Beyond Punching Up and Down
Overcoming Divisions in Anti-Racism
Things I’ve been reading this week:
This piece by David Feldman, the organiser of the conference in which the paper I share below was delivered, has written a very interesting essay on disconnections which have emerged between anti-racism and antisemitism since the 1960s.
I found this dialogue between Orla Guralnik (the therapist from the Netflix show Couples Therapy) and Christine, a former participant on the show, rich and fascinating. Guralnik grew up in Israel and Christine is Palestinian and they have a full and frank dialogue on all aspects of the conflict.
This long article on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ new engagement with Israel-Palestine after taking a trip there in the summer of 2023 is a must read.
This (again long) New Yorker profile of Jewish Currents magazine is a great read, and can usefully be paired with this New Left Review interview with Currents editor Arielle Angel (although both the New Yorker and the NLR bring their own agendas to the pieces in quite unhelpful ways)
I’m really enjoying this book, a new history of the Palestine Liberation Organisation Research Center in Beirut.
This was a paper I delivered on September 18th at the one day conference ‘Anti-racism and anti-antisemitism’ which took place at Birkbeck, organised by the Birkbeck Institute for the Study of Antisemitism.
There is a tendency today to do anti-racism in siloes. The bodies which deal with antisemitism have little to say about anti-racism more generally and bodies who work on anti-racism do scarce work on antisemitism. There is a distinct lack of organisations who do both simultaneously, and this results in an atmosphere of suspicion, competition and sometimes hostility between two worlds which, on the face of things, ought to be allies.
This separation has major ramifications at governmental level, particularly under recent Conservative administrations. Broader anti-racist campaigning, particularly when centred around anti-Black racism, or Afriphobia, is treated with little concealed hostility, depicted critically as ‘woke’ and presented as a threat to the memory of Britain’s glorious national and imperial past. Anti-antisemitism campaigning, on the other hand is welcomed, and the issue treated as a national priority. Jewish safety has become treated as integral to the well-being of the British state and used to justify restrictions on popular protest.
This bifurcation has led to politicians with a history of racism styling themselves as warriors against antisemitism. To give just one example, one of the stranger attendees at the 2018 Enough is Enough protest, against antisemitism in the Labour party, was Norman Tebbitt, the creator of the ‘Cricket Test’ – where he asked the descendants of South Asian or Caribbean migrants – ‘which side do you cheer for’?
Today I want to consider one of the main arguments which has upheld such anti-racist bifurcation. I will argue that that the divide is founded on presentism, based on the situation in the west since 1945. A longer view can help bring greater unity to the anti-racist world and promote multidirectional memory over competitive anti-racism.
The argument may be described as punching up or punching down. Lisa Nandy, daughter of Dipak Nandy, the Indian-born founder of the Runnymede Trust, put it like this in 2020: ‘Antisemitism is a very particular form of racism. It’s the sort of racism that punches up, not down. That argues that Jewish people are privileged and powerful.’ At her talk at BISA earlier this year the United States Antisemitism Envoy Deborah Lipstadt put it like this:
Most prejudices posit that the reviled group is “lesser than” the rest of society. This is particularly true for racial or ethnic prejudices. For example, the racist opines: should people of color move into our neighborhood, “there goes the neighborhood.” If their children go to our children’s schools, “there go the schools.” The prejudiced person, in this case, the racist, reviles the person of color as being of lesser value than themselves. They punch down in order to keep them down.’
Lipstadt stated that while the antisemite does sometimes punch down, ‘he also “punches up.” Jews, the antisemite is convinced, are richer than, more powerful than, and more able to control matters than “the rest” of us. They revile the Jews, but they also fear them and the evil they can cause to the “rest” of society.’
In other words, we can distinguish between groups which are feared and those who are despised. George Frederickson put it this way: The emotion to which racism appeals is either contempt or fear, depending on whether the dominant group views the Other as under control and securely “in its place” or conceivably capable of competition or reprisal.’
The punching up or down argument can be critiqued both on grounds of representation of Jews, the people that the racist is supposedly afraid of and over the representation of Black people, those that the racist is alleged to despise.
