The George Floyd Case: The unseen and silent sicknesses causing race hatred
The patent police brutality of the George Floyd case demonstrates the absolute imperative of meting-out stern and certain punishments to killer cops. Some of this can be corrected by the Law. However, legal changes probably won’t make a dent in the pervasiveness and depth of racial hatred.
For many decades, many people have said that we have to stop hating one another and need to have an honest conversation about race. For many decades, the same platitudes have been bandied about and conversations about race never get anywhere: People say isn’t racism horrible and mustn’t we do something about it, and racism endures as tenaciously as the rats and refuse of New York City Subway System.
I think the persistence of racism has a lot in common with the seeming intractability of emotional illness. Often a patient will see a psychiatrist for years without any amelioration of his psychopathology. Very often the shrink and the ailing patient aren’t conquering the problem because the cause of the problem is unconscious. Similarly, discussions in which well-meaning but cliché-ridden social workers and political commentators say that we all must love one another will not defuse black-white antagonisms if the underlying causes are hidden from view.
There are probably many unconscious conflicts between blacks and whites which keep pouring gasoline on the flames of racism. In the following essay, I tried to illuminate just one aspect of unconscious conflicts regarding race in America, specifically, the unconscious problems between blacks and Jews. I hope other writers and thinkers will not be bogged down by the pablum of ephemeral news stories which rehash the conventional wisdom and try to do some psychological sleuthing. When people hate each other passionately, their hatred is illogical and an examination of the psyche is warranted.
UNCONSCIOUS CONFLICTS BETWEEN JEWS AND BLACKS
Some Jews, I think, may have projected their feelings toward Germans onto blacks.
Many Jews, understandably, may have wanted to kill Germans after WWII. (I know I did.)
Many Jews may assume, at least unconsciously, that many blacks want to kill and murder white people, including Jewish white people, because of what blacks endured. Just as they may have wanted to kill Germans, some Jews may have believed that many blacks wanted to kill them because they were white.
This made Jews wary of blacks, frightened of blacks and stimulated often stale, stodgy expressions of liberal support for blacks. Sometimes, Jews were extremely solicitous of blacks and were too forgiving of black racism. For example, many radical Jews did not find offense when New York Radio Station WBAI aired a poem, read by a black girl, consisting of two lines: “Hey you Jew Boy with that Yamaka on your head/ Oh how I wish you would drop dead.”
When Jews failed to protest this poem, Blacks reasoned that Jews were terrified of them.
Blacks further reasoned: This must be because Jews harmed us and fear retribution.
Black aggressiveness and hostility toward Jews increased.
Meanwhile, the Jew was sick and tired of being afraid of blacks.
And this made Jews hate blacks because no one can stand someone who makes them frightened.
Fear nourished hatred, hatred fed fear, and thc cycle became endemic in New York politics in the 70’s and 80’s – and instead of having senators like Robert Kennedy, New York got proto-Trumps like Senator Alphonse D’ Amato.
Of course, the foregoing probably does not apply to relations between white gentile America and black America. Eldridge Cleaver, a brilliant black panther and theoretician, addressed many of the unconscious psycho-sexual conflicts which, he believed, fueled racial animus in America. Unfortunately, most people are unfamiliar with him – so many educated people never heard of his brilliant exposition on race and sex, “Soul on Ice” -- as he has been buried by the professoriate which finds his views on sexuality altogether un-PC. Some of his comments are offensively macho, but the book should be read because much of it is piercingly brilliant. .