The Fall of White Supremacy

The January 6 attack on the Capitol is

one more sign that equal justice draws nearer

I started reading Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, with two particular thoughts in mind. First, having absolutely loved her previous book, The Warmth of Other Suns, I was certain that my investment in reading Caste would be repaid several times over. Second, it goes without saying that I, and virtually every other white person in America, need to be repeatedly schooled about the African American experience and how white supremacy has imposed relentless and almost overwhelming burdens on Black people since the first Africans were transported in chains to colonial America. Indeed, that white supremacy has not led to the complete genocide of African Americans is due largely to the vitality, endurance and resistance of Black people in the United States.

 

Without a true understanding of the struggle of African Americans to survive systemic inequality and to achieve equal rights under the law, it is too easy for white people to assure ourselves that the fight to dismantle white supremacy is not ours. But to understand that white privilege includes the assumption that Black people must fight their own battles, one only needs to consider how many times we hear whites claim that they are colorblind, or that their immigrant heritage absolves them of responsibility for the racism that took root in American life centuries ago and endures today.

 

Trump voters are perhaps the best examples of whites who have been made impatient and angry by the very notion of #Black Lives Matter and by last year’s regular demonstrations protesting police killings of people of color. But the persistent demonstrations are both a marker of fatigue with 400 years of oppression and exploitation and an increasingly powerful mobilization against the system that maintains those conditions. Those who are tired of that very visible resistance to inequality and discrimination need to recognize that though such mass activism doesn’t happen every single day, it will persist, and it will increase, until the very idea of whiteness has relinquished its hold on the white majority.

 

It is that reality, and the losses that throwing away lives and talent, impose on all of us that white people need to understand. In our iniquitous world, my white privilege is a constant. And though I cannot change the color of my skin (or my class background or my gender or my gender identity or my sexual orientation), if we are to prosper together in a world in which all lives do, in fact, matter, then we must separately and collectively reject what has been imposed on us. As Wilkerson writes,

 

“The tyranny of caste is that we are judged on the very things that we cannot change; a chemical in the epidermis, the shape of one’s facial features, the signposts on our bodies of gender and ancestry—superficial differences that have nothing to do with who we are inside.

 

“The caste system in America is four hundred years old and will not be dismantled by a single law or any one person, no matter how powerful. We have seen in the years since the civil rights era that laws, like the Voting Rights Act of 1965, can be weakened if there is not a collective will to maintain them.

 

“A caste system persists in part because we, each and every one of us, allow it to exist—in large and small ways, in our everyday actions, in how we elevate or demean, embrace or exclude, on the basis of meaning attached to people’s physical traits. If enough people buy into the lie of natural hierarchy, then it becomes the truth or is assumed to be (pgs. 379-380).”

 

A first consequence of such “truths,” faithfully believed by the vast majority of white Americans for centuries, is the exclusion of people of color, and the loss of much of the energy, creativity and brilliance they would have brought to bear on the American project. Together we might have built a United States of America that at this point in time had come much closer to fulfilling the promise expressed in the nation’s foundational documents and by our most celebrated visionaries. Neither should we overlook the fact that so many of those visions of a better America were first articulated by Black voices, like Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, A. Philip Randolph, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others.

 

Why a discussion of caste?

 

Before I had gotten very far into the book, I had a number of conversations with people, both black and white, who wondered why anyone would bother to examine the impact of caste when race seems to be the root cause of so much that is wrong in American society. The book’s subtitle, “the origins of our discontents,” clearly signals Wilkerson’s intent to persuade us that we should see the characteristics of caste systems as the foundational problem that must be addressed by efforts to promote comprehensive social change. But in 2020, the year in which events supercharged the notion that Black lives matter, the odds rose dramatically that a significant number of Americans, perhaps a majority, would be inclined to say that race, not caste, is the origin of our discontents.

 

Still, Wilkerson asserts that race is the mechanism that orders the underlying caste system in the United States. “Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive,” she writes. “They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place (pg. 19).”

 

Caste itself is such a rigid and comprehensive mechanism of social control that understanding it in detail is necessary to the work of dismantling it. In pursuit of that understanding, Wilkerson identifies the Indian caste system, which has endured and evolved for 2,000 years or more, and the fleeting, but ferocious treatment of Jews in Nazi Germany, which expropriated Jewish labor and wealth before moving on to the almost complete extermination of European Jewry, as the two closest analogs to the caste system in place in the United States. Writing about the similarities between the three distinct structures, Wilkerson defines “the eight pillars of caste.” These pillars uphold “a belief system, the piers beneath a caste hierarchy. As these tenets took root…it did not matter whether the assumptions were true.” It only mattered that people came to assume that they were true.

 

“These are the pillars of caste, the ancient principles that I researched and compiled as I examined the parallels, overlap, and commonalities of three major caste hierarchies,” Wilkerson writes. “These are the principles upon which a caste system is constructed, whether in America, India, or Nazi Germany, beliefs that were at one time or another burrowed within the culture and collective subconscious of most every inhabitant, in order for a caste system to function (pg. 99).”

 

A new nation is being born

 

Early in the book, Wilkerson writes that

 

“…in the summer of 2008, the U.S. Census Bureau announced its projection that, by 2042, for the first time in American history, whites would no longer be the majority in a country that had known of no other configuration, no other way to be.

 

“Then, that fall, in the midst of what seemed a cataclysmic financial crisis and as if to announce a potential slide from preeminence for the caste that had long been dominant, an African-American, a man from what was historically the lowest caste, was elected president of the United States. His ascension incited both premature declarations of a post-racial world and an entire movement whose sole purpose was to prove that he had not been born in the United States, a campaign led by the billionaire who was now in 2016 running for president himself (pg.6).”

 

It doesn’t take much imagination to connect the prediction that whites, and white supremacists, would be outnumbered by people of color by 2042, to a number of other markers that link to the attack on the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. That list includes the hardships that working class Americans, southern and rural white workers among them, suffered in the economic collapse that exploded in the fall of 2008; the election of Barack Obama that followed; Donald Trump’s birther campaign to delegitimize Obama’s presidency; Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell’s six-year effort to obstruct Obama’s leadership; the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement; and Trump’s 2016 election victory (and 2020 defeat). The extremist mob on Jan. 6 might not have been explicitly aware of the details of the coming demographic change, but they surely sensed in the political tensions and economic difficulties of the last decade that the consolations they once obtained from whiteness were in serious jeopardy.

 

For some poor whites who live in isolated white communities, not being black has meant that come hell or high water, they were still white and not sentenced to life at the bottom of the American caste system. The teachings of caste, the pillars of caste, as outlined by Wilkerson, had long ago persuaded them that someone other than themselves were deservedly ranked lower. They may not see the end of the caste system coming, but their panic and hysterical fears of stolen elections and welfare queens and masses of refugees camped out on our southern border are a sign that they feel the fragility of white supremacy in their bones.

 

 

If the majority only knew…

 

White Americans, Nazis, and Brahmin elites imposed a structure on their own people and culture that divided their own populations for the purpose of stealing wealth and labor, with the goal of maximizing their own comfort and ease. Wilkerson elaborates insights from Erich Fromm, a German Jewish refugee who, in the process of writing about fascism and racism in 1964, eerily describes the president who Donald Trump (and Trumpism) has been these last four years (pg. 271):

 

“Fromm well knew the perils of group narcissism from both his training in psychanalysis and his personal experience,” Wilkerson writes. “He saw firsthand the Nazi appeal to the fears and insecurities of everyday Germans in the lead-up to the Nazi takeover.