Firstly, on Jews - there is a very long tradition of depicting Jews as physically vile: deformed, disgusting, coarse, having misgendered bodies, stinking, disease-ridden, mongrels. To take just one example from the corpus of medieval and early modern anti-Judaism: the foetor Judaicus was the perceived stench produced by Jews, and one so irrevocably tied to the Jewish body that it could persist even following conversion to Christianity. Even in the era of modern anti-semitism, Jewish immigrants to the East End of London in the late 19th and early 20th century were racialised as stinking, carriers of disease, unable to speak properly, having gross facial features, poverty stricken and generally at the bottom of the social pile. This is in keeping with the long medieval and early modern history of Jews in Europe as excluded, ghettoised, frequently expelled, and subject to regular incidents of violence. Rooted in classical Christian notions of Jewish punishment for supposedly rejecting Christ, Jews were people of lesser value, and thus usually restricted from entering the higher echelons of society.
Secondly, we need to reconsider the claim of Afriphobia being necessarily based on contempt, given the volume of historic anti-Black racism that has been rooted in fear. Fear that is, of Black people taking power, seizing control of resources and organisations, taking revenge or simply doing to white people what has been done to them. In most situations of slavery and colonial domination, white Europeans and their descendants were heavily outnumbered, and the fear that Africans and those of African descent might overthrow them was widespread and prescient. Racist strategies of separation, discrimination and legal violence were founded not only on disgust at Black bodies but also on the need to prevent them rising up. The black male body was regularly racialised and sexualised as strong, muscular and large; qualities associated with fear of it, rather than with disgust.
As late as the late 1960s, the racism of a figure like Enoch Powell was rooted in fear that the colonised would recolonise the metropole, and gain power over their former colonial masters. In his infamous 1968 speech Powell described the Race Relations Act as ‘the means of showing that the immigrant communities can organise to consolidate their members, to agitate and campaign against their fellow citizens, and to overawe and dominate the rest with the legal weapons which the ignorant and the ill-informed have provided.’ Powell’s notion was rooted not only in fear, but also in conspiracy, the idea that New-Commonwealth immigrants would collaborate and organise to take control over white Britons.
It is this idea of conspiracy that acts as the primary justification for the punching up or down distinction. As I just suggested, white claims of planned Black militancy or secretive co-operation to overthrow masters and colonists should be understood as versions of conspiracy theory. But even if we accept that conspiracy is more prevalent in antisemitism than in Afriphobia, the extent to which antisemitism is always rooted in it has been exaggerated. Conspiracy theories in which Jews plot to take over banks, media and government have their roots in the 19th century, around portrayals of the Rothschild banking dynasty. The core text of conspiratorial antisemitism, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, was published in Russia in 1903 and then in England in 1920. Jewish conspiracy theories then, are a decidedly modern genre, products of the modern antisemitic movement born in the 1870s. Eternalist attempts to paint them as modern versions of the accusation of deicide, or based on older notions of Jewish moneylending, are unconvincing.[1] Furthermore, modern antisemitism was never solely a conspiracy theory; it was always a political programme dedicated to the removal of Jewish rights and, when possible, the removal of Jews from society.
Older forms of anti-Judaism, which see Jews as low and vile, centred on the Jewish body; in fact, the idea of Jewish corporeality was an essential component of historic anti-Judaism, rooted in the Pauline doctrine that Judaism represented flesh and law while Christianity stood for spirit and grace. Such bodily disgust persisted into the modern-era and depictions of gross Jewish physicality were staples of Nazi propaganda. This prevalence may be surprising to some contemporary observers because in recent decades we have heard frequently that antisemites hate Jews because of their incorporeality. I would suggest this analysis, and the main source of the punching up theory, comes from the work of Moishe Postone. Postone was hyper-conscious of antisemitism rooted in abstraction, as the intangible force of capitalism that will overwhelm the physical nation. Thus, he focused only on antisemitism based on conspiracy and largely ignored antisemitism rooted in Jewish corporeality. By the time he was writing in the 1980s, the discourse of Jewish bodily vileness was fading away and traditional forms of antisemitism were decreasing, largely confined to the neo-fascist fringe. But Postone did not wish to concede this decline, and did not want to focus purely on neo-fascists. He sought to emphasise antisemitism as a phenomenon of the left, and his approach to doing so was to connect antisemitism to anti-capitalism, through his notion of the ‘foreshortened critique of capitalism’. Moreover, Postone’s theory has been fundamental to the separation of antisemitism from other forms of racism, and the punching up argument which is a subset of this. As Neil Levi puts it, Postone ‘distinguishes the kind of power attributed to the Jews from that of ‘other forms of racism’ … and thinks that ‘modern antisemitism is ultimately categorically distinguished from… “racism in general” which he thinks always focuses on the concrete, physical, sexual properties of the other.’ If, I as have suggested Postone is wrong to play down the physical component of antisemitism and the attribution of power to colonised peoples in other forms of racism then we need to move beyond his approach and beyond the punching up or down narrative.
