverance of Daniel from the lion’s den.
The confusion of it all resolves into a new identity, one that is culturally dense but artificially homogenous. The laws of that time compressed all that these people really were into a race, a category, a column of humanity good for nothing but the extraction of value.
For a people committed to the idea of spirit and a God, is it really all that unbelievable that, centuries after the horrific, tortious separation of African peoples from their identities, that one day the identities would come and claim their people? Observant Christians and Jews will remember that it was in slavery that the Great Identity, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, announced to Moses the reclamation of the Hebrews. Black Americans are finally coming into a moment where they can give serious attention to the beckoning voice of ancestral identity. It is only today that notions of a feral African past are being fully exorcised from the minds of the great mass of Black American descendants of slavery.
To be clear, there is no place in the world for theories that threaten the existence of the Jewish people by claiming that they are all pretenders. However, there is definitely room for the recovery of Jewish identity by Black Americans who may see in their family history even the tiniest clues of a Hebraic past.
In America, the so-called melting pot, this should not be an issue if Jewishness and whiteness are two separate things. Unfortunately, the exclusive claims of Jewish identity are wrapped up, tied up, and tangled up in whiteness, in assumptions that correlate European heritage or lighter skin with cultural validity. In other words, American Jews of European descent have been protected by their presumed whiteness, even though, strictly speaking, to be Jewish is not inherently white. It is confusing to watch people, who participate mostly uninhibited as white people in a society and economy whose standard entry pass is whiteness, claim the same level of vulnerability as the only segment of the American population that was thoroughly enslaved, then thoroughly segregated, and still excluded from American social and economic life for continued exploitation. And though history bears out the public support that Jewish leaders and laypersons have lent to Black American progress, there has also been a pattern of pursuing whiteness and excluding Black Americans from Jewish life.
When all is said and done, let us place the blame where it belongs: At the feet of racism. The fact that Kanye had to maneuver a market with no possibility of support from his existing network and that he saw himself stymied by what he saw as an ethnic group wielding economic hegemony is because the United States looked the other way (or participated) during the destruction and appropriation of what wealth we accumulated. Because so much effort was put into popular and academic arguments for the inherent inferiority of Black Americans, Kyrie and others of our background have no other recourse but to learn about our history before enslavement from sources of varying reliability. As Johnny Silvercloud recently wrote,
“There’s a reason you never see a Korean-American named Song pick up disinformation about where they come from.”
Meanwhile, many Black Americans are panning through mud, sewage, and erasure for glints of who we are to fill the void our American education left us with. This is all the result of the U.S. policy of describing and maintaining social order in racial terms that strip Black Americans, particularly, of their history and humanity.
There is no Black community: there are a bunch of families with different backgrounds who are forced into an artificial group because every other group largely excludes them. A religious minority with a history of compassion toward this group would do well to fall out of love with whiteness and find itself in support of the economic and cultural awakening of the children of the captives. Though by no means the majority of Black America, the descendants of Hebrews are definitely among us, and slowly but surely, the Great Vindicator is turning the captivity of the cast asides.
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Peace and healing, fam. ✌🏿
Update: This video is a great expansion on the article you just read.