 

“If one examines the judgment of the poor whites regarding blacks, or of the Nazis in regard to Jews,” Fromm wrote, “one can easily recognize the distorted character of their respective judgments. Little straws of truth are put together, but the whole which is thus formed consists of falsehoods and fabrications. If the political actions are based on narcissistic self-glorifications, the lack of objectivity often leads to disastrous consequences.”

 

Comparing the American and German supremacist systems, Fromm observed that people marginalized by poverty, unemployment, lack of education and low-paid labor are nevertheless elevated by caste. A person in this group might be persuaded that despite their individual difficulties, “I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world—'I am white;’ or ‘I am Aryan,’” Fromm wrote.

 

“The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own,” Wilkerson writes, crediting Fromm with the insight.

 

I think it’s telling that Wilkerson begins the book quoting James Baldwin and Albert Einstein. In tandem, the two quotes speak volumes about Wilkerson’s intent.

 

Baldwin: “Because even if I should speak, no one would believe me. And they would not believe me precisely because they know what I said was true.”

 

Einstein: “If the majority knew of the root of this evil, then the road to its cure would not be long.”

 

Actually, what Baldwin was in the habit of saying was clearly understood and known to be true by a healthy percentage of the people who took the time to read his work, African Americans, especially. Nor was he the first to make similar points; he was one in a distinguished line of largely Black writers who have been speaking truth to a white-dominated country for generations. What has historically gone missing in that equation was an audience of white believers large enough to change the perspective of the majority; to persuade white people that the dream of a community characterized by inclusiveness and equity offered something to whites that surpasses the consolations of caste. Hence, Einstein’s wish that the indifferent majority come to understand the root of the evil with which we all live.

 

Clearly, Wilkerson set out to write the book that would define that unacknowledged reality thoroughly. It follows that if the end of white supremacy will grow out of the continuing activism of African Americans and other communities of color, and the growing numbers of white Americans who have been schooled by Black Lives Matter, by the disproportionately black and brown casualties of the pandemic and now, finally, by Isabel Wilkerson’s book, then Einstein’s prediction that we are on the road to a cure will finally become the reality of our collective lives.

 

 

Underway: The collapse of white supremacy

 

Though Wilkerson does not say so, reading her book has caused me to rethink my own understanding of American history. In particular, I am persuaded that 22^nd century historians will identify the hundred-year period from the end of World War II to the middle of this century (1947-2042, say) as the final phase of the 400-year long struggle against white supremacy. Tim Black, the oral historian of the Great Migration as it manifested in Chicago, and, for more than 60 years a progressive political activist in the city, told me once (he was my high school history teacher) that returning World War II veterans, both Black and white, came back to the city on fire with the belief that they could lead the city and the country toward racial justice and equity.

 

Though the Great Migration provided little relief from white supremacy, it did expand the space in which newcomers to the north were free to join organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League. The return of World War II veterans moved by the same spirit that motivated Tim Black added momentum to the struggle. The NAACP, itself, grew from 90,000 members in 1919 to 600,000 members in 1946.

 

A partial list of the advances against white supremacy that followed those years would have to include the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s victory in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-56, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Civil Rights Act of 1968. By 1968, the expanding community of black activists and their allies experienced exponential growth with the development of Black Power, the Black Arts and African American Studies movements, and new allies in the anti-war, feminist, Chicano, American Indian, gay liberation and environmental movements.

 

These movements did not always move forward in unity, or adopt common strategies, but even when they disagreed or followed a separate path, they educated each other, identified areas of common struggle and widened the space for social change. In many instances, leadership passed from one organization to another. Groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panthers and Students for a Democratic Society contributed new energy and fresh critiques of entrenched elites. But at no time was the path ahead of the liberation movements ever clear of obstacles. Some victories were unsustainable in the face of the forces moving against them, forces aimed at maintaining and reinforcing the white supremacist system.

 

The loss of high-wage manufacturing jobs that began in urban areas in the Midwest and Northeast in the ‘70s initiated a dramatic increase in poverty rates in minority neighborhoods. That in turn set the stage for the growth of the carceral state in America. Prison sentences began increasing even for non-violent offenders as states began passing three-strike laws. With the Reagan-era development of the War on Drugs and a boom in prison construction and private prisons, the process accelerated.

 

“The term ‘welfare queen’ became a not-so-subtle code for ‘lazy, greedy black ghetto mother.’ The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let ‘some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,’ while ‘you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.’ These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it,” Michelle Alexander wrote in The New Jim Crow (pg. 49).

 

Promises to beef up policing and expand the prison system were often only a part of a larger strategy that cut federal budgets, starved aid programs of sufficient funding, and proposed privatizing Social Security. These, too, were racialized attacks on the common good and were most often aimed at creating political advantages for Republicans. But in the 1990’s, Democratic President Bill Clinton launched his own version of the Republican agenda, cutting benefits and time-limiting welfare eligibility, endorsing the passage of a federal three-strikes law, and announcing “the end of big government.”

 

All of these changes added up to something more than reinforcement of a white supremacist system that had been severely shaken by the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. They were also a direct assault on the well-being of minority communities, forcing the energy of liberation efforts to refocus on mitigating emergencies in those same communities and on defending them from the relentless assault of the carceral state.

 

The War on Terror launched by the Bush administration following the September 11 attacks (2003) had the added effect of further diverting funding from domestic needs and drove minorities to seek employment in the military and, ultimately, into an expanding war effort in which people of color would account for the overwhelming majority of casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. In the face of the economic downturn of 2008, the worst since the Depression, African Americans turned out in unprecedented numbers to elect Barack Obama as president. Despite years of Republican electoral and policy victories, Obama’s election created new anxiety about the strength of the white supremacist system. Donald Trump and a number of other right-wing opportunists launched the birther movement which claimed that Obama wasn’t even an American.

 

But the liberatory energy that had been diverted and suppressed so effectively during the previous four decades of right-wing counterattack manifested anew in 2013 as Black Lives Matter, which became both a leadership organization and a symbol of the revitalization of a movement to deconstruct white supremacy in the United States. None of this proves decisively that the history of the last seventy-five years can be framed as the final confrontation between the growing and increasingly effective mobilization of African Americans and their allies against the tottering edifice of white supremacy in the United States. That would take a much more detailed investigation of the flow of events since the middle of the 20^thCentury. But it seems clear that the struggle to liberate the United States from racism and white supremacy continues to gather momentum and support.

 

Nothing, certainly not victory, is promised to the multiracial, multicultural, multigenerational movement outlined here. But the pandemic, and its disproportionally devastating effect on communities of color, has persuaded a growing number of white Americans that equal justice and equity must be a first priority, that racism and the caste system cost us all more than we can bear. Making the most of this moment in which it is suddenly clear that white supremacists also see the fragility of the racialized caste system that sustains them will require an extraordinary attention to the details, to deconstructing the pillars of caste.

 

In The New Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander outlines the challenge: “If the movement that emerges to challenge mass incarceration fails to confront squarely the critical role of race in the basic structure of our society, and if it fails to cultivate an ethic of genuine care, compassion, and concern for every human being—of every class, race, and nationality—within our nation’s borders (including poor whites, who are often pitted against poor people of color), the collapse of mass incarceration will not mean the death of racial caste in America. Inevitably a new system of racialized social control will emerge—one that we cannot foresee, just as the current system of mass incarceration was not predicted by anyone thirty years ago. No task is more urgent for racial justice today than assuring that America’s current racial caste system is its last (pgs. 18-19).”

 

It is time to give Isabel Wilkerson the last word:

 

“In a world without caste, instead of a false swagger over our own tribe or family or ascribed community, we would look upon all of humanity with wonderment: the lithe beauty of an Ethiopian runner, the bravery of a Swedish girl determined to save the planet, the physics-defying acrobatics of an African-American Olympian, the brilliance of a composer of Puerto-Rican descent who can rap the history of the founding of America at 144 words a minute—all of those feats should fill us with astonishment at what the species is capable of and gratitude to be alive for this.

