FOOD FOR THOUGHT: OUR USE OF IDEAS OF THE OTHER SHAPES OUR REALITY

David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2014) (From the bookjacket: "We understand anti-Judaism--whether expressed in a casual remark or implemented on a massive scale--as somehow exceptional: an unfortunate mark of personal prejudice or the shocking outcome of an extremist ideology married to power. We consider it irrational, an anomaly in the Western tradition of tolerance and progress. But as David Nirenberg shows with deep learning and elegance, we are dangerously complacent if we confine anti-Judaism to the margins of our culture. This complex of ideas sits at the core of the Western tradition, where it has operated for millennia as a means of making sense of the world." From the text: "Throughout this book I have tried to show how, across several thousand years, myriad lands, and many different spheres of human activity, people have uses ideas about Jews and Judaism to fashion the tools with which they construct the reality of their world. The goal of my project . . . is to encourage reflection about our 'projective behavior,' that is, about the ways in which our deployment of concepts into and onto the world might generate 'pathological' fantasies of Judaism." Id. at 468. Reading this books during Black History Month, in the United States, prompted me to wonder whether a similar analysis would throw meaningful insights on to how the use ideas about Blacks and Black--or African American culture(s)--fashion the tools with which Americans generally, and White Americans specifically, construct the reality of their America. For instance, if comments by conservative journalists, talk-show hosts, newscasters, bloggers, and political pundits are any indication, one might reasonable conclude that most of America's problems would be significantly lessened, if not eliminated all together, were Blacks to suddenly disappear from the polity. In short, the perception of the Black in America, a four-hundred-year tradition, shapes our reality. Book proposal: "Anti-Blackism: The American Tradition.").