WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT ANTISEMITISM JUSTIN CORY Various iterations of white nationalism—the belief that white people are a singular race, that this race is superior to all others and that they must develop and maintain a white, racial-national identity and ethnostate—have been promulgating and metastasizing both online and in the halls of power for a long time now. From the founding of the American colonies, this nation’s existence has explicitly depended upon the theft of lands through the settler-colonial genocide of Indigenous peoples from sea to shining sea and the expropriation of the forced labor of enslaved Africans. When the scourge of slavery was finally abolished in 1865, the system shifted to relying upon the exploitation of marginalized groups by denying them complete access to the protections of full citizenship while continuing to expand the riches and power of the wealthy. Many brilliant thinkers have deeply analyzed these historical factors and their direct connection to present conditions—the 1619 Project, Roxanne DunbarOrtiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow are a few that you should absolutely read. A wider cultural understanding emerging from the devastating impacts of these intersecting systems of oppression and domination is encouraging. However, it is appalling that it has taken so long for the many voices of the marginalized to reach this critical mass, and in many ways, it has been in reaction to ascendancing white nationalism as it animates the base of the right-wing in the United States. Our culture tends to take very binary or dichotomous perspectives—things are good or evil, black or white, male or female, heterosexual or homosexual—and in doing so, we miss the complexities and nuances so crucial to understanding and evolving beyond our present maladies. This deficit has been especially pronounced when considering antisemitism.
Recently, The View host Whoopie Goldberg said that “the Holocaust isn’t about race. It’s not. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man, that’s what it’s about. These are two groups of white people.” There was a swift backlash that has led to Goldberg being suspended from the show for two weeks, issuing of an apology that seemed to reinforce her original point of the Jewish people not being a race and calls for her to be fired. Her statements in the discussion were predicated upon the recent decision by a Tennessee school board to ban the
There is incontestable evidence of the prevalence of systemic racism, as previously mentioned in this article. Where this conversation gets mired in complexity is in the nature of Goldberg’s statement. She is a Black woman who has posited that race is about the color of one’s skin. This understanding of race is absolutely a component of systemic racism, however, it is not the whole picture. She misses the crucial component that race was constructed differently in Nazi Germany—Jewish and Roma people were racialized as inferior. Further, her remarks erased the fact that there are BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, people of color) who are Jews. For centuries, the Jewish people have been cast as an evil force within European society from the accusations of blood libel—that they sacrificed Christian children—through to the Spanish Inquisition and their subsequent expulsion from many medieval European nations. In 1903, the Russian Czarist police published a now-infamous fabricated document called The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, purporting to be the meeting minutes of a Jewish cabal attempting to seize control of the entire world. The aftermath of damage due to this document has been absolutely inconceivable. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party seized upon it as proof of the threat posed by the Jewish people to the German nation. The Holocaust (also called the Shoah)—the genocidal slaughter of over six million Jewish people—would not have been possible without the systematic denigration and brutalization of Jewish people made possible through antisemitism. The myth of Jewish power was crucial to these atrocities. In it lies another nuanced contradiction, as they were seen as racially inferior while also wielding some sort of Protocols-style power to orchestrate global corruption and domination. It is also important to mention that Holocaust denial has been the contemporary vanguard of antisemitism in both Europe and the U.S. ever since. Prior to the rise of the Nazis in the U.S., Nazi-sympathizer, friend to Hitler and Mussolini and business magnate Henry Ford published half a million copies of The Protocols renamed
The struggle for human rights is intersectional and interconnected.
22
OPINION
Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maus, which recounts the experiences of Holocaust survivors. This move is part of a wider strategy challenging the teaching of what has been termed Critical Race Theory (CRT) by rightwing officials across the U.S. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund defines CRT as “an academic and legal framework that denotes that systemic racism is part of American society—from education and housing to employment and healthcare. Critical Race Theory recognizes that racism is more than the result of individual bias and prejudice. It is embedded in laws, policies and institutions that uphold and reproduce racial inequalities.”
PSU Vanguard • FEBRUARY 9, 2022 • psuvanguard.com