 

“In a world without caste, being male or female, light or dark, immigrant or native-born would have no bearing on what anyone was perceived as being capable of. In a world without caste, we would all be invested in the well-being of others in our species if only for our own survival and recognize that we are in need of one another more than we have been led to believe. We would join forces with indigenous people around the world, raising the alarm as fires rage and glaciers melt. We would see that, when others suffer, the collective human body is setback from the progression of our species.

 

“A world without caste would set everyone free (pg. 388).”

 

The Time Is Now: White Supremacy and Climate Change

As winter approaches, it is clear that Joe Biden will be our next president. But a remarkable number of people, led by our current president, are still arguing with the evidence and our political divisions threaten to fuel a rocky and unproductive, if not outright dangerous, transition from one administration to another. We, Americans, whoever we voted for, are almost universally suspicious of and alienated from most of the partisans who disagree with us.

 

But the truth is, we’ve been living in that divided country for quite a long time.  Arguably that estrangement began developing with the Vietnam War and Watergate, but it has additional roots in political controversies that followed. The Reagan-era and a partisanship that waged war on both the safety net and on imaginary “welfare queens” accelerated our discontents. So did Iran-Contra and US-subsidized mercenary warfare in Central America. The divide grew larger with the misogyny of both Bill Clinton and his political opponents, the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, the bipartisan expansion of the carceral state, and “the end of big government.” The excesses of the Trump administration and the failure to manage the pandemic merely added new material to the top of the mountain between us.

 

With each decade since the victories of the Civil Rights movement, the divisions have gotten wider and more obvious until this moment in time when it is next to impossible to identify a political figure with the ability to bridge the chasm across which some of us stare at each other with stunned incomprehension, if not with pure loathing. Regardless of what other detail we might add to our list of divisive issues and events, the energy that powers our divisions is rooted in the racism and white supremacy, the misogyny and machismo, and the homophobia and xenophobia that have been a part of our history since the first Europeans invaded the Western hemisphere.

 

 

The struggle ahead

 

But today is the day after, in the most fundamental sense. Everything we have to say about what we think our country is, and how it became what it is now, surely matters. But it is only at dawn on the day after that we can begin to do something about making the United States what we want it to be.

 

That work should begin with ourselves as individuals, with accepting that recent events may be discouraging, that recent defeats may have blunted our faith in what we can accomplish both individually and collectively. But we must begin by recognizing that whatever it is that lies in our individual capacity to achieve, our collective mental health depends on affirming our belief in what is possible for us to achieve together.

 

We must take on the small myriad challenges directly before us. We have to rebuild our communities, our cities and our states, and we must do so while also focusing on the challenges that loom the largest. And of all the very large challenges, the ones that threaten us all and that will get far worse in the absence of unity, climate change is the most severe, the one that will track us all down, wherever we are, and teach us that the old fantasies of the good life are pipe dreams and distractions. There is no express train to ride to a better life, no flight path to safety.

 

 

The urgent work of managing climate change

 

The exact date of the beginning of the climate crisis that the world and that the United States are living with now will be a matter of historical debate for some time to come, perhaps for generations. At some future time, the when, how, and why of the crisis itself will be the basis for a whole new field of historical study.

 

Regardless, climate change is upon us full blown. The continuing effects on less-developed countries as coastlines are submerged, as once arable land turns to desert, and as tens of millions of climate refugees continue their forced migrations, will get much worse. And the politics of our time threaten to  grow even more tumultuous than they already are.

 

So far, the vast wealth of the United States and its residents has empowered many of us to ignore climate change. Polling responses make clear that as much as half the adult population have somehow been able to ignore the starkest proofs that the climate crisis is upon us. Five years ago, Republican Senator James Inhofe brought a snowball into a Senate session as a way of demonstrating his complete rejection of any evidence supporting the claim that the world is getting warmer, like, for instance, the fact that the year before, 2014, was at the time, the hottest on record. But the climate emergencies, like enormous forest fires and devastating and frequent hurricanes keep accumulating.

 

Small-scale climate migrations are already occurring. People in the hundreds of thousands who have been repeatedly displaced by coastal flooding or forest fires these past few years are finally deciding not to rebuild their homes and not to return to devastated communities. Indeed, one recent report estimated that more than one million US residents moved from environmentally unstable areas in 2018. And we know beyond any doubt that flooding, droughts, tornadoes, hurricanes, heat emergencies, and more will get more frequent, more sustained and more destructive.

 

The hundreds and thousands making decisions to leave areas where they have lived for decades, if not generations, will most often be making the cheapest and most convenient changes they can. But southern Californians moving to Arizona or Nevada will be moving from fires to frying pans, moving to areas where climate crisis in the form of droughts and heat emergencies will get much worse; those effects on ecologically fragile environments multiplied by population pressures increased by their own new arrival.

 

Northern Californians and Oregonians are also beginning their own migration, trickling further north along the Pacific Coast to places where drought, flooding and forest fires will also get worse. Perhaps, long-term, they will all end up in British Columbia, where, hopefully, a far-sighted Canadian government will move forward in the next decade or two to put in place the kind of infrastructure that will mitigate the worst effects of climate change in the Northwest.

 

Miami, FL, regarded by many climate scientists as the most endangered coastal city in the world, will be the eventual source of a significant stream of climate refugees, a stream that will be further swollen by tributaries of refugees moving north from other Florida communities. The wealthiest of those refugees may not seem like climate refugees, at all. Their wealth will allow them to move further up the coast to Georgia and the Carolinas as they wish, maintaining their high-maintenance quality of life as they go, creating new and photogenic spreads for magazines and TV shows highlighting the lives of the rich and famous.

 

But the poor and middle-income families living in threatened areas will find themselves forced to move, their property devalued, their resources exhausted by multiple emergencies. And because no one can predict the if and when and where the migrations can and should stop, it is past time for all of us to begin preparing to live lives that will be consistently more challenging than many Americans have ever been forced to live. It is time to begin recognizing that we are about to become a nation of migrants on a scale not previously reached by earlier migrations.

 

 

 

Ending white supremacy is key

 

The claim that the lives we will be living will be more difficult for many of us than our lives before the escalating climate crisis needs qualification; it is important to note that for African Americans who have always had to negotiate life in a white supremacist country, hardship and challenge will not be a new experience. That people of color and the poor will bear the burdens of global climate change sooner and more extensively than the wealthy and more securely situated is not news.

 

White supremacy, itself, is the scaffolding for all the arguments that divide working people and the poor against each other, dramatically reducing the effectiveness of their political mobilizations. This leaves our collective fate in the hands of the very people who profit from our social divisions. It is also the basis for arguing that the first step toward managing climate change should begin with a multi-racial and multi-generational movement to dismantle white supremacy.

 

It can be done, with enormous difficulty, of course, but demography may finally be on the side of such a movement. After all, Gen Z is the largest and most diverse generational cohort in US history. And though no generation is ever a cohesive whole, it seems obvious that a significant fraction of that cohort is far past fed-up with the status quo, and already mobilized in pursuit of sweeping change.

 

In her recently published book, Caste, The Origins of Our Discontents, Isabel Wilkerson tells the story of the African American slave who may have been the first American to introduce the notion of vaccination as a means to controlling an epidemic.

