If Black on Black Violence Today in Chicago is Ignored by Jewish Whites...

 Why is it shocking to learn that White on White violence in the Holocaust is ignored by Jewish Blacks?  Isn't that what Whoopi is offering to the national discussion on diversity?  And what's to be done about the Black Hebrew Israelites / Black Zionists who often attack -- verbally and physically -- innocent Whites?  Who dares speak against them?

Earlier this year, Ta-Nehisi Coates made his now-familiar argument for reparations, which called for Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders to recognize the importance of racially-specific–rather than colorblind universalist–solutions to the legacies of slavery and racial discrimination. When Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman asked Coates about precedents for such reparations, he referenced the “grand precedent of the Holocaust,” citing the formation of Israel with financial subsidy from Germany.

Israel as a historical precedent for reparations is not new for Coates, and it stands in stark contrast to the recent framing for reparations by The Movement For Black Lives (M4BL), which instead cited contemporary calls for a Universal Basic Income (UBI) in Finland and Switzerland. In his George Polk award-winning article, “The Case for Reparations,” Coates argued that although reparations “could not make up for the murder perpetrated by the Nazis . . . they did launch Germany’s reckoning with itself, and perhaps provided a road map for how a great civilization might make itself worthy of the name.”

But this “road map” is a rocky one, evoked before by black intellectuals and activists ranging from Malcolm X and A. Philip Randolph to Stokely Carmichael and Ethel Minor. By invoking Israel as a precedent for reparations, Coates reminded me of Robin Kelley’sadmonishment that “you cannot build a state on ethno-religious grounds.”

Interestingly enough, it is through the Nation of Islam (NOI) – a black nationalist group organized in part around ethno-religious grounds – that we can best trace the winding place of Israel in the black radical imagination. Long before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, there was a Black Zionist tradition which envisioned the liberation and deliverance of those throughout the African diaspora using the book of Exodus.

The story of the Israelites’ emancipation from bondage in Egypt, led by the prophet Moses to the promised land of Canaan served as a blueprint for black nationalists ranging from David Walker, Henry McNeal Turner, and Martin Delany to Marcus Garvey, Mittie Maude Lena Gordon, and Rastafarians. As Kelley notes in Letters to Palestine: Writers Respond to War and Occupation, Black Zionism provided “not only a narrative of slavery, emancipation, and renewal, but with a language to critique America’s racist state since the biblical Israel represented a new beginning.”

Maybe we need more voices who know Black History in this national conversation on race that everyone is saying we always need to be discussing in America... Maybe more voices will mean more hard checks on dumbbells saying stupid stuff...  Let them lay it out, and let other educated and practiced voices counter.  Stifling one side of the conversation or artificially elevating another only brings us back to the point where honest discussion isn't working, and instead boycotts, threats of intimidation, unions circling the wagons, and tenured folk issuing ... statements of support make national news.

And don't nobody look over there, but... President Kennedy is committing 5,000 troops to VietNam today.  Such a small number, what could it lead to, eh?  Fools running the show in DC and in the media.  Americans won't be fooled again.  Place your bets accordingly, gentlemen...