The outburst of support for Hamas—an Islamic terrorist group—on college campuses after the Oct. 7 atrocities against Israel caught many Americans off guard. Media coverage also revealed that Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters were quick to find parallels between American "systemic racism" and Israel, the so-called "colonizer" nation.
As Israel's fight to destroy Hamas continues, we can only expect the campus Left and BLM to ramp up their shrill rhetoric for election year.
This reaction is both embarrassingly ignorant and deeply destructive. These self-styled spokespeople for the oppressed have emerged from a media landscape of racial grievance and "oppression olympics" far removed from the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lacking any other context for understanding world events, these activists project their own warped vision of America onto the Middle East, with "white" Israeli racists oppressing "black" Palestinian victims.
But not only is running cover for Hamas in the name of fighting anti-black racism absurd and obscene, it also poisons the historically important relationship between blacks and Jews in America.
By contrast, there is a rich tradition of Black-Jewish cooperation before and during the Civil Rights era. Over a century ago, the great education reformer Booker T. Washington teamed up with Jewish American philanthropist Julius Rosenwald to build schools across the rural, segregated South. While the Rosenwald fund's contribution was essential, local black communities raised matching funds and built the schools themselves.
By 1932, there were almost 5,000 black-built, black-run "Rosenwald schools" educating students. Many influential figures benefited directly from Washington's vision and Rosenwald's largesse: Congressman John Lewis, poet Maya Angelou, and Civil Rights martyr Medgar Evers were all Rosenwald school alumni, to name just three. In their half-century of use, the Rosenwald Schools educated over 700,000 children.
Meanwhile, in Europe, the German Jewish linguist Max Weinrich drew inspiration from Washington's Tuskegee Institute, the engine of Black empowerment in the decades after emancipation, when building his Yiddish Scientific Institute, dedicated to preserving Jewish faith and culture in the face of prejudice.
A generation later, Martin Luther King, Jr. pleaded for the freedom of Jews trapped in the Soviet Union, connecting their plight and that of black Americans living under Jim Crow. Many of the Jews who did escape from behind the Iron Curtain, of course, settled in Israel.
The same strategies of cooperation and social enterprise that empowered blacks and Jews have also benefited American Muslims, who have faced increased hostility in the months since the war began.
But it's exactly those uplifting qualities that BLM and the campus Left could not care less about. This is doubly true when Muslim parents stand shoulder-to-shoulder with conservative Christians in opposition to radical gender ideology in our schools. Faith, like most of the forces that hold low-income communities together, only interests these race hustlers when it can be weaponized against America and our bourgeois values.
Meanwhile, faith-based leadership and fruitful cooperation with other groups, including the Jewish community, has yielded benefits we still enjoy generations later. That is why the great majority of black Americans do not side with BLM in supporting Hamas.
Mr. Woodson is founder and president of the Woodson Center, editor of "Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History From Revisionists and Race Hustlers" and author of "Lessons From the Least of Us."
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Black Lives Matter Does Not Speak for Black America
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11.12.2023
The outburst of support for Hamas—an Islamic terrorist group—on college campuses after the Oct. 7 atrocities against Israel caught many Americans off guard. Media coverage also revealed that Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters were quick to find parallels between American "systemic racism" and Israel, the so-called "colonizer" nation.
As Israel's fight to destroy Hamas continues, we can only expect the campus Left and BLM to ramp up their shrill rhetoric for election year.
This reaction is both embarrassingly ignorant and deeply destructive. These self-styled spokespeople for the oppressed have emerged from a media landscape of racial grievance and "oppression olympics" far removed from the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Lacking any other context for understanding world events, these activists project their own warped vision of America onto the Middle East, with "white" Israeli racists oppressing "black" Palestinian victims.
But........
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