I’m not looking for a debate so much as personal observations. But let me explain why I’m asking this.
I’m in Memphis. The local NPR station has been running the local version of StoryCorps during All Things Considered recently. Last Friday, a gentleman who one of the first black city councilman was featured. Relating how he came to be elected back in '68, he said that one of his opponents, a white man, ran an unabashedly racist campaign including having a car drive around with the message “Memphians, you don’t want a nigger on the city council, do you?” This aroused the ire of two prominent Jews in the district, who went to the black candidate and offered their support, and largely as a result the black candidate won.
I was listening to this with my stepdaughter, who, obviously, is much younger than I. She commented that it was noble of the two Jewish leaders to offer their assistance thus; I replied that there was probably self-interest involved as well, because a candidate who was so flagrantly anti-black was also likely to be anti-semitic. Likewise, if I hear a white person in this part of the country making unashamed anti-semitic comments, I generally assume he or she is prejudiced against blacks as well.
So I ask you, Dopers from the non-Southern US: how closely are anti-black racism and anti-Semitism correlated in your neck of the woods?
I don’t know that those two are specifically related, so much as racist idiots tend to be anti-everything, in my experience. Anyone who rants about niggers and kikes probably also hates spics, towelheads, and fags.
Honestly, I can’t even remember the last time I heard someone seriously say something anti-semitic. Unless you count people quoting one of the best episodes of Seinfeld ever:
George: “Astroturf? You know who’s responsible for that don’t you? THE JEWS!”
So I would say they probably correlate only as far as most racists are racist against everybody that doesn’t belong to their race (and some who do).
There are, equally sadly, anti-semitic black people–more than a few of whom I know. Mrs. Rhymer is half black, half Jewish (well, the Jewish half is on her father’s side, so technically it doesn’t count), and she has told me of getting it from both sides.
Right. I’m saying my experience is that they correlate nearly 100%, along with almost all other prejudices. Those two in particular don’t correlate any higher than the rest, as near as I can tell.
I think around here (rural Ohio) they’re pretty highly correlated.
Unfortunately, I don’t find it surprising that members of a minority would be hateful to members of a different minority when both have experienced discrimination. The chicken that is next-to-last in the pecking order pecks the hardest.
The reason I ask the question is that, while I know many anti-semtic black persons, it’s harder for me to know if the white persons I know casually are anti-semtic because they’d be less open about it with me, as I am not a member of their group.
My anecdotal findings: In person, I’ve heard a distubing amount of anti-black commentary in my life here in VA (including a sharp rise since Obama’s rise in popularity). I’ve heard significantly less but still disturbing anti-gay comments. I have never heard a single serious anti-Jew comment in person. So IMHO, no correlation here but maybe that has to do with living in the Capitol of the Confederacy.
I grew up in 1960s SoCal. Orange County to be precise. A bastion of West Coast conservatism. Which really was “Pot’s fine. Abortions are fine. We didn’t invent the sexual revolution (SF did), but we sure perfected it. Jesus is silly. We hate all taxes (except those which power the aerospace companies where we all work)”.
I hear that since then aerospace has collapsed, Jesus has Risen & free sex is right out. But taxes remain Evil.
At any rate, what would now be considered over-the-top foaming racist remarks were commonplace ordinary commentary about blacks in general, and the poor folks in Watts, Oakland, etc., in particular.
Conversely, I can’t recall ever hearing anything negative about Jews. In fact I recall, as a precocious 12-ish year-old, being mystified about news reports of ant-Semitism from back east. I remember thinking “The Jews aren’t distinctive enough to be prejudiced against even if you wanted to be. How can you act out hate against something you can’t identify in a crowd?”
The fact my high school of 2400 kids had 4 Jewish students may have had something to do with the lack of anti-Jewish commentary in the public I encountered. Oddly, and as corny as it sounds, two of them were among my top 10 friends. I knew one for 3 semesters before I discovered he was Jewish.
When I moved briefly to NYC in the 1990s I saw my first real concentration of seriously cultural Jews. That’s also the first time I ever heard significant anti-Semitic sentiment from Joe on the street.
What’s it all mean? Damn if I know. I do know that anti-Hispanic sentiment has increased as they’ve gone from 5% to 35% of the SoCal population. Perhaps the SoCal Jews were so few in number and so culturally assimilated as to be ignored. But they’d still have been hated if only anyone could’ve spotted them in the crowd.
Ditto that for north Georgia. Never encountered any anti-Semitism growing up. Maybe that was a function of there just being not that many Jews in rural Georgia. There was one Jewish kid in my high school. No one gave him shit about that to my knowledge. (He was also gay. He did catch shit about that.)
Also, protestant fundamentalism was ascendant, and those folks tend to take pretty seriously the idea of Jews being God’s chosen people, and they tend to be mindful of the warning in Genesis 12:3. At least in the churches I attended.