Two Voices: A Dialogue on Dissension

Political Sociologist Leonard Fein, 34, is a Jewish intellectual who is associate director of the M.I.T.-Harvard Joint Center for Urban Studies. Black Educator Rhody McCoy, 46, is administrator of New York City's Ocean Hill-Brownsville experimental school district. Last week they met at the offices of TIME to discuss their concern about the deteriorating relationship between the ethnic communities to which they belong. Excerpts from their talk:

Fein: The peculiar tragedy is that the Jewish community has a history of many creative relationships with blacks. We have shared a great deal. While your grandfather was being whipped in Mississippi, my grandfather was being killed in a pogrom. I may be dead wrong on this, but I sense that blacks say to themselves: "Look, the Jews have gotten it in the neck, too; yet they've been extraordinarily successful in this country. How do I explain their success and black nonsuccess?" They're certainly not going to conclude that Jews are better than black people. But there is a convenient alternative explanation. Just assert that the Jews were successful only by cheating, and that the people they cheated were black. So in one fell swoop you explain both Jewish success and black nonsuccess. But there are a lot of Jews who are so obviously good guys that it's hard to say that they are gougers or cheaters or bigots. So what do you do? You call them hypocrites and you provoke them so fiercely that they, too, in the end turn against you. Then you can relax and say, "See, everybody's a racist."

McCoy: That's a pretty frightening concept, isn't it? But I'm not sure that's so prevalent. I would suggest that black people are still enslaved in one way or another, and I don't think they're really so ready to find scapegoats as to find reasons to blame it on the total American scene. It's an anti-white attitude period. To me, it eventually all goes back to economics. Jewish people say, "Well, I've been discriminated against, I was a second-class citizen and so I'm going to do something about it." But they still continue to practice the same discrimination. You can't even get a job as a dishwasher in certain areas they inhabit.

People who are oppressed want the oppressor off their backs. If he happens to be Italian, somebody's going to say you're anti-Italian. It's ridiculous. It only becomes a charge of anti-Semitism when some person needs a political platform. It's all part of a very definite effort on the part of some people who are trying to keep the black community isolated and fragmented.

Let me put it another way. Of course I think anti-Semitism is bad but I think we have more things to be concerned about than making anti-Semitism a priority. In Ocean Hill-Brownsville, people who basically were committed to educating children suddenly now are being charged with antiSemitism. It takes things all out of context. I keep asking myself why it's so repugnant when it becomes black antiSemitism. We know that other groups practice anti-Semitism much more subtly. If every black man in America were an anti-Semite, it would have no real impact on our society as it presently stands.

Fein: You can take that one step further. If every black man, woman and child were an anti-Semite, they would still number fewer than the total of white anti-Semites in America. But it would still be patronizing on my part to tolerate black anti-Semitism to any greater degree than I would tolerate it from any other source. If I were to tolerate it, it would be an insult to you because it would mean I don't hold you to a standard that I hold every other person to. Black anti-Semitism is fundamentally a cop-out--the same thing that people of all societies engage in when the going gets rough.

When a problem becomes hard, it is very easy to point and accuse and say well it is racism or Jews or some other big word nobody defines very carefully or precisely.

Increasingly it seems to me that the black community has a choice. Is it going to be like many other ethnic communities--entirely introverted, hostile to other groups? Or is it going to be a community that is building for itself a capacity to relate to others creatively and productively? The organized Jewish community has a pretty good record of isolating and condemning its own bigots. But how can we make it possible to accept responsibility for the Jewish bigot who owns a building in the slum or who does not hire blacks, any more than any national black organization can be held responsible or accountable for every cheap hoodlum or foulmouth who happens to be black? I most certainly won't let such crude stereotyping go unchallenged when my people say it, and I don't expect you to let it go unchallenged when your people are the ones who say it.

McCoy: Maybe there are too few of us. The devastating part is that we don't have the resources to combat it. In the school strike, our governing board went on record as being opposed to antiSemitism. We issued a document relative to the meaning of Rosh Hashanah, and now people are asking us to issue still another statement. How far do we go?

Fein: For both of us, the issue has been exaggerated. Why? Well, Jews and blacks are both more sensitive than people with less harrowing memories, so when Jews hear anti-Semitic statements being whispered, they are deafening. Beyond that, there is a backlash in the Jewish community, an unmasking of latent bigotry. Also, Jews in a perverse kind of way need anti-Semites. Jews in this country are in fairly serious trouble spiritually and ideologically, and it is very comforting to come once again to an old and familiar problem. By confronting others, you can avoid the much more challenging confrontation with yourself.

McCoy: In a very sophisticated way, I can say there is some education that has got to be done. When I look at it realistically, I am not so sure. I think we can sit around a table and iron out all the differences, but when you go to put that into practice nothing ever comes out of it in terms of moving to get people out of this kind of slavery. The other day I talked with a Jew who impressed upon me that he grew up on the Lower East Side. It was a ghetto when he went to school, but he got out of it. I said to him: "If it was a ghetto then and you left it and turned it over to me, what do you think happened to it? Do the blacks own the buildings now? No, they don't, and when they do and they overutilize them the Department of Buildings moves in and cuts their throat while the landlord next door is an absentee landlord and they can't find him and his building deteriorates." I said to him: "You've exploited, that's what you've done, you've exploited the people for a long time. Give them a chance to remodel and renovate. If you don't want to add to their identification of Jews as antiblack, then you have to do something about it. I don't think we need a process of education. We need a process of doing."

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