Emphasizing differences
Here’s what really happened: On November 21, Kayum Ahmed, a South African and an adjunct member of the Columbia University Law School faculty, spoke at Fieldston about apartheid. In the Q & A, which was recorded on video, in response to a student’s question, he said that “xenophobic attacks are a shameful part of South African history, but in some ways it reflects the fluidity between those who are victims becoming perpetrators,” and that he uses the same example in talking about the Holocaust. “Jews who suffered in the Holocaust and established the State of Israel,” he told them, “today perpetuate violences against Palestinians that are unthinkable.”*
If a speaker had made comments such as these about any historically marginalized group in the U.S. other than Jewish people, it is hard to believe that an official from the school wouldn’t have condemned it long before the students left the room. Apologies would have flooded parents’ in-boxes. Counselors would have been on hand.**
I can think of another historically marginalized group that is an exception in that way. Women. (The author is a woman – Pamela Paresky PhD.)
I suppose it can happen to any (or almost any) historically marginalized group. People who are dominant in one context can be marginalized in another, and vice versa. That’s part of what “intersectionalism” is about.
To be clear, I do not have a problem with schools allowing speakers to say things like this in front of students. I think it’s important for students to see that words do not equal violence, to learn about antisemitic conspiracy theories, and to see firsthand that antisemites don’t all announce their bigotry by looking like Nazis or a skinheads. If a school would allow similar ideas about any other group to be shared without condemnation, then allowing it to be said about Jews would not be a marker of antisemitic undercurrents at the school. But of course, they wouldn’t. And that’s the insidious nature of antisemitism. It’s the form of bigotry often embraced by those who claim to be enemies of bigotry and advocates of social justice.
But so is “TERF” hatred. I think the two are at least matched.
Long before this incident, some Jewish parents expressed concern about the school’s mandatory “conversations about race” program for all third, fourth, and fifth graders. Despite research indicating that friendships between children from different backgrounds reliably diminish bias and discrimination, and that emphasizing differences is counterproductive to those ends, the curriculum requires each child to self-identify as part of a segregated, racial “affinity group.”
The mutually exclusive options are African American/Black; Asian or Pacific Islander; Latino; Multiracial; White; and Not Sure. Each child must pick one. “Jewish” is not among the identities from which children can choose.
God, what a muddle. “Asian” is geographic; “White” is racial; “Latino” is…what? Geographic, linguistic, racial, what? Is a Mayan the same as a Guatemalan of all-European descent? And then, what about the Irish? What about Italians? Eastern Europeans? The US slices and dices its prejudices and belittlings very fine.
Regardless of whether their ethnic backgrounds happen to include one of the non-white available categories, Jewish children (age 8 to 11) are forced to “self-identify” (a misnomer) as one of the available “affinity groups” even if their Jewishness is the more salient aspect of their identity. Jewish children who do not fit any of the non-white racial categories are required to choose “white” or “not sure” (which was renamed the “general discussion” group).
They weren’t all that “white” in Warsaw in 1942.
Except, of course, the speaker was actually sharing that idea about his own “group”, black South Africans who are participating in xenophobic violence, and then making a comparison to Israeli politics. It’s a fact that in the modern world, we have relatively few cases of a group that has been historically oppressed, or even suffering from current oppression in some parts of the world, who has also risen to a position of power in another part. So there really aren’t many good examples to draw of the danger. (The other legitimate–and arguably preeminent- example, of course, would be the switch from pre- to post-Constantinian Rome, and the rise of Christianity from ‘being fed to the lions’ to ‘let’s write all the laws and make sure everyone else’s life sucks’, but it lacks the relative recency of the pre-oppressor condition, as well as being political suicide.in the U.S.)
Israel does have heavy issues with oppression within their borders, even as they also face persecution from without; this oppression isn’t because they’re Jewish, but because they have a hierarchical power structure, and one that is currently dominated by conservatives–a recipe for oppression.
