Jamie Foxx is Being Smeared, & It's Racist
Calling Jamie Foxx an anti-Semite is anti-Black racism, period.
(Academy Award and Grammy Award winner Jamie Foxx)
Jamie Foxx, one of the most skilled Hollywood entertainers of our lifetime and a 55-year-old man who has recently gone through some serious health scares took to social media recently to post about a personal betrayal he says he recently suffered. “They killed this dude name Jesus…what do you think they’ll do to you???! #fakefriends #fakelove”,” he wrote.
Before long fellow stars like Jennifer Aniston began publicly accusing Foxx of being anti-semitic because of the post. Foxx took the post down in short order and issued a public apology and clarification that his post was not, in fact, deeply theological in nature and referencing the anti-Jewish claim of deicide but actually about…a fake friend of his.
“I want to apologize to the Jewish community and everyone who was offended by my post,” a statement from Foxx read. “I now know my choice of words [has] caused offense and I’m sorry. That was never my intent…To clarify, I was betrayed by a fake friend and that’s what I meant with ‘they’ not anything more.”
Unless I’m mistaken, Jamie Foxx has never before been associated with nor said antisemitic things in his three decades of being world-famous. He is, however, steeped in R&B and hip hop culture, including having several R&B albums of his own. Speaking broadly but accurately, the term “fake friends” is constantly used in literal ways in popular American Black cultures, including the musical subcultures of R&B and Rap. You find no shortage of usages of that phrase and concept in many songs, over the years, having nothing to do with our Jewish brothers and sisters.
People don’t typically wait to become bigots in their mid-50’s and if Foxx held and was so eager to publicly share anti-semitic beliefs, it would seem strange that it took him three decades in the public eye to do so.
The point is that there is no specific reason to believe that the general pronoun “they” Foxx used was in reference to Jewish people and zero contextual reason to not take Foxx’s word that he’s using the term “fake friends” and the Christian trope of even a blameless Jesus of tradition able to inspire ire and betrayal from Judas-like “fake friends.” It’s a common phrase in Black churches not used in even veiled reference to Jewish people.
Unless his accusers have some additional context or evidence they’d like to reveal calling Foxx antisemitic for posting about a friend backstabbing him is baseless. It’s also racist.
Only people utterly ignorant of or disinterested in explicating Black American culture would have you believe that antisemitism is at play when a Black man who has never before been publicly accused of antisemitism uses a commonly used phrase from Black American culture like “fake friends” in reference to how Jesus was betrayed by Judas, his friend, according to tradition. The problem might be that, to many, all Black men look alike, and that there’s a myth that Black people somehow have a history of oppressing Jewish people of European-descent.
Of course, the two identities - “Black” and “Jewish” - are not mutually exclusive. There exist many Black Jewish people in the world, and those who find themselves in Palestine often face horrendous abuse from the Jewish ethno-state of Israel. There are American Black Jewish people as well. Those interested in catching Foxx up in a PR lynching don’t speak of such pertinent things any more than they might bring up the prevalence of the decidedly unbigoted usage of “fake friends” in Black American parlance.
Calling Jamie Foxx an anti-Semite is anti-Black racism, period. Black people aren’t oppressing White Jewish people.
Contrary to some disturbing conventional wisdom that would have us believe the myth that Black Americans have an historical collective animus against White Jewish people that they’ve long acted on in a systematic way, Black Americans as a group-class have no structural power to oppress White Jewish people. Foxx also isn’t Kanye West or Louis Farrakhan, both of whom have infamously targeted Jewish people by name with individual bigotry.
There simply is not, to my knowledge, any specific context warranting this smear against Foxx. If White people want to feel persecuted by Black people, harass them more than they already have with their structural power and privilege, and make sweeping generalizations about them, implicitly, and reveal their absolute ignorance of Black American culture, they should just say so.