Jews, Blacks, and authoritarianism: The question I asked liberal Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine
On its website, the liberal-left Jewish magazine Tikkun, edited by Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of the book “Jewish Renewal” (1994) and co-author with Rev. Dr. Cornel West, of the book “Jews and Blacks” (1996), invites readers and viewers to submit questions to Rabbi Lerner. Below is my question. It is currently pending a reply from Rabbi Lerner, after appearing to accept my rather long entry into the question box, for which I am grateful.
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Dear Rabbi Lerner,
I have just begun rereading your 1996 book with Cornel West, Jews and Blacks. You and West confront the issue predictably by emphasizing common interests regarding oppression. And you discuss many issues and topics. But I believe you give short shrift to one of the biggest problems: There is a difference of values. This will surprise many people. Both sets of values are compatible with the experience of oppression and the struggle to overcome it; but less so with each other. This is it:
American Black culture is profoundly authoritarian. That means: angry moralism, a rush to accuse, and, when Blacks are in power or doing the enforcing (many security guards are black, even at universities where they are a tiny minority, like my alma mater, Berkeley). The roots are: slavery, its exclusion of intellectual culture (physical culture triumphed), military recruiting focused on the poor, jobs and schooling that do not favor the mind, and the evangelical Protestant religion. I think this last is the biggest obstacle.
Christianity in most of its forms is quite authoritarian, and much more so than Judaism. It was, like Islam, a religion of empire, and thus faith, and allegiance, which it demands. God in Christianity (and Islam) is more closely linked to the state than in Judaism, even though this relationship can be one of identificatory subordination, or antagonistic contestation. The world is fully created and essentially good, and only individuals need redemption, and for their moral lack. Though not all injustice is immorality; it may be structural, and economic, or systemically cultural. And texts, paradigmatically the Bible as 'word of God', are read to be implemented, or enforced (these are really the same), not interpreted, and argued about, as in Jewish practices of study. Obey the boss, do what you're told; that's the message. Slavery made that extreme, and the culture of the blues and the Black church modified this to favor the oppressed nation, but it did not abolish the paradigm.
Most Black Americans are left-wing or (usually) liberal authoritarians. This is paradoxical and can seem so if, like me, you have had many experiences with Black people recruited and paid to be enforcers, or simply all too eager to have recourse to punishments. This can be vicious and ugly; I have witnessed it. Of course, "liberal" whites and others will join the chorus in accusing the Jewish or white middle-class rebel (that means the Confederacy, right?) or the presumptively disobedient person guilty of arguing with a boss or enforcer or just not promptly obeying. In politics proper, most Blacks are solidly on the side of the authorities, just so long as it is done for them or by them.
America's biggest cultural problem is ambivalent and extreme views of authority versus liberty. This is the legacy of both slavery and the American colonial and Revolutionary experience which accompanied it. Most Jews are like most white Americans in not trusting the government too much. This logic is lost on most Black people. They don't want the government to hurt or kill them, but they do want it to feed them and give them goods. This means they will tend to be social democrats who "like" the big state that serves capital coercively. White and Jewish radical leftists like right-wing and centrist whites care more about liberty, and the difference is not that but whether its opposite is the market or something else.
Socialism, in fact, can bring liberty because the social control practices of the social welfare and police state are there for capital, along with longer working hours, lesser pay, poor living conditions, and a greater rate of dying from crime, pandemics, or police killings, all of which the left and labor radical have always wanted the opposite of. The Social Justice Warrior has a police morality: these two words go together in their authoritarian angry moralism. This is abetted by the trap of identifying injustice with crimes, oppression with oppressors, and racism as an attitude. The struggle for social justice then is reduced to a holy war against sinners. A paranoid narcissism demands that strangers who are presumed to be oppressors welcome us, while at the same time hating them because they cannot, enough. Such a morality is not just a bad politics; it really is not one at all. Though the guardians of capital will not mind using it. Recognition can be extorted, because to begin with it was cheap.
Jews care a lot about oppression and liberation, certainly, even if it is not quite as central to our faith as you believe. Your book “Jewish Renewal” offers one answer to the problem I describe, but it is too simple. Your book is one of many which implicitly suggests that God is an indulgent, kindly mother more than an angry, demanding father. This suggests a radical feminism and more substantive talk about all the oppressions, in a Rainbow Coalition of Affirmative Action prone intersectionalisms. Of course, God is a political progressive, and by definition, since he wants us to improve the world by making societies more just and people happier. No one can quarrel with this idea, but only with making too much of it (not all justice or happiness depends on transformation; sometimes it just means doing what we normally do).
Authoritarianism does not divide Jews and Blacks irreparably, but it very much divides us; that is my claim. And is this not really very much at the heart of what divides our communities? I think it means building a radical socialist politics that is not a liberal moralism. Moralism leads to the police state. Moralism says "I'm so good, because you are so bad, and guilty, and you must be punished," while morality says, "This is a problem, and it affects and implicates me/us. Here I am; here we are. What is to be done?"
I have here described a problem, but have no concrete solutions, “not yet.” What do you think, Rabbi?