Current controversies swirling around the artist formerly known as #KanyeWest, who has made resurgent anti-Semitic comments in recent days, as well as the controversy hanging over Los Angeles City Council President #NuryMartinez, who made “openly racist remarks, derided some of her council colleagues and spoke in unusually crass terms about how the city should be carved up politically,” according to the Los Angeles Times, both raise the specter of Intersectionality in crisis.
Specifically, Kanye West (he’s legally changed his name to Ye, according to press reports) called for “death con 3” on “the Jews,” though one report wrote the quote as “Def Con 3” (more properly written DEFCON 3, which refers to a much heightened state of militarily preparedness by the government).
Ye also stated that fellow rapper and businessman Sean “Diddy” Combs was controlled by Jewish people. Referring to Jews as controllers or “puppet masters” is a historic anti-Semitic slander.
I’ll address the anti-Semitic nature of Ye’s comments before returning to Nury Martinez, because I know there is an undercurrent of resentment against Jews who allegedly complain a lot about #anti-Semitism yet have had considerable success commercially and professionally in modern times. But that resentment or skepticism is part and parcel of anti-Semitism – success itself is now a crime Jews are really being accused of by anti-Semites, after centuries of being called Christ-killers and Prophet-killers.
I don’t follow the lives of rappers, and I was unaware of Ye’s past anti-Semitic statements. I will only ask why it took his latest outburst to make front-page news, internationally as well as nationally. We’ve read a lot about anti-Asian hate crimes in America in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the data is pretty clear – the religious group that is by far the target of the most hate crimes in America is Jews. See link here. And Jews make up only 2-3 percent of the American population.
But, of course, “the Jews” control the media, so I guess you can choose to ignore the data.
Now, for Ms. Martinez. She mocked the African-American son of an apparently gay fellow council member, and joked about beating the child up because he was allegedly misbehaving during a Martin Luther King Jr. event and parade. Perhaps her worst offense was referring to the child as a “monkey” in Spanish, which strikes at the heart of the most racist slander ever made against African Americans.
I’ll say this for Ye – he doesn’t apologize for anything – but Ms. Martinez is so sorry (sorry she got caught, I think most of us would agree) that she is resigning her council presidency, but not her seat on the council, at least not yet.
Intersectionality
Now, this is what I’ve been building up to. For years we’ve been hearing about intersectionality, or “the intersection of this and that” marginalized or under-represented group. In one interpretation, the usage can be viewed as the coalition of activist Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and some other identities who are fighting against a common enemy (that’s the intersection), typically the white male patriarchy and hegemony. But that coalition has always been manufactured and is inherently unstable. Colorism, which you can read about here, is one problem, i.e., there is discrimination within #BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) and, as the recent Martinez scandal illustrates, there is long-standing friction between some elements of the Latino community and the Black community. And the Democratic Party, long a home for Hispanic voters as well as for Blacks, has in fact been shedding some Hispanic voters in recent years.
Many of the anti-Asian hate crimes reported in the media have clearly been related to the “middleman” function some Asian Americans fulfill in the poorer inner city neighborhoods (similar to small businesses and rental properties some Jews owned in inner-city neighborhoods through the mid-20th century). And Louis Farrakhan has not only made anti-Jewish and sometimes anti-Catholic statements, but I once bought a copy of the Nation of Islam publication “Muhammad Speaks” in which Farrakhan specifically threatened Arab Americans who were buying up rental properties in inner-city Chicago neighborhoods.
The cracks have always been there. Activists don’t like to admit this because intersectionality can be a powerful coalition, and constituent groups in the coalition do have their grievances. The media have often turned a blind eye to the friction and fractures in the coalition in the past, but not always – in the media’s partial defense, they’re walking a kind of fine line between being seen as too partisan or ignoring the claims that the various groups that make up the intersectional coalition have.
One cost of this kind of coalition politics is that, when and if the overall coalition breaks down, some legitimate concerns and programs will sink with it. Would not a better program be for activists to advance their causes and make their best case for policy changes they want rather than be linked to other groups with which they may not really agree?