 

“Cotton Mather was a Puritan minister and lay scientist in Boston and had come into possession of an African man named Onesimus. The enslaved African told of a procedure he had undergone back in his homeland that had protected him from [smallpox]. People in West Africa had discovered that they could fend off contagions by inoculating themselves with a specimen of fluid from an infected person. Mather was intrigued by the idea Onesimus described. He researched it, and decided to call it ‘variolation.’ It would become the precursor to immunization and ‘the Holy Grail of smallpox prevention for Western doctors and scientists,’ wrote the medical ethicist and author Harriet A. Washington.”

 

Wilkerson’s account details the outrage with which Bostonians greeted Mather’s attempts to promote inoculation as cure for the smallpox epidemic that raged in Boston in 1721. “They feared it could spread smallpox all the more,” she writes, “and they also wanted nothing to do with a practice that had come from Africa and had been suggested by an African slave.”

 

But Onesimus’ suggestion was a cure. One in seven Bostonians died from smallpox, but out of 240 people who were inoculated by a single local doctor who believed in “variolation,” only one in 40 died. The otherwise disastrous consequences of the smallpox outbreak in Boston, Wilkerson notes, was the absolute consequence of a caste system built on the notion that those at the top are inherently superior, those on the bottom are inherently inferior, and, by definition, are incapable of the intellectual brilliance necessary to advance development and solve social problems. “The investment in the established hierarchy runs sufficiently deep [in the United States],” Wilkerson concludes, “that people in the dominant caste have historically been willing to forgo conveniences to themselves to keep the fruits of citizenship within their own caste.”

 

That point ought to be among the most important arguments for dismantling white supremacy. Climate change has been creeping up on us all since the Industrial Revolution; it has been gathering mass and velocity at an accelerating rate since the middle of the last century, and it has become the most global of emergencies in the history of humankind. We cannot begin to manage that emergency in a society that throws people away from birth, that denies opportunity for human talent to develop, and that continues to foster inequalities of every description. We need to mobilize and fully employ every human talent that manifests itself in time to turn us toward a sustainable future.

 

 

A few proposals for action

 

The failure of presidential leadership over the last four years underscores the argument that the exclusive leadership of wealthy, white males is a recipe for disaster. We have waited far too long to open the way to the leadership of women and people of color. We are moving forward now in a nation that cannot depend on the leadership (or celebrity) of the newly elected president. We can hope that he will be a competent steward in a period of epic social and political transition, but the heroes of the effort to transform our world, with roots in previously excluded communities, are already stepping forward everywhere.

 

So, if the challenge is to dismantle white supremacy on the way to building an effective nationwide movement to address climate change, how do we do it? Where do we begin?

 

Building on the success of the electoral defeat of Donald Trump by a record-setting voter turnout seems like one of the more obvious places to start. Register more voters. Register millions more voters. Choose Stacey Abrams to lead the Democratic National Committee and to organize the largest and most effective voter registration effort in American history. This will accomplish two things. It will continue to build a multi-racial coalition capable of advancing an electoral and legislative attack on white supremacy. And it will acknowledge the leadership and accomplishments of an African American woman who has already directed the effort to turn Georgia, a deep-south red state, purple.

 

Here in Chicago, we need to act directly and relentlessly to confront developers and political leaders who have persuaded themselves that downtown and upscale and high-rise office and housing developments serve the interests of the city’s residents. In fact, not only do such subsidized developments fail to serve the interests of the vast majority of city residents, they fail to acknowledge the role that African American and Latinx labor has played in creating wealth in the city. Indeed, the continuing denial of educational, housing and career opportunities for people of color has forced minorities to compete for low-wage and dangerous jobs that expropriate the wealth generated by their own efforts (and exposes them disproportionately to health risks and to environmental toxins). The solution for Chicago begins with prioritizing development in the south and west sides of the city and in requiring all development projects to employ workforces that reflect the city’s actual population.

 

On an even more local level, we need to recognize that our homes and our neighborhoods are not ready to weather climate change. We should be retrofitting to make housing community-wide as energy efficient as possible. Moreover, we must advance green-energy development in the form of small-scale solar installations, green roofs, wind-powered generators, and neighborhood-based energy co-ops. Housing and building codes should be changed to guarantee that both developers and landlords play an appropriate role in improving energy efficiency.

 

While we are initiating and moving forward locally and globally, we should recognize that the two Senate runoff races in Georgia represent an opportunity to dethrone Mitch McConnell and to begin building a Senate that will not stand in the way of progressive legislation. To do so will be a sustained, multi-step effort. Long-term, it will mean electing senators who bring a more profound understanding of class and race issues to the work of legislating, but we must not neglect the immediate opportunity to elect two Democratic senators from Georgia. We have only two months—the runoff elections will be held January 5—to mobilize a Mississippi Summer-type intervention in Georgia aimed at electing Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the Senate. Winning either seat will be a challenge, but the urgent task is to win both. It’s time for the most energetic and adventurous among us to head to Georgia for an adrenaline-fueled election campaign that must end in a critically important victory.

 

And while volunteers head to Georgia, the demands for local action, including confronting police violence and misconduct, and building up anti-violence networks in our neighborhoods remain a priority. So, too, are organizing efforts that build capacity in Chicago neighborhoods and address continuing needs like hunger, made worse by the pandemic.

 

One nonprofit in Chicago, Just Roots, began development and operation of a community farm on 45^th Street in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In just three years, the Legends South Farm has distributed 20,000 pounds of produce grown at the farm and provided 1,000 hours of education and training for community farmers. Just Roots, in partnership with St. James Catholic Church, also established a second community farm this past summer at 29^th and Wabash. This model for community self-help could be replicated many places across Chicago with support from the city; another political challenge that local activists could take on.

 

The possibilities for action, for projects that will promote the changes we desperately require, are nearly infinite. Every individual, every family, every neighborhood, every community can work up a list of the possibilities. There will be dissenters, people who will not share in the tasks ahead; some will even stand in the way. But obstacles are not enemies. We must focus relentlessly on building a movement capable of flowing over or around whatever is in the way. 

 

 

Implacable forces have been building the world to come

 

The pandemic, itself an outcome of globalization and climate change, has taught us a lesson about traditional expectations and the pace of social, environmental and existential change. We live now in a world in which it is no longer reasonable to assume that tomorrow will be essentially the same as today. That means, in general, that everything about our personal lives, our families, our neighborhoods, and our communities, needs to be carefully reexamined. If we as a country are to dismantle white supremacy, manage and mitigate climate change, and successfully adjust to a new world in which our old assumptions about life trajectories are merely baggage we will have to discard, we are going to need to reeducate, retrain and reimagine ourselves. That will be very hard work. Mistakes are inevitable. We must get started now.

Covidicah

and

The Message of the Miracle of the Mayonnaise Jar

It was the time of Covid, in the year 2020. The land was quiet. Too quiet for some and, yet, too loud for others. The landscapes without people were eerily beautiful, but also apocalyptically depopulated.

For several decades before Covid, the country’s leadership was, shall we say, below average. And even the presidents who showed some real ability to lead were unable to unite us all and often proceeded timidly, when they needed to be brave. But the particular president serving in office at the time of Covid was even unable to surpass the low bar set by his predecessors.

He was a buffoon some said. A fat head, said others. More serious minded folks,called him a white supremacist, or a misogynist, or both. Some who were less serious, or fatalistic about the chances of the country surviving Covid, made fun. His hands, they said, loudly and repeatedly, were very small—baby hands. And he had a little, tiny dick, they would say, though history is mostly agnostic about the size of his penis.

So, okay, then. Enough about that. I just didn’t feel like this would be good, full, truthy story, if I didn’t mention the diverse speculations about the president’s tackle. Little tackle. Tacklette. Whatever.

