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Suffering at the hands of dominant others has been the fate of ethnic and racial minorities throughout the course of human history. No single group thus victimized can claim its maltreatment to be worse than that encountered by another group. The torment of each group has its own grammar. Each pain sings on a different note. Each voice is mute on different topics. Each shame covers the face of history with a different hue of degradation. And, yet, some groups do stand out in their victimization by their fellow human beings. Jews who suffered the Holocaust (and their relatives and offspring) and African Americans who lived through the horror of the Middle Passage and the long nightmare of slavery (and their subsequent generations) constitute two such groups.
Jews were subjected to the greatest calculated, government-sponsored act of man's cruelty to his fellow beings. This was a macabre culmination of centuries of discrimination and exile. Nazi atrocities left profound, pervasive, and protracted impact upon their victims and the generations to follow. A burgeoning literature, documentaries, and interview material seek to document this. The Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. provides a soul-wrenching encounter with what Hitler's lieutenants did to millions of innocent civilians.
African Americans have their own saga of anguish. Brought against their will to this continent, they had their flesh exploited, minds silenced, and souls strangulated for over 350 years by the white people of Europe and this country. Few nations of people have been so consistently harmed and so mercilessly abused on a long term basis. So much so that the world's most proud and prosperous country accorded them a right to express their opinion on public matters some 120 years after its becoming a democracy!
Given their background of pain, one would expect sympathy and cooperation to exist between the two groups. And, indeed there was such a sentiment on both sides during the 1950s. Paul Robeson's