By Paul M
What a week it’s been on the cutting edge of contemporary anti-racism.
First, we had the solemn announcement by Amnesty International that, after careful research, they have discovered that Israel has been an apartheid state since its birth on May 14, 1948. Think about that: By the time Hendrick Verwoerd finally saw his comrades set up shop in South Africa that June, the Yidden had already nailed their mezuzah to the door. I feel I ought to be proud of such enterprise and initiative, except why did we have to wait so long to get the credit? Wouldn’t you think everyone would have noticed sixty years ago when apartheid was all the rage, so to speak, and nobody had to invent new definitions? Well you have to start somewhere, as someone once said, and against logic and custom they started with the Afrikaners, but finally we Jews are getting the recognition we deserve.
Before you could properly savor this, we had Whoopi-gate. I suppose if you seek political wisdom from a comedian you shouldn’t be surprised when what you get seems like some sort of joke. Whoopi couldn’t see the racism in the Holocaust because it was just white people and other white people “fighting each other.” I could almost feel sorry for her. She comes across, more than anything, as not very bright. Even after three attempts she failed to give much indication that she got it. The main problem, it seemed, was that she was misunderstood.
The latest item, last time I checked, is the least remarked but the most emblematic. The Anti-Defamation League, a venerable Jewish organization that tackles antisemitism and all other forms of hate, updated its definition of racism to leave out antisemitism and most other forms of hate. They did it a couple of years ago, but so quietly that people are just now noticing. This is the original version:
“The belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another, that a person’s social and moral traits are predetermined by his or her inborn biological characteristics.”
As succinct, accurate and clear a definition as you could want. They replaced it with this:
“The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
Perhaps that seemed unclear, because they followed it with a definition of systemic racism:
“A combination of systems, institutions and factors that advantage white people and for people of color, cause widespread harm and disadvantages in access and opportunity. One person or even one group of people did not create systemic racism, rather it: (1) is grounded in the history of our laws and institutions which were created on a foundation of white supremacy;* (2) exists in the institutions and policies that advantage white people and disadvantage people of color; and (3) takes places [sic] in interpersonal communication and behavior (e.g., slurs, bullying, offensive language) that maintains and supports systemic inequities and systemic racism.”
Boiled down to something like intelligibility it doesn’t seem to be saying anything different than the racism definition, just in more words, but it does add an asterisk to let you know that white supremacy doesn’t mean what you thought it did either:
* In the above definition, the term “white supremacy” refers to the systematic marginalization or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges people who identify as white. It does not refer to extremist ideologies which believe that white people are genetically or culturally superior to non-whites and/or that white people should live in a whites-only society.
So now we’ve been told three times that black people are oppressed by social constructs created by white people, but at least we have a choice of names to use.
When this was finally exposed to the light of day, and especially once people started pointing out that under the ADL’s racism definition Whoopi was right and Adolph didn’t qualify, they quietly changed it again. Currently it says:
“Racism occurs when individuals or institutions show more favorable evaluation or treatment of an individual or group based on race or ethnicity.”
Systemic racism and white supremacy, in case you were worried, are still white people oppressing people of color.
For the life of me I couldn’t see why the ADL wouldn’t simply put back its original, natural definition. Who, when they think of racism, thinks of racial favoritism rather than abuse? Even last week’s version, now memory-holed, was centered around marginalization and oppression. Why the need now to strain for something so contrived? The ADL’s CEO helpfully offers some insight into their thinking. He explains that they’ve chosen this wording to allow for the possibility of such things as “German racism against the Jews, Greeks or Turks.” Wait—didn’t the original definition do that? Well yes it did, but it also admitted the possibility that the Turkish minority in Germany might be racist against the Greek one. Or that some black people in America might go after Jews or Asians … and at this point earsplitting alarms must have gone off for the good, modern anti-racists of the ADL. So they stepped back from the abyss and tortured into existence a definition that does, basically, what the last one did but without using the words “white” or “people of color”. Racism is only what majorities do to minorities.
Believe it or not, I think there’s some good news in all this. It’s possible that Whoopi Goldberg’s moral myopia is all her own, but it’s absolutely consistent with the laws of present-day anti-racism as showcased by the ADL, it’s a public demonstration of where embracing such lunacy leads you and it’s been put out there for all the world to see. Put out there, I should add, in front of a very large audience of people who will mostly not be academics or on the frontlines of the cultural revolution and who probably have a keen nose for intellectual sophistry or, as they might say, bullshit.
Meanwhile, Amnesty & the ADL are both showing something else significant: They know their own weakness. Amnesty had its report ready to go for some time but tried to embargo its release until Holocaust Remembrance Day was safely past. Why do that if they were confident that their case was unassailable, why not just publish it when it was done? Because they’re trying to sell the idea that Israel was conceived from the start out of racism and should be dismantled, and it’s a harder sell if people immediately afterward get a reminder of what life was like for Jews without self-determination. The ADL, for its part, has displayed how aware it is of public distrust of the current re-engineering of morality. It re-made the meaning of racism in the dark, without fanfare. Now, when people are showing how inadequate it is, they’re scrambling to re-re-make it but, as we’ve seen, they’re simultaneously trying to keep the essence of the old, unfit one and obscure the fact that they are. That too is not a sign of confidence.
The achilles heel of the new racial puritanism is that it has chosen to take the shortcut. It’s not trying to persuade but to bully. It has shown it can spread through academia and much of the media, but even there the penetration consists of some true believers, some opportunists and a thick slice of people just trying to keep their heads below the parapet. Social bullying stops when some threshold number of people refuse to be bullied. After that it’s The Emperor’s New Clothes all over again. The further into enemy territory the social justice warriors push, the thinner you can see their supply lines getting. The breaking point won’t be the academics and artists trying to keep their jobs, status and social circles, but the daytime television watchers who at some point will say “I’m not buying this and you can’t make me.” Because without the equivalent of a Religious Police, which our moral authoritarians do not have, they can’t.
