Steve QJ
2 min readFeb 20, 2024

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Two things. You're using two articles, one from 1992, and one from 1967 (!!!) to support your opinion about all black people's views on Jews? Should I use the Israeli government's far more recent sterilisation of Ethiopian Jews to frame my understanding of Jewish attitudes towards black people?

Second, did you actually read Baldwin's piece? The piece is an argument against antisemitism and hatred in general:

"All racist positions baffle and appall me. None of us are that different from one another, neither that much better nor that much worse. Furthermore, when one takes a position one must attempt to see where that position inexorably leads. One must ask oneself, if one decides that black or white or Jewish people are, by definition, to be despised, is one willing to murder a black or white or Jewish baby: for that is where the position leads. And if one blames the Jew for having become a white American, one may perfectly well, if one is black, be speaking out of nothing more than envy.

If one blames the Jew for not having been ennobled by oppression, one is not indicting the single figure of the Jew but the entire human race, and one is also making a quite breathtaking claim for oneself. I know that my own oppression did not ennoble me, not even when I thought of myself as a practicing Christian. I also know that if today I refuse to hate Jews, or anybody else, it is because I know how it feels to be hated. I learned this from Christians, and I ceased to practice what the Christians practiced.

The crisis taking place in the world, and in the minds and hearts of black men everywhere, is not produced by the star of David, but by the old, rugged Roman cross on which Christendom's most celebrated Jew was murdered. And not by Jews."

Recognising that black Americans were poorly treated by Jews, and by pretty much everybody else, in 1960s America is not being blind to Jewish victimhood. It's a recognition, as he says, that Jews were not ennobled by victimhood. Nor, sadly have black people been. He's talking about the paradox of victimhood in its broadest sense. And implicates black victimhood just as strongly as Jewish victimhood.

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Steve QJ
Steve QJ

Written by Steve QJ

Race. Politics. Culture. Sometimes other things. Almost always polite. Find more at https://steveqj.substack.com

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