What do we do with Desmond Tutu?
How do we grapple with the Antisemitism of a human rights leader?
On 26 December 2021, South African anti-Apartheid leader Desmond Tutu passed away at the age of 90. Tutu was ordained in 1960, awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, and served as the Anglican Archbishop of Southern Africa from 1986 to 1996. As the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Tutu had led the Black South African struggle against Apartheid alongside leaders such as Nelson Mandela. He spoke out against the dehumanization of oppression, and in the early 1990s after Apartheid ended - worked to end the violence between Black and White South Africans as the nation rebuilt itself. In addition to all of his achievements in the fight against oppression under South African Apartheid, Tutu was also a confident opponent of Israel whose rhetoric, at times, flirted with Holocaust denial.
As his death is mourned worldwide, we are left with the question: what to do with Desmond Tutu? This question comes up time and again when dealing with the great men - and women - of history.
Historical figures rarely live up to our present-day sense of morality or ethics. Wherever you look, from Catherine the Great to George Washington to Winston Churchill, everyone was at least a little racist and Antisemitic. While there is a present movement to reject figures such as these for their failure to align with our modern sense of right and wrong, we have far more flexibility on how we deal with these individuals. We can place the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Pablo Picasso, and Edgar Degas within their historical context and brush off some of their behaviour as being within the norm for their time. After all, they play Wagner in Israel.
The problem arises with what we do with our more recent examples of high-achieving, high-impact individuals who simultaneously espouse problematic views. What do we do with the likes of Mel Gibson, Alice Walker, and Desmond Tutu? What do we do with the people alive today, in an era where we know that these views are wrong, and where - at least in the case of Antisemitism - we have 75 years of a retrospective on the Holocaust to confirm this knowledge? We somewhat cancelled Mel Gibson, or at the very least have significantly reduced the number and quality of roles offered to him. Alice Walker continues to be celebrated for The Colour Purple with no mention beyond the Jewish community of the blatantly Antisemitic poems featured on her website. But Tutu’s contributions are far more significant and much more difficult to work around. We can just not watch Lethal Weapons or not teach a few books and be done with the matter. Just like we need to continue teaching about the Holocaust, we need to talk about South African apartheid.
The complicated and straightforward answer to all of this is that people are complex. We are - every one of us - multifaceted. And not every one of those facets reveals a pretty picture. For all of the good we do - and some of us do an awful lot of it - we still hold our biases and prejudices. For most of us, this reality is merely an internal dialogue that we struggle with in our lifetimes. For some, this will be part of the public sphere as it grapples with recording our legacy.
Tutu’s public legacy was sealed long along, and his unrelenting support of the BDS movement and comments about Israeli Apartheid are an all but non-existent part of it. It is unclear to me how someone who lived under South African Apartheid, where a White minority exerted legislated oppression over a Black majority, can look at Israel, where a Jewish majority grants equal rights to Arab-Israeli citizens, and view these as the same. But I’m going to leave that one to the experts.
As much it hurts, as a proud Jewish person, to say this, perhaps it is crucial that Tutu’s Antisemitism is kept separate from his legacy of fighting against Apartheid. There is, perhaps, good reason to look at these two parts of Tutu’s life separately. This does not mean that Tutu’s Antisemitism should not be discussed or recognized. Quite the contrary. Hasn’t every superhero comic and movie taught us that all heroes have flaws?
There has been a push on Jewish Twitter to reject Tutu entirely because of his Antisemitism. But I have a Degas print in my bedroom, and it won’t be coming down any time soon. People are complex, and we can recognize Tutu for what he was - a complicated person. We can talk about his role in ending the oppression of Black South Africans, but also acknowledge that his opposition to the existence of the only Jewish state continued into the weeks before his death when he urged Miss South Africa to refrain from competing in the Miss Universe pageant for the sole reason that it was being held in Eilat, Israel.
Acknowledinging Tutu’s Antisemitism should not take away from the work he did in South Africa - it’s not related to what he was fighting for there or what was accomplished. It also does not mean he is not deserving of public mourning, including by Jewish people. In the long-history of the fight against oppression, the Jewish community has always stood with the Tutu’s of the world, even when they have not stood with us. Conversations about Tutu and his legacy should recognize that he was a complicated person, and that because of that, not every stance he took was the right one.
There is no obvious answer to what we do with Desmond Tutu, but I can say with some confidence that ignoring him or his Antisemitism, is not it.