And yes, the “TERF” BS appropriates a lot of that language, just like it appropriates language about LGB rights and women’s rights; this misappropriation doesn’t invalidate those arguments being used in an appropriate context.
But identifying all critiques of Israeli policies as de facto anti-Semitism is a trick Netanyahu’s been getting away with for decades, and shouldn’t be tolerated unless it can be backed up by legitimate examples.
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All that said, yes, the school obviously has a hot mess on its hands in how it talks about race. That list of racial identities is, as you note, horribly designed. (Though your question about Guatamalan vs. Mayan reminded me of the time a very inebriated gent on the subway explained to me, at length, that he wasn’t Mexican, he was Aztec, which meant he was descended from warriors, whereas “Mexicans” were descended from the Spanish invaders who were thieves and cowardly murderers. So, yes, we do chop those distinctions up very finely.)
Your subway acquaintance had a point, however muddled by booze and wishful thinking. In Mexico, Central America, and South America the indigenous people are looked down on. The caste system was much like that in the American South: people of European descent above mestizos above Indians.
Most white people in the US are unaware of this and lump all these people together as “Latinos” (or, god help us, “Latinxs”), which I imagine can get pretty annoying for the Indians (and those of mixed blood who identify–sorry but you know what I mean–as Indian).
Also, Muslims may be oppressors in Iran and Saudi Arabia, but they are oppressed in Myanmar and Xinjiang.
My mother always referred to us as Heinz 57 – though as Irish/Swedish/English/German, we fit well into that white category, which still is too big and broad a category…it’s race, but it includes a vary disparate range of people. For instance, my Irish ancestors may well have been oppressed in this country by my English ancestors, and my Irish grandmother had nothing but contempt for the Swedish, even though she married one.
We really are mixed up, and it’s time we all recognize that we are all human and quit oppressing each other.
Yes, that was my point with “What about the Irish?” They were treated with what amounted to racism in the 19th century.
Same can be said of the Italians, and even, for a brief period of American history, the Germans. That said, there’s a key difference there, in that those groups acquired dominance by melding largely indistinguishably with the oppressor group (WASPs). So those examples don’t really illuminate the speaker’s point as well.
Freemage:
That may well be the case. But different individuals were involved in each generation under consideration. I am not sure that a person who grows up oppressed will make such a good oppressor as an adult. History knows of course, many peoples and groups who were oppressed in one generation and who went on in subsequent generations to become oppressors in their own right.
The Puritans of New England spring to mind, along with such as the minions of Papa Doc in Haiti. Successive generations also of English and Scots peasant-farmers, whose forebears had been ‘cleared off’ the common lands went on to themselves ‘clear off’ the original inhabitants from the lands they migrated into, particularly in America and Australia-NZ in the 18th C and after.
They had been relying on those lands for their sustenance, but were forced off by the Enclosure movements beginning in the 1600s that drove the Industrial Revolution in Britain in tandem with technological change,
Kayum Ahmed is not a Black South African.
And Israel was targeted with explicit genocidal intent by every neighboring state, before it HAD any track record of ‘internal oppression.’
“And Israel was targeted with explicit genocidal intent by every neighboring state, before it HAD any track record of ‘internal oppression'”
Hopefully I’ve misunderstood you but it looks like you’re simultaneously doubting the oppression of Palestinians and making an excuse for it. There’s no need to do either. Plenty of evidence that the Israeli state is oppressing Palestinians (even though it was founded by an oppressed people). And, obviously, the bad behaviour of neighbouring states cannot justify the bad behaviour of the Israeli state.
John the Drunkard:
First off, thank you for correcting me on Ahmed’s ethnicity. I drew a bad assumption from context, and apologize.
Second: I don’t deny the aggressive hostility of Israel’s neighbors, nor the timeline you present; in fact, I referred to the former in the post you were replying to–that was my meaning by saying Israel faces ‘oppression from without’. That their internal oppression is a reaction to that external oppression doesn’t cause the former to cease to fit the definition.