Now is the Time to Protest

THE Black Students Association (BSA), in its most repugnant display of hatred and anti-Semitism since its last speaking invitation to Dorothy Blake Farden (an anthropologist who says that white Europeans are "mutants" created by a being called Yakub), has decided to sponsor City University of New York (CUNY) Professor Leonard Jeffries to speak tonight at Harvard.

Groups ranging from Hillel to Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism (AWARE) will be protesting outside Sanders Theater, where Jeffries will give his lecture.

No doubt the sponsoring organizations will try to portray the massive demonstrations planned as racist and anti-Black. But this self-serving interpretation should be rejected by the Harvard community.

Put simply, the reason people will be outside protesting is that they are offended by Leonard Jeffries. In the course of his tenure at CUNY, he has managed to single out and offend every possible category of people.

Jeffries has said to his students that he is "sick and tired of having the damn Jews shoving the Holocaust down [their] throats."

He says that Italians were the muscle behind the Hollywood conspiracy to denigrate Blacks. He also says that gay men in Europe offered their wives to him in exchange for gay sex.

Even within this community, Jeffries has been extremely offensive. He has charged that DuBois Professor of the Humanities Henry Louis Gates Jr., the chair of Harvard's Afro-American Studies Department, is a "faggot and a punk." This attitude is disgusting and has no reasonable place in an institution like Harvard.

During an interview with me last fall, Jeffries threatened to kill me if I published the racist and anti-Semitic statements he made. Then he had one of his bodyguards confiscate the tapes of the interview he agreed I could make.

These actions should offend us all--no matter what groups or organizations we align ourselves with.

TO PROTEST BIGOTRY, one has to go after the bigots and their sponsors. That is why Jeffries and BSA (which has a track record for sponsoring racists) should be protested.

There is no alternative.

All campus organizations should sever all ties with BSA, as well as with the Black Law Students Association and the DuBois Graduate Society, who are also sponsoring the Jeffries speech. Their invitation shows such insensitivity to the rest of the Harvard community that any other response would be a miscarriage of justice.

If Leonard Jeffries is what BSA and other sponsoring organizations think represents Black culture, then these groups do not represent the true sentiments and judgment of the Black community at Harvard or any other respectable place.

Maintaining relations with these groups would be the equivalent of maintaining relations with the Nazi Party in hopes of creating a working coalition.

Blacks of good will should choose not to associate themselves with these bigoted organizations. This is not a call to protest Blacks but to protest the racist organizations that claim they speak for the Black community.

The poor judgment and inexcusable insensitivity toward other oppressed groups should not be placated by the rest of the community. Hillel must not send mixed messages. If BSA issues an apology and retracts its invitation, there is reason to talk. If not, there is only reason to resist.

The leadership of the Black groups involved counted on Jewish passivity and the fear of other liberal groups of being called racist if they protest BSA's decision to invite Jeffries. But they shouldn't cooperate--they should speak out tonight.

Instead of working with the Harvard community to combat racism and bigotry on campus, BSA invites racists and bigots to speak. That ends our obligation to support their programs.

BSA HAS every constitutional right to invite Jeffries. This is unquestionable. But the rest of the Harvard community has a responsibility to show that bigotry and hatred will not be legitimized by silence.

The grandparents of many Jewish students on this campus were slaughtered in the Holocaust that Jeffries says he is tired of hearing about. The gay community suffers continuous discrimination, but Jeffries says these people are "nasty" products of the European "ice influence."

In the December 2, 1991 edition of The Final Call (the Nation of Islam newspaper that anyone who wants a crash course in anti-Semitism should read), Jeffries says that I "was a planned enemy of his struggle" for printing my interview with him in the What Is To Be Done? Though it wasn't true at the time, I will wear this distinction like a badge of honor.

Jeffries' bigotry includes attacks against all who would dissent from his racist onslaught. When I interviewed him, he made racist, anti-semitic, anti-gay and bigoted statements because, as he noted later, he thought "I was representing the Black community at Harvard." It will be up to this Black community to show Jeffries they are not willing to accept his theories blindly.

Though Jeffries did not know I was Jewish at the time of the interview, he did expect me to write a blanket endorsement for him because I am Black. Jeffries assaulted me and had his bodyguard steal from me when he figured out that wasn't the case. There have been numerous newspaper reports of Blacks being intimidated by his thugs at his school, CUNY. This man ought to be in jail, not at Harvard.

In 1985, Harvard University ceased all official relations with the finals clubs because they refused to adhere to University policy by discriminating against women.

BSA's attempt to debase and intimidate the vast majority of the Harvard community should not go unanswered by the administration or the students.