Kilson Challenges BSA Invitation

To the Editors of The Crimson:

I'm writing to say "Hurray" to Jessica Yellin '92 for her courageous letter in The Crimson (February 3) criticizing the Harvard Black Students Association (BSA) for inviting Leonard Jeffries to our campus. I say "Hurry" also to other students--white, Black, Asian, Arab, etc.--who recognize that there are occasions when they must stand up and challenge their peers whose political actions are so morally askew. And this must be done regardless of the recent essentially manipulated anti-Political Correctness posturing among neoconservatives--a posturing based upon grossly exaggerated claims regarding the presence of a left-wing "Politically Correct" takeover of college campuses.

Yellin's critique of an invitation to Jeffries is right on target. There is simply no valid intellectual or pedagogical reason for BSA to bring Jeffries here. While God knows that Black Americans--after a couple of centuries of American slavery and another century-plus of modern racism--have a lot to be angry about and even full of rage, the path of anti-Reason and neurotic Ethnocentrism offered by Jeffries must be unacceptable.

Unacceptable above all because it is without a basis in evidence, in carefully searched and articulated data and experience. So we must consider Jeffries' so-called theory of human groups (classified as Ice People and Sun People) as harebrain, and we must consider as equally harebrain his claim that major responsibility for the Atlantic Slave Trade can be laid at the feet of Jews.

This is the kind of harebrain thinking on Jeffries part that can become the vicious cannonfodder of enormous discord between Jews and Blacks, and the leaders of Black students at Harvard ought to have enough clarity of mind to recognize this and thus to treat Jeffries with the contempt he warrants. Jeffries warrants the same contempt that his harebrain counterpart among those I like to call the "scum segment" of America's New Right--the segment who utter fullfledged idiocy about the non-existence of the Holocaust, cynically placing advertisements to this effect in newspapers and magazines.

Jeffries' charge of Jewish responsibility for the Atlantic Slave Trade is just utter ignorance. While some Jews were into slaving, the Atlantic Slave Trade was overwhelmingly a vile act by Christendom, not by Judaism. And, alas, Jeffries, if he took a moment to read rather than emote, might have added that another major component of the structure of slaving involved African societies themselves, or more precisely not the victimized agrarian African masses but the cynical ritual leadership and chiefly leadership sectors of African societies who manned the scaffolding of slaving--without guns at their backs but with myriad mercantile capitalist resources as incentives--and they did this for a couple hundred of years.

Jews, like the rest of us mortal humans, have done injury in this world, but the Atlantic Slave Trade was not their doing--it was Christendom's season in Hell.

Finally, Jeffries ought to be unacceptable to the leaders of BSA because his actions and thinking are without virtue. His model for a solution to America's racist degradation of Black folks is right out of the fascist handbook for the degradation of the German herrenvolk. It is a neurotically twisted paradigm, appealing to the base needs of injured Black folks for revenge and for a scapegoat, and he chooses as scapegoat one of the longstanding victims of Western Civilization's fascist scapegoating impulse--Jews.

Black students at Harvard and elsewhere must stand up against Jeffries' kind of moral rot...if only because it violates the great moral legacy to Black folks--and to all decent Americans--of Martin Luther King Jr. The way out of America's vicious racist legacy lies down a path very different from that offered by Jeffries.

The path must involve Black/Jewish concord--regardless of the issues in conflict between Blacks and Jews at any given time--and that path must involve mutual respect among Blacks and Jews for each others' historical wounds. Jeffries' presence here violates both of these paths. You dishonor the best in the African American heritage and the memory of King. Martin S. Kilson   Professor of Government