Racial Subjects by David Theo Goldberg

Author:David Theo Goldberg [Goldberg, David Theo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317958642
Google: sOKCCwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-02-04T06:01:07+00:00

Supposing His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return pledge ourselves to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We would there form a portion of the rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. The sanctuaries of Christendom would be safeguarded by assigning to them extra-territorial status.… We should form a guard of honour about these sanctuaries, answering for the fulfilment of this duty with our existence. (96)

Leaving aside the embarrassing presupposition of Jews as natural money managers and guardians of Christian sanctuaries, Zionism emerged as a secular commitment to self-protection and self-determination. Israel became the realization of the late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century Jewish drive for security, a realization made more readily possible in political and economic terms ironically by the holocaust. Israel was established thus both as an extension of European colonialism (a bastion of civilization in the face of Asian barbarism) and a limit to it, Europe’s last colony and first postcolonial state, its first postcolonial “success.” Again ironically, the Jewish state bears out the prevailing pre-sumption of Jewish difference, of Jewish exceptionalism, at once a Jewish blessing and burden. A Jewish state thus ends the historical condition of Jews’ migration, aliyah supposedly the last journey, the return “home” (in retrospect, a totally naive and simplistic presumption). It is Israel’s “success” that in a sense made possible also the assimilability of Jews in America, the holocaust that perversely led America finally and (almost) completely (and somewhat misleadingly) to see Jews as European and therefore white. That one could be Jewish in relation to the State of Israel meant that one could be white, one could assimilate, in the United States.

Black nationalism before the 1960s, as expressed most clearly in Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, was about black self-development and collective self-determination in the face of oppression and powerlessness through developing independent and racially based separate organizations and institutions. Garvey’s (1926) statement of beliefs for UNIA summarizes this spirit:

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