We can say that then, as now, there were other centers of power, and some of them had more influence than others. There was one center of power that was like a fox ranch, or something like it. The foxes on that ranch were big supporters of the otherwise helpless—did I say, helpless?—I mean, hapless president. The foxes on the ranch were big supporters of the hapless president. Some of the foxes were sleek and blond and talked nonsense, but you wouldn’t have expected foxes to be fountains of wisdom, would you?

Regardless, it does appear that fox babble was a big source of ideas for the hapless president. That was never going to turn out all right and, let me tell you, history shows that under the president’s leadership, shit did hit the fan, the air, the water, everything.

To make matters worse, there was a constitutional assembly, called the House of Elitists (or something—history is vague on the name), which was led by another woodland animal; the morose, turtle-faced Mitch, who had a deep and strategic objection to democratic process and a fondness for incompetent judges. Turtle-faced Mitch, it is reported, ended up in the soup.

It was definitely a no-good, very bad time. In our city, the zip codes that suffered the worst violence, also recorded the most deaths from the virus. The same zip codes also had the largest air-polluting railyards, the highest number of industrial air-polluters, the most kids suffering from asthma, and the fewest number of people with health insurance. The whole country hit the deep do-do lottery jackpot.

Local and regional governments didn’t invest much in public trans, creating vast profit opportunities for private trans. The same ideological indifference to the idea that we could all succeed together that characterized policies that crippled public health and public trans plagued public education. The opportunities for individuals to profit off of the kinds of needs that we now enshrine in our code of human rights (our Code of Human Rights) made a hash of public education. We were throwing away lives and achievements and whole communities of skills and talents with which we could have built (and, eventually, would build) the Beloved Community.

As if all of this was not bad enough, the earth itself was heating up—I mean like in giant, biblical degrees. And the policy response to this—well, let’s say it wasn’t science-based.

People hoarded, which is to say, they bought extra amounts of things they didn’t need. Especially in the early phase of the pandemic. This was no surprise. In an environment when many people didn’t have work, and many jobs were dangerous, and the good things in life seemed so unachievable, people were scared.

They were afraid to get sick and suffer and, maybe, die. So they took care of themselves by buying more than they needed of things that were available and seemed affordable. Now, we know, of course, that they didn’t need so much stuff. And they bought some of that stuff in quantities that were sufficient to ensure that their families wouldn’t run out of whatever they hoarded for generations.

That’s why we own so many pencils. Somebody, your great-grandfather, maybe, hoarded pencils. They were cheap, I’m sure; available, I’m certain; and he liked pencils, I’m guessing; so, our family is never, ever going to run out of pencils.

That’s what happened down the block with Ms. Alice’s family, I think. Someone thought that having a lot of plastic forks around would be a comfort—I know, go figure—so now she owns thousands of plastic forks. That’s why she’s always going, “Here. Have some plastic forks.”

Some people even hoarded toilet paper, which they used for wiping their butts. A lot, I guess. That bit of hoarding makes a little more sense because, as we know, everybody poops.

Unfortunately, the toilet paper hoarding apparently caused widespread inconvenience, or emotional distress, maybe. Eventually, people realized that there was enough for everybody and started sharing their toilet paper. That’s when people started saying that, “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus,” which eventually became the third and, I think, most important meaning of our greeting, “Salaam.”

At any rate, people started mobilizing. That’s what happens when people start realizing that change is in the air, and that they have the power to shape that change. They mobilized to kick the scary and notorious Orangish Man out of the People’s House.

And though we seem to have lost interest in the exact identity of the Orangish Man, we do know that they voted him out of office. And after he was out of the way, they started voting pretty much nonstop for things they did want. They voted for universal health care. And for decent housing for all. And for good, green jobs.

They voted and voted and voted. They voted money out of voting. Boy, did they vote. They voted good public schools until public schools were where everyone wanted to go to school. That project took a long time. A lot of voting.

Eventually, they were all, hell, let’s just vote socialism and be done with it. But here’s the thing. You’re never done with it. Democracy is not perfectible. Notwithstanding the attitude of the old-school, uber-powerful, lifetime-appointed judges favored by the Orangish Man and Turtle-faced Mitch, democracy changes as the people will it to change.

And how do they express their will? They vote and vote and vote. They even voted that forever after we, all of us, must vote to heal the least of us, heal the body politic, heal the air and water, heal the earth, our mother, heal our mother who was here before Covid and has been here ever since and will always be here and will always love us. We vote to love our mother back.

So that’s what this holiday is really about, to remind us to vote to love the earth back. That’s why at this holiday celebration, around this community table, we tell about the Covid miracle of the mayonnaise jar that held only enough mayonnaise for a single turkey sandwich, but miraculously lasted to make enough turkey sandwiches with fresh lettuce and mayo to feed every hungry person that lived here before the Beloved Community and would live on to be a part of that new understanding of ourselves.

So, there’s the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise. And the Message of the Covid Miracle of the Mayonnaise is this: We heal what we can and deepen our understanding of that which we cannot heal. And we pledge to each other that down the road we will try to heal that which we cannot heal now.

And now we close this Covid night with the recitation of the Four Covidicah statements:

 “Solidarity is the path to and the purpose of the surplus.

“The social surplus belongs to the people.

“The anti-social surplus was the way of things before Covid.

“The surplus is the path to and the purpose of solidarity.”

Amen

Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad"

Lessons in white supremacy

            Some books never stop teaching what needs to be taught. Noam Chomsky’s American Power and the New Mandarinsis one of those books. So is Elaine Pagel’s The Gnostic Gospels. Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is another. And Naomi Klein's Shock Doctrine is one more. I’ve read dozens of books that struck me that way and I’ve just finished another—Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. I don’t expect everyone who reads Whitehead’s wonderful novel about slavery and an actual, tangible underground railroad (complete with real engines, engineers, train stations and on-time problems) to come to the same conclusion about the book that I did, but, maybe.

Whitehead is relentlessly effective at portraying the myriad ways individual slaves and freemen struggled with slavery and white supremacism. They endure it, of course, evade it, escape it, always compromise with the pervasive reality of it, and frequently succumb to it. Only rarely do the white people they encounter show them a human face. Rarer still are the white folks who offer assistance of any sort and many of those falter at crucial moments, undone by their own privilege, weakness, fear, guilt and past histories of sordid compromise.

            Cora and Caesar and Royal and every other African American in the book must navigate a world dominated by monumental cruelty, by the abuse of slave masters and slave catchers and a collection of white folks who benefit from African American misery and who also conspire in varying degrees in the work of maintaining and prolonging that misery. As it happens, even black folks born free and living in the north must reckon with white supremacy. They lived with a continuing message of jeopardy based on skin color, and had to exercise regular caution against being snatched by rogue slave catchers operating in the north. Free, but not enfranchised, they were aware that if they were captured, judges and others with the power to intervene on their behalf were likely to stand aside, if not conspire, in their misfortune.

None of this should come as a surprise to anyone even remotely familiar with the history of slavery and every other guise white supremacy has assumed in the 150 years since the Civil War—the southern counterattack on Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the criminalization of blackness, lynching and white terror attacks on black communities, segregation and discrimination, and mass incarceration and the New Jim Crow. But the lessons are there in The Underground Railroad and the seeds of the relentless and continuing oppression of African Americans are foreshadowed in the story the book tells.

The traumas associated with slavery and blackness serve to highlight the indomitable qualities of the slaves, runaways and freemen who nevertheless survived, who sought and built community, who rebuilt when those communities were decimated and who managed to find joyful relief in transient experience. The whole range of reactions that traumatized human beings display are fundamental elements in the world Whitehead has created; one in which misery, brutality and murder were the norm, and intelligence, grit, strength and endurance were frequently not enough to survive. The strong fall right next to the weak. People are brought down by the weight of experience. Often, they go mad. Sometimes, tortured beyond human endurance, they cooperate with the masters and collaborate in the awful violence.