I suggest that like Postone, much anti-antisemitism and anti-racism work does things the wrong way round. It begins from the contemporary world, starting from practices and words that minority groups, in all their subjectivity, find offensive, and then traces these backwards in time to claim that these have always constituted the essence of antisemitism and of racism. This creates bizarre outcomes, like the idea that the essence of antisemitism is tropes and conspiracy theories, and the essence of anti-Black racism is unconscious bias and microaggressions.
I suggest instead that we begin historically, seeing how anti-Judaism, anti-semitism and Afriphobia functioned in their heyday, when they were mainstream and normalised. Such an approach demonstrates that both antisemitism and Afriphobia were techniques of political control and exclusion, when Blacks or Jews were deprived of rights, ghettoised, excluded, enslaved and killed. Taking the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust as the zeniths of anti-Black racism and antisemitism respectively; in both cases the victims lost all rights, were treated as less than human, were used for their labour power when possible and killed if not. But even without relying on such extremes we can consider the treatment of Jews in early modern Europe and the treatment of Africans under European colonial rule. Both should be understood as examples of structural racism, where groups of people are systematically separated, discriminated against, used, beaten and destroyed by the state and state-backed actors, and not cases of personal prejudices and slights emitting from individuals.
This historically centred approach shows the fundamental similarity of antisemitism and Afrophobia and should facilitate the building of organisations that deal with both simultaneously. If we do not find such structural oppression to persist today, we should not bend language beyond recognition by claiming that the issues we face today are essentially the same as those in the heyday of race-science, colonialism and political antisemitism. After 1945 there was a new understanding of racism as an individual failing, a mark of an authoritarian personality, rather than a political programme of exclusion and discrimination against certain groups. This move was often accepted by Jewish actors, leading antisemitism to be considered a form of prejudice. It was also the tendency of the British state, which criminalised individuals who engaged in racist incitement but built much weaker remedies against collective discrimination. The prejudice approach was forcefully opposed by Black radicals, including those fighting for independence from colonial rule, who viewed racism as structural, or institutional. It's notable that in the quote I shared from Deborah Lipstadt earlier, she talked of the racism of ‘there goes the neighbourhood’, an account implicitly based on the prejudices of white Americans during Great Migration, where African Americans migrated en masse to the Northern Cities of the US, rather than focussing on the disenfranchisement and segregation of the Jim Crow south, which drove that migration. Her focus located racism in the individual prejudices of Northerners rather than the structural racism of the South. This division between prejudices and structures set the scene for the divides we see today, including the perception that anti-semitism is essentially prejudice whilst Afriphobia is bona fide racism.
I suggest that the move to frame antisemitism and racism as personal prejudice was mistaken and should be reversed. For most of its history, anti-Judaism and antisemitism was structural racism, and it would be difficult to describe the Nazi persecution of Jews in any other terms. Anti-antisemitism should follow the lead of Black radicals who argued that the essence of racism is not in the prejudices, stereotypes and attitudes held by individual members of the in-group but rather the oppressive practices carried out by state bodies, like the police, the courts and immigration services, or by powerful private ones like private clubs and housing associations. Despite important differences, both Blacks and Jews continued to suffer discrimination and adverse treatment in the immediate post-war years on both sides of the Atlantic, such as in private clubs, and both benefitted from the provisions of the Race Relations Act. To the extent that the situation since then has changed, and structural antisemitism and Afriphobia is less present in our society, we should not abuse the history of these racisms by claiming they are. Instead, we should use new terminology to discuss whatever concerns we may have about language and prejudice in the contemporary world.
[1] I have received some criticism of this argument, and I accept that it may be too stark. Of course, there were a panoply of false claims and falsehoods made about Jews in the medieval and early modern periods; while perhaps some of these might be framed as proto-conspiracies, I think they were substantially different to notions of Jewish conspiracy that emerged in the 19th century. The distinction is in the scale of the claim; the idea that Jews were not only engaged in ‘satanic’ acts but were actively attempting to control all of society and the world is, I would claim, a modern creation.