Walking amid the Million Man March in October 1995, sociologist Jonathan Rieder attracted the attention of a dozen black men on the Capitol Mall. “You’re a Jew, right?” one called to him. “What of it?” answered Rieder.
“Which is worse,” the man asked, “what happened to 6 million Jews or what happened during slavery? Six million or 600 million?”
Rieder replied that he could not rank such enormous suffering, which prompted the man, mindful of Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed Holocaust film Schindler’s List, to cry: “You got your recognition! You got your movie!”
Now, two years later, black Americans have indeed got an equivalent movie from the identical director: the historical drama Amistad, based on the mutiny of African captives aboard a slave ship in 1839.
The film’s release Dec. 12 follows the world premiere of an Amistad opera created by Anthony Davis and Thulani Davis, the composer and librettist also responsible for a biographical opera about Malcolm X.
The two major openings have thrust renewed attention on slavery. Indeed, the artistic focus on the Middle Passage and the centuries of enslavement that followed has brought the very term “black Holocaust” into heightened prominence. The increasing use by African-Americans of a proper noun so closely identified with the Nazi genocide that it does not require the modifying adjective “Jewish” has raised the issue of who, if anyone, owns language, particularly language of moral urgency.
Within the last month, historian Howard Jones, a specialist in the Amistad mutiny who served as a consultant to the film, said that Spielberg viewed the slave trade “as the black Holocaust.” The same phrase has resounded through black culture in the last few years. The database Nexis, which compiles print and broadcast news reports, this month tallied 335 uses of the term “black Holocaust,” 295 of them in the last four years.
Museums, conferences, lectures, books, poems, historical exhibits and Internet Web sites all invoke the words. While groups as varied as Cambodians, Armenians, American Indians, AIDS activists, environmentalists and anti-abortion campaigners also have seized upon the noun “Holocaust,” its appropriation by blacks is the most pervasive and arguably the most complicated of all.
Set against the backdrop of black-Jewish relations, which have veered from alliance in the civil rights era to more recent acrimony, “black Holocaust” has appeared in contexts ranging from the philo-Semitic to the anti-Semitic. Some blacks employ the term in admiration of the Jewish achievement in preserving the memory of the Nazi genocide and thus deriving both communal identity and political power; others wield the phrase, precisely because of its usual association with Jews, as proof that blacks have suffered more.
“There’s a double-edged quality to blacks and Jews identifying with each other,” said Rieder, co-editor of Common Quest: The Magazine of Black-Jewish Relation.
“The comparison can be an act of empathy, of paying homage to the other in the community of the oppressed. But the opposite edge is one of accusation, rebuke. There is a pattern of black appropriation of Jewish terms _ black Holocaust, black Diaspora, Day of Atonement _ and part of the impulse is one-upsmanship.”
If one motive does unite all the uses and users of “black Holocaust,” it is the desire to pierce the American conscience with a word of demonstrated impact.
Prof. James E. Young of the University of Massachusetts, author of Writing and Rewriting the Holocaust, said the earliest use of “holocaust” as a synonym for the extermination of European Jewry comes in an editor’s footnote to a 1938 edition of Sigmund Freud’s collected works: “Alas! As these pages are going to the printer we have been startled by the terrible news that the Nazi holocaust has circled Vienna.”
For the duration of World War II and more than a decade thereafter, Jewish leaders employed the uncapitalized “holocaust” interchangeably with such terms as “Great Disaster” and “shoah,” a Hebrew word meaning “great destruction” that first appeared in Old Testament accounts of the razing of the First and Second Temples. Only with the Second World Congress of Jewish Studies in 1957 did many historians begin using “Holocaust” as a proper noun.
Two years later, Elie Wiesel’s path-breaking concentration-camp memoir Night was published in the United States. Holocaust literature and history grew sufficiently vast by 1968 for the Library of Congress to create a category heading “Holocaust: Jewish, 1939-1945.”
As Jews later shook off their residual shame about the Holocaust to develop an intellectual infrastructure _ museums, memorials, school curricula, endowed professorships _ black Americans were beginning to similarly reckon with slavery.
Roger Wilkins, the civil rights activist and former Justice Department official, has recalled that during his childhood in the 1930s and ’40s, his mother refused to speak of her captive forebears, saying, “We don’t like to clank our chains.”
With the rise of Malcolm X in the early 1960s, however, American blacks found an eloquent exponent of the view that they were African people whose culture had been systematically destroyed by whites.
It took more than a generation after Malcolm X’s 1965 assassination for that belief to frequently express itself with the phrase “Black Holocaust.” The 1980s and early ’90s saw the ascent of the Afrocentricity movement and a black artistic renaissance that produced such works about slavery and its legacy as August Wilson’s cycle of plays and the novels Middle Passage, by Charles Johnson, and Beloved, by Toni Morrison
. Black scholars and artists point to catalytic events in the same period, like the campaign to preserve the African Burial Ground in lower Manhattan and the raising of the wreck of the slave ship Henrietta Marie off Key West.
By the mid-1990s, “Black Holocaust,” or “African-American Holocaust”, was emerging as a proper noun in variety of settings: a Black History Month conference in Fort Lauderdale; an exhibit and subsequent book of slavery documents and artifacts assembled by the Shrine of the Black Madonna, a bookstore and museum in Atlanta, and a documentary about the Tulsa race riot of 1921, in which a neighborhood called Black Wall Street was decimated by white attackers.
“Using the word ‘Holocaust’ allowed black people to make the point that slavery was systemic and intentional, that it was a genocide against a people regarded as inferior beings,” said Davis, the librettist for Amistad, which is being performed by the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
Many Jewish scholars of the Holocaust, however, argue that the Nazi extermination of 6 million Jews stands alone in the spectrum of atrocity.
Specifically, they maintain, the Nazis intended to murder every Jew, while slave traders and masters needed to keep most of their African chattel alive for commercial reasons. At the same time, these scholars insist they are not diminishing the suffering of blacks or any other groups.
“Is cancer better than a heart attack?” said Deborah Dworik, director of the Center for Holocaust Studies at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “All of these are horrible things.”
Such reasoning has not persuaded many blacks, who consider exceptionalism for Jews either insensitive or patronizing. Some argue for black entitlement to the term “Holocaust” as a homage to Jews with whom they share a history of oppression; others think it is the only word to express the enormity of centuries of of slavery in colonial and democratic America.
When the general comparison of tragedies turns to the specifics of body counts, the black-Jewish discussion often grows competitive and rancorous. Historians of the slave trade estimate that 9 million to 13 million black Africans were shipped to the Americas, with about 20 percent dying either during the Middle Passage or shortly thereafter. But some blacks place slavery’s death toll in the tens or even hundreds of millions. As much as the term “Black Holocaust” may unsettle some Jews, Holocaust scholars expect to hear it more frequently.
“Any attempt by any group to keep a monopoly on language is doomed to failure,” said Alan Rosenbaum, a professor of philosophy at Cleveland State University and the editor of the anthology Is The Holocaust Unique?: Perspectives on Comparative Genocide (Westview, 1996). “Because anybody can use any language they want. And the term Holocaust has such power _ as the paradigm case of genocide _ that any group wanting to make a superlative case for its own experience would naturally want to borrow it.”