That, too, is a story we already know and understand. But the most human thing about all of us is that nothing we claim to already understand should assure us that we know all we need to know about racism in America, especially if we are white and have the privilege of forgetting what we know, of ignoring how we have benefited from the exploitation of others, of the ways whiteness exempts us from facing up to ugly truths about ourselves and our world. What we need to know, what we may have already learned once or twice, we need to learn again, over and over, until knowing becomes like breathing, and those of us with privilege in our DNA are moved to absolute solidarity with the people who do not share that heritage.

Forty acres and a mule will only begin to repair the damage that white supremacy has perpetrated. It may be that the feeling that one has done right in moving beyond privilege is not enough, but it strikes me that a world in which equal justice is the foundation of life will be richer and more rewarding for every last one of us. Colson Whitehead’s book is a good place to begin our reeducation. We should get started. The reading list is long. So is the to-do list that comes with it.

The Palestinian-Israeli conflict

Activist passion sometimes subverts peace and justice

More than thirty years ago, Richard Cleaver, a colleague at the American Friends Service Committee, led me to the realization that as a peace and justice advocate, I ought to have an elevated concern for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Ever since, I have maintained a focus of sorts on the issue.

After twenty years of some sort of activism on the issue, Henry, an old Ann Arbor friend--also Jewish, like me--signed on with a heightened concern of his own. After Sept. 11, it became his soul focus and, over a period of time, he and I began to develop diverging perspectives on the issue, on root causes, on strategic considerations, on tactical steps. Five years later, we had a pretty complete falling out. It has been about ten years since we last talked. 

A couple of months back, a journalist working on a story about Jewish activism on behalf of justice for Palestinians contacted me about Henry. He was trying to flesh out a story about Jewish activists facing considerable pushback from their own communities.

For part of our discussion, I went off the record. I think now that I did so because I still hadn't worked out an understanding of my conflict with Henry that satisfied me. But going off the record was a mistake. It was safe, I guess, because I wasn't sure exactly what I thought. But it was lazy, too, because it was my way of putting off careful reflection about why I had fallen out with Henry and the important lessons that could be learned from the experience.

But now, in the form of a letter to the journalist whose piece ran in al-Jazeera at the end of January, I've tried to get a handle on the whole episode. At any rate, the letter below captures what I'm thinking now.


Dear Dien,

Thanks for sending the link to your January article, "US Jews struggle in the fight for Palestinian rights." Nice piece.

I especially like the part that focuses on Rabbi Brant Rosen, whose support for Palestinian self-determination cost him his job as the leader of the Jewish Reconstructionist Congregation in Evanston, Ill. Rosen's experiences as a political activist and his continuing efforts to share his justice commitment with his Jewish co-religionists makes his experience a perfect example of the conflict between  Jewish belief and mainstream Jewish support for the state of Israel.

In one of our recent e-mail exchanges, I mentioned that I did have a bit of an argument to pick with the article, in particular the way in which my relationship with Henry Herskovitz is portrayed. Simply put, Henry and I did not fall out with each other because I, as a Jew, was somehow offended by his pro-Palestinian beliefs. In regard to an article about the way the Jewish community sometimes penalizes Jewish dissent, this is a crucial point, I think.

Unfortunately, I have been slow to follow up with an explanation for my objections. That, I have concluded, is because my problems with the article are really based in my own failure to explain my perspective on Henry properly. I have also repeatedly postponed writing my own full version of Henry's evolution as a pro-Palestinian activist and my perspective on his journey.

In our exchanges, I did not provide you with sufficient detail about how Henry and I grew apart politically. And, worse, I insisted that we discuss certain points off the record that should have been part of the story. Perhaps, if I had spoken entirely on the record, I might have had an improved grasp of exactly what I thought and needed to say.

Given the limits that I created, I have to acknowledge that you told our story as thoroughly as you could. I give you props for respecting those limits.

But when it comes to the question of Palestinian human rights and the way some elements of the mainstream Jewish community police the boundaries of "acceptable" political perspectives, it has become obvious to me that everything I have to say about Henry and his advocacy for justice for the Palestinian people should be on the record. So, here, without restrictions, but as briefly as I can put it, is the version I wish I had shared with you.

Henry came to political activism after he retired from his nearly career-long employment as a research and development engineer at a brand-name manufacturing firm. We had become close friends years earlier in Ann Arbor in the late '60s. But though I was politically active against the Vietnam War, and continued to focus on social justice issues for the next 40 years, our intimacy was primarily based on our shared social life. We hung out together, we played in municipal softball and basketball leagues together, we partied together, travelled together, and I sometimes lectured him (at unbearable length, I'm sure) about why he needed to come off the sidelines and join the fight for social change. But during most of our friendship, though he seemed to be largely sympathetic to left perspectives on the country and the world, Henry was apolitical.

Then, in a few short years after his retirement, and with the Bush threat to launch a war against Iraq in 2002, Henry suddenly found himself a vocal advocate for peace. With his hands-on, engineer's soul, he decided that he needed to visit Iraq and see what the people and the place looked like to him. So, he went. By himself. Less than a year before the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

I don't remember how long Henry was there, or know where he went in Iraq, but he talked to Iraqis in Baghdad and elsewhere about the threatened war and about how they perceived America and Americans. He discovered that they were happy to meet him and welcomed him as a visitor to their country.

Some were freely critical of Saddam Hussein, but quick to point out how a decade of U.S. sanctions against Iraq had done little to hurt Saddam, but much to harm Iraqi civilians. A number of Iraqis told Henry that U.S. policy toward Iraq was most certainly a cause of the anger that fueled the 9/11 attacks, but many also noted that another important cause was Arab and Muslim anger over U.S. support for the Israeli state and the occupation of Palestinian territory.

In point of fact, the message that Henry heard repeatedly--that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a significant cause of anger at the U.S. and the West--inspired Henry to take another trip; to go to Israel and the West Bank in order to better understand why the Palestinian-Israeli conflict loomed so large in the geo-politics of the Middle East and the world.

Henry visited a number of different Palestinian towns in the West Bank, enjoyed a great deal of Palestinian hospitality, and had several frank conversations with Palestinian political activists. Again, he discovered that the people who he talked to seemed unaffected by the fact that he was Jewish, except for their insistence that as an American Jew, he might have an opportunity to influence other American Jews to rethink their apparently absolute support for Israel and Zionism. During his visit, he listened to Palestinians who argued that if the American Jewish community was less generous towards Israel, and more critical in its support, the Israeli state would be more likely to seek a peaceful and productive resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

Henry returned from that trip intent on discussing the conflict between Zionism and Palestinian self-determination with other Jews in Ann Arbor. Though he had always identified as a Jew, he had never been particularly religiously observant. In fact, Henry was one of those Jews (not uncommon) who show up at temple only during high holidays like Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur. Regardless, his emotional connection to his identity as a Jew was crucial to him, and he was certain that there would be no significant resistance to his effort to open discussion of the conflict within the Jewish congregations on which he initially focussed.

He quickly discovered that he was naively optimistic. At Beth Israel, the congregation that he eventually targeted with a continuing public protest, Henry made an initial approach to the rabbi. Their first private conversation was cordial, and included the rabbi's observation that his concern with and dissent from mainstream Jewish support for Israel and Zionism was well within the boundaries of tolerable opinion. But by the time of their second conversation, it was obvious that the rabbi would refuse to schedule a forum at Beth Israel.

