NEWS about a film called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America has been circulating on social media under the banner of a “banned” documentary. The framing is wrong, and it matters that it is wrong.
The facts are modest. The Film and Publication Board issued a “Refused Classification” ruling on the film this week, and the distributor was asked to remove it from all platforms in South Africa. The process began with an application by the South African Jewish Board of Deputies, made two years ago. This was a regulator applying an existing statute through its ordinary procedure. No new law was passed and no minister issued a decree. The Films and Publications Act of 1996 requires distributors to submit material for classification, and a refused classification merely means it cannot be lawfully distributed or exhibited.
In other words, don’t expect to see this travesty in local cinemas or on Netflix any time soon.
The Confusing title
First off, the many labels bandied about here invite confusion. The so-called ‘Hebrew Israelite movement’ is not Judaism as such, nor are its adherents black Jews of which there are many, and thus the sect’s followers are not considered part of the Jewish community. According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) the film sets out to “prove” the minority ‘Black Hebrew Israelite belief’ that all Black people are the true descendants of the biblical Israelites. Its core claim is therefore that actual Jews are impostors.
The film itself is not a neutral “alternative history.” The ADL notes it includes purported, seemingly fabricated quotes from Hitler. It trades in Holocaust denial and in the oldest antisemitic tropes, and it dresses them up as suppressed knowledge.
The Banning Narrative is one of the Film’s own devices.
The film trades on the theme of knowledge suppression and online petitions go so far as claiming to defend against the “halt the flow of knowledge” urging readers to refuse to be “unlawfully controlled” in matters of “epistemic empowerment.
Consider the word “banning.” In South Africa, that word has a history. The apartheid Publications Control Board once studied about 1,300 films a year, often frame by frame, to protect a racial order from ideas. Invoking that history to describe a post-1994 classification decision borrows moral authority from the victims of real censorship, some of the many titles that I have worked for were all subject of banning orders at one time or another.
Worse, claiming the FPB classification is a ‘banning’ implies that the Constitutional order we built is just apartheid with a new letterhead, which shows some contempt for the laws we fought for, and double standards, if you one of the many armchair advocates only railing against classification when it suits you, or concerned about suppression of information but too timid to stand up when it comes to my own saga involving Jazz history?
This is not a free speech issue
This is not a free speech question in the way many social media pundits are reacting. Section 16 of the Constitution protects freedom of expression, but it excludes advocacy of hatred that incites harm. The Board’s decision sits well inside that framework, and it can be appealed. Those who object have a lawful route through the Review Board, now the Appeal Tribunal.
If anything such persons demonstrate a form of epistemic antisemitism. They recast an antisemitic text as persecuted truth, by implication, casting the Jewish community (black and white), and here the SAJBD, as a ‘shadowy power suppressing knowledge’.
By epistemic antisemitism I mean the strategy of attacking Jews’ standing as knowers of their own history. It does this in two moves. First, it casts doubt on the documented record of persecution. Second, it recasts those who defend that record as censors suppressing a hidden truth. The target is not only a community’s reputation but its ability to be believed about what was done to it.
The concept borrows from the philosopher Miranda Fricker’s work on epistemic injustice, the wrong done to people in their capacity as knowers. Fricker describes how prejudice acts to make testimony appear less credible. Here the process is deliberate: the aim is to repackage the testimony and evidence of the Holocaust as suspect or doubtful, in the same manner that Flat Earth pundits prey on those with limited knowledge of physics by letting off crackers.
That is what this film does — manufactured “evidence” is used to challenge a history that is among the best documented of the twentieth century. Its right up there with the infamous “Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ which turned out to be a forgery of an earlier conspiracy document about Napoleon Bonaparte.
None of this means every classification decision is beyond criticism. Regulators err, and South Africans are right to watch the FPB’s reach, especially online. But the proper critique is of process, proportionality and appeal rights, not a false claim of lawlessness. People who want to argue the film should be classified differently can make that case to the Review Board, and the argument can be tested on the evidence.