“A Jew ain’t northin’ but a white man.”—-The African Poet.

This line from a poem offered as part of the introduction to a Black History Month lecture sticks in my mind while all its other lines faded away. This ‘African Poet’ from Brooklyn set the tone for the lecture with since it reflected a unifying them. In short, Dr. John Henrik Clarke, professor emeritus of Hunter College made it clear that Whites were no damn good and the Jews were no less white, and no less nasty.

When I got up to leave at the lecture’s end I discovered that I wasn’t the only white member of the audience. Norman P, and Jerome S., from the Holocaust Studies Center, were seated back by the exit looking pretty glum. No wonder. The Center had contributed a couple of thousand dollars toward an anti-Semitic lecturer’s fee. Apparently they had missed the July 1992 Op-Ed column in the “New York Times” by Henry Louis Gates Jr. entitled “Black Demagogues and Pseudo-Scholars.”

Norman and Jerry must have thought they were making a friendly multicultural gesture to the Middlesex County College Afrocentric faction by helping to pay the way for a man that Gates calls “the great paterfamilias of the Afrocentric movement.” They presumably had not heard Clarke’s recent attack on multiculturalism as the product of the ‘Jewish educational Mafia.’ Nor had they figured out that the Afrocentrics dislike the Jews just because of, and not despite, their historical association with the American desegregation effort.

Readers who pay attention to national news and have good memories will remember Professor Gates as the Harvard professor and friend of President Obama who had a 2009 encounter with a Cambridge policeman that he interpreted as a racist attack. The president, after joining the outcry, later arranged a conciliatory “beer summit” for the professor and policeman.

John Henrik Clarke does not share Obama’s fondness for Gates, whom he characterizes as a “Black Conservative,” i.e., “a crawling dog…one of the frustrated slaves crawling back to the plantation…” The paterfamilias died in 1998, so we don’t have his first-hand evaluation of Barack Obama, but I’m guessing that he’d number the president among the “Black conservative crawling dogs.” Not that this matters, the multicultural whim-wham seems to exist in a world apart from ordinary criticism and evaluation.

I paused after the lecture to listen to the question and answer session that followed. A Puerto Rican student asked Clarke about the prospects of a united Black-Hispanic front against the ghastly White race. The old man briskly replied that “as far as I’m concerned a Puerto Rican ain’t nothing but a pseudo-White man.” This was an odd reply from Hunter College’s Professor of Black and Puerto Rican Studies, but not far out of line from the rest of his babble

I thought about this pseudo-scholar and the ‘African Poet’ while reading an book review in the June issue of “Commentary,” a monthly founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 to cover politics, Judaism, social and cultural issues. The book, by a professor at DePaul University College of Law, is entitled “The Myth of the Cultural Jews: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition.” According to the reviewer it makes two arguments:“ first, that “Jewish culture produces Jewish law,” and second, that “cultural Judaism absent any connection to Jewish law is an impossibility.”.

The subject is interesting and the arguments fairly complex but the thing that connects the book and the bigot is the question of just how distinct the Jews are from the rest of the White race. “Commentary” magazine had published well over a thousand articles predicated on the assumption that the Jews in general and American Jews in particular have distinctive cultural traits. This sort of runs into the multicultural assumption that we are all “under house arrest inside our own skin.”

Putting it more deliberately, the multicultural assumption is that Whites are all the same and there are no important differences arising from Lithuanian, German, Jewish, Serbian, Greek, Italian, Swedish, or any other cultural backgrounds.

The belief that skin color reveals all that needs to be known about your culture and, therefore, your character does not fit with Martin Luther King’s famous line: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

It’s up to the multicultural enthusiasts to admit that there’s a conflict here and explain how to resolve it. Those enthusiasts who dismiss the racist rants of Afrocentrists have the responsibility of explicitly repudiating them.