Henry made further efforts to engage a broader portion of Ann Arbor's Jewish population. He went to Hillel, the leading University of Michigan organization for Jewish students, to see if he could rent space for a public forum. His early contacts with Hillel were positive, I think, but as the moment for commitment approached, Hillel representatives became uncooperative. Henry's other efforts to reach out were similarly stymied. He came to believe (rightfully so, I think) that some people within the mainstream Jewish community were letting it be known that the community should neither engage Henry or allow him a forum.

We talked a lot in those days about what was happening, and about our shared certainty that ending the silence within the Jewish community about the illegal Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people and the illegal occupation of their land could lead to a more vigorous American Jewish opposition to Israeli policy. Though I had always believed that Zionist organizations, and many leading Jewish figures, as well, actively and effectively narrowed the possibilities for dissent within the Jewish community (see my blog post "Adventures with Zionists," for instance), Henry was experiencing the phenomenon for the first time, and in excruciating detail.

But the resistance served only to inspire him to seek other ways to make his point. It was then that he conceived the idea of beginning a silent vigil outside Beth Israel congregation's Saturday morning services. Henry showed up wearing a suit at that first vigil, a kippah (skullcap) on his head, holding a sign that read, simply, "End the Silence." On his car windshield, parked nearby, another sign said something like "End the Israeli Occupation of Palestine."

That first Saturday, Beth Israel congregants responded in a variety of ways. Some were incensed. It was the Jewish sabbath, they reasoned, and Beth Israel a house of worship that ought to be off-limits for political protest.

Other congregants, who shared at least a portion of Henry's political perspective, acknowledged his presence and, in some instances, spoke with him. Though Henry was careful to stay on the public right-of-way, one congregant turning into the synagogue driveway went out of his way to drive as close as he could to where Henry stood. It would be only the first of dozens of angry gestures and implicit, or explicit, threats aimed at him over time. Such extreme hostility was an over-the-top response to the moderation of his early protests, and likely contributed to how adamant and hardline Henry became subsequently.

Regardless, Henry kept showing up on Saturday morning and the vigil grew. Among the first to join him were other Jews who believed as he did that the Jewish community was generally closed to discussion of the most perplexing ethical issue the community faced. Area peace activists, who felt that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a major cause of a number of political conflicts in the Middle East, also joined the vigil; some of them becoming regulars.

Meanwhile, within Beth Israel, itself, some members argued that Henry should be allowed to convene a forum on the issue within the temple. Others agreed that the issue needed to be widely discussed. But most of the congregation remained strongly supportive of Israel. Some accused Henry of being an anti-semite or, at the very least, an enemy of Israel.

Though disputes grew within the congregation, a new unity also began developing around the idea that the divisions in the congregation were largely Henry's fault and that the protest at Beth Israel was inappropriate. Some argued the Henry's protests should be declared illegal on the grounds, however dubious constitutionally, that it was a violation of the congregation's religious freedom. Even some of those who were critical of Israeli policy began to call on him to stand down.

But that was the last thing Henry was willing to do. The vigil and the signs condemning Israeli policies and Israel, itself, began spreading beyond the side street entrance to Beth Israel and on to the side walk bordering the four-lane road that ran along the property in front of the temple.

As the attitude of Beth Israel congregants became almost exclusively hostile or coldly indifferent, people driving by began to honk in apparent support of the growing and increasingly visible protest, which at some point had become an official activity of the new political group, Jewish Witnesses for Peace and Friends (JWPF), formed by Henry and his most enthusiastic supporters.

Though I was living in Chicago for much of this time, I had lived in Ann Arbor for more than 20 years and my daughter still lived there. This made me a regular visitor to the city and allowed Henry and I ample opportunity to discuss his activism and political strategy.

As a former member of the Ann Arbor City Council, I had a sort of limited celebrity in the area that Henry wanted to exploit to better promote the vigil. Though the characterization of me as a "celebrity vigiler" made me mildly uncomfortable, solidarity with Henry and the announced perspective of the vigil--to foster open discussion within the Jewish community--encouraged me to show up when I was in town. But when I did so, I was always careful to hold a sign like "End the Silence" or "End the Occupation;" phrases that I believed were simple, clear and not obstacles to further discussion between people with differing viewpoints.

But the protest signs, like "End Israeli apartheid," or "Boycott Israel," became more openly critical, often stridently so. The orientation of the protest away from the temple and towards passers-by became points of contention between Henry and I. We would often disagree about whether or not it made good tactical sense to rely on slogans that suggested that Israel was an apartheid state, or that Israeli policy was the first steps toward a Palestinian holocaust, or that Israel had no right to exist.

I believed that the truth was more nuanced than the slogans suggested, arguing in a subsequent piece on my blog (Painful Truth: Israeli Apartheid") that "if anything defines the difference between the South African and Israeli apartheid states, it is that the South African version named itself. Israeli apartheid is the apartheid that dare not speak its name. It is understandable that large numbers of American Jews cannot concede this truth, Richard Cohen among them. Israel was created at a moment of celebration and hope for Jews around the world. Freshly scarred by the Holocaust, and still fearful that history might repeat itself, [the vast majority of] Jews were inclined not to notice that their [joyful achievement] might be the occasion for the suffering of others."

Though it took me many years to get to that sort of a full articulation of my own position on the question of Israeli apartheid--a position much influenced by Henry--I maintained that phrases like "End Israeli Apartheid" were an obstacle to open discussion, that they provoked stiff opposition, and polarized the discussion. That result, I observed repeatedly, would lead to a vigil that never ended and, ultimately, render it ineffective.

Indeed, by that point, when I would ask Henry what his endgame was, what it would take to end the protest, he would respond that it would end when the congregation voted to join the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) movement. Henry was fully aware, of course, that the congregation would never take such a position. I expressed strong objection to a strategy that publicly advocated dialogue, but privately had no real commitment to further engaging Beth Israel congregants, the ostensible audience for the vigil.

In response, Henry argued that the vigil's effectiveness could be measured by the fact that some drivers going passed would honk, raise fists and flash peace signs in obvious support. Henry began, then, to formulate the notion that it was actually American Christians, opposed to Israeli policy toward Palestinians, but silent because they were afraid of being branded as anti-semites, who could play an even more pivotal role in changing U.S. policy toward that favored the Jewish state at the expense of justice for Palestinians. That, he concluded, meant that maintaining the vigil at Beth Israel served the larger goal of justice for Palestinians, even if the idea that the vigil was a sincere attempt to open discussion within the Jewish community became nothing more than a pretense. Such insincerity, I contended, meant that Henry's strategy was flawed and that he could not be an effective advocate for justice for Palestinians on that basis.

In a 2009 blog post (American Jews and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict"), I followed up on this disagreement with Henry:

"It is a further irony that the polarization in Ann Arbor has come to resemble the deadlock in Palestine. But both situations seem a symptom of a larger problem in the politics of the US. Our inability to move toward reasonable and just outcomes in virtually all policy areas, health care, climate change, quality public education, market regulation, reliable public transit and reduced dependence on fossil fuels to name just a few, seems endemic. And ultimately traceable to the politically expedient marriage of religious fundamentalism and corporate interests. When oil companies, weapons manufacturers, Big Pharma, insurance interests, hospital corporations and the Southern Baptist Convention find themselves working together against broader social interests, we are all in trouble."

Ultimately, those disagreements with Henry marked a turning point in our relationship. But we remained in contact, and continued to spend time together when I visited Ann Arbor. I should note that our growing disagreements did not keep me from appreciating both the intensity of Henry's commitment and how extensively educated he had become about the history and politics of the conflict. Though I had always been an advocate of the two-state solution to the conflict, his position persuaded me to look harder at the realities, the facts-on-the-ground, of Palestinian disenfranchisement.

By then, it was clear to me that after 40 years of occupation (and the continuing forcible takings of occupied Palestinian territory) that a Palestinian state created on Israeli terms would not be viable, but I had not backed off of support for the two-state solution. Discussions with Henry eventually convinced me that it made no sense for me to continue to support a non-solution masquerading as the way to resolve the conflict; the creation of a Palestinian state, with borders enforced by Israel and with limited access to water and other resources, would only cement the injustices that Palestinians had suffered since the creation of the Jewish state.

These conclusions moved me to advocate an eventual, single, secular state that would be the home of Arabs and Israelis, Muslims, Jews and Christians. But even then, it was impossible for me to go forward with Henry.

To me the path to a single state had to begin with a two-state solution with equal access to resources, like water, and with borders guaranteed by an international force, not by Israel. This would not be a process with much to assure the eventual outcome, but to Henry it was a simple sell-out.

Though I had sometimes been characterized as a "self-hating, Israel-threatening" Jew (a web-based "S.H.I.T. list" had once named both Henry and I as enemies of Israel on that basis), Henry's feeling that I was a sell-out wasn't new, either.

At a Detroit teach-in on the conflict, I had been on a panel with filmmaker Michael Moore, whom I had known from his days as an activist and publisher in Michigan. Based on my experiences and discussions in Israel and the West Bank at the time of the first Palestinian Intifada, I advocated an end to U.S. military aid to Israel and a repurposing of those funds toward joint Palestinian-Israeli development projects, particularly in the West Bank and Gaza. But Moore blasted me directly for suggesting that there was a gradual way to wind down the conflict, characterizing my position as "constructive engagement," a phrase that Ronald Reagan had first used to describe his policy toward South Africa, which emphasized working with the white South African government to "phase out" apartheid. Coming from Moore, the suggestion that my proposals were simple appeasement resonated with the audience (and to some extent, with me) as a stinging indictment.

But criticisms like Henry's and Michael's notwithstanding, the stipulation that I supported a single state in the area was a position that I believed had to be nuanced by a concern for both the process and the speed by which the goal was reached. Though I maintained that the privileged position of Jews in Israel must also change, and that Israel had to become a truly democratic, not a theocratic state, this could never happen without an open and continuing discussion among Jews in both the U.S. and Israel. Adopting such a position without acknowledging how threatening the idea was to both Israeli and American Jews would make it impossible to move further, I believed.

Yes, my perspective had and has a distinct air of unreality, but then so does every other proposed solution to the conflict that began brewing more than one hundred years ago during the days of the British Mandate in Palestine and almost a half-century before the Nazi holocaust. The idea that Israel can continue to exist indefinitely as a Jewish garrison state in the Middle East (without the eventual elimination of the Palestinian people as a national group) ought to be regarded as at least as fantastical as my notion that an Israeli state can cease to be a theocratic state and that Jews would have a secure future in a democratic Palestinian-Israeli state that evolved over time.

As Henry began seeking ways to work around American Jewish resistance to his message, he came across Norman Finkelstein's controversial book, The Holocaust Industry, in which Finkelstein makes a distinction between the historical event that he refers to as the Nazi Holocaust, and the subsequent use that Israel and major Zionist organizations made of "The Holocaust." Finkelstein contends that major Jewish figures in the United States and the organizations they led used the tragedy to obtain settlements on behalf of Holocaust survivors with Switzerland and other European countries, while actually enriching their own organizations and positioning themselves to more powerfully influence U.S. policy in the Middle East.

The book is a well-documented and persuasive read, written by the son of Holocaust survivors. But as Henry began to see how powerful the Nazi holocaust was as a tool in defending and advancing Israeli interests, he began to question historical accounts of how and, particularly whether the Nazis had proceeded with genocidal intent. To me, Henry's entire discourse on the issue reflected how he had become emotionally captured--at a high cost to his ability to proceed strategically--by the idea of fighting all comers on behalf of justice for Palestinians.

Because Henry had the sense not to embrace Holocaust revisionism publicly, I had always believed that it was not up to me to "out" him and would only talk off the record about that to you. But I take that step now because I have reached the conclusion that a journey that began with the honest belief that American Jews could have an awakening to the injustices suffered by Palestinians beginning with the creation of the Jewish state morphed into a devotion to the Palestinian cause that no longer required him to believe what he was publicly proclaiming.

I believe that effective dissent requires dissenters to proceed ethically precisely because lies and misrepresentation are frequently the tools of those who defend the status quo. As Henry became increasingly focused on tactical effectiveness, he lost perspective on the social justice goals of the struggle he had engaged. To me such a disconnect between devotion to principal and tactical success (measured, for instance, by Henry's belief that he would be "...even less popular the next time you talk to me...") made him willing to embrace any position that undermined support for the Jewish state. Thus, his embrace of "Holocaust revisionism."

My point in sharing that information off the record was to further drive home my argument that Henry faced virulent opposition from the Jewish community not because he was a dissenter, but because he attacked the community and made it a prop in his Kabuki play of political activism; unlike, say, Brant Rosen, who had lost his job within the Jewish community precisely because of his advocacy for Palestinian self-determination.

Unfortunately, my decision to do so left you in a position where you had to choose between telling a story based on on-the-record sources, about a Jewish activist who has taken plenty of flak from the Jewish community, or not telling the story merely because I maintained that the secrets I wouldn't allow you to share should be sufficient reason to leave Henry's story out of your piece. My bad, I know, and I apologize.

I take the central point of your article to be that activist American Jews who think that true justice is best served by vigorous opposition to Israeli policy toward Palestine and Palestinians (and American support for that policy) often face significant challenges from fellow Jews, in some cases becoming pariahs in their own communities. Of course, this is often the fate of dissenters. To persist in the face of that opposition frequently requires a sort of heroism that deserves our respect. But, as I have noted, I do not consider myself (or the withering of our friendship) as an obstacle that I created and that Henry had to overcome. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if I was an enabler, encouraging Henry as he went through a transformation so rapidly that balanced response to setbacks became increasingly difficult.

Henry's commitment to justice for Palestinians and his persistence in that effort may be heroic, but I would contend that his political immaturity exacerbated confrontations, escalated conflict, polarized discussions, and defeated the goal of productive debate. If, in the face of such a debacle of action/reaction, Henry's persistence required courage and inspires admiration, so be it. But that seems to me to have led to a situation where the fate of the Palestinian people is no longer the central question.

In that respect, Henry's decision to go to virtual war as a way to create justice for Palestinians reminds me of the fatal decision by a small percentage of anti-war activists to choose violence as a strategy to end the Vietnam War and to defeat the foreign adventures of the American war machine. Groups that resorted to violence at the time also linked their fight to the domestic repression of African Americans and other minority groups.

The perception that only violence, a left revolution, could overthrow a corrupt American government serving the interests of the wealthy, was shared by a significant part of the anti-war movement at the time. But only a tiny minority of them ended up advocating "armed revolution."

The decision by that tiny minority to resort to domestic terror, helped instigate a repressive counterattack by the authorities at activists of all sorts, including non-violent activists. Certainly, there were other factors at work in provoking the counterattack. Black nationalists, militant workers within and outside of unions, feminists and counterculture organizers were, indeed, threatening corporate control of the economy, and work and social life.

But I have to say that the decisions people made then, to abandon dialogue and advocate confrontational strategies at the expense of smaller victories that could be won and could be the foundation for further victories, seemed ego-driven to me. They had ceased to be about the goals of progressive social change and became about the delusions of people who considered themselves to be working-class heroes.

Henry calls the end of our friendship "the 'most painful break-up' as a result of his activism."  I can't agree. My contention is that Henry allowed his own role as a political activist to become a cause in and of itself, an obsession, a delusion, that long ago lost its connection to justice for Palestinians. The end of our friendship was simply collateral damage.

Best,
Jeff