[captain_shane]

(08-09-2018 04:18 PM)redonion Wrote:  

The Jews need to go.

Such a wonderful group of people aren't they?

From Vox:

In defense of Sarah Jeong
Why Andrew Sullivan and the conservative media are wrong to call the New York Times’s latest hire “racist” for attacking white people.

Quote:

In his column, Sullivan challenges me, specifically, to explain how I would feel if Jeong were tweeting about Jews rather than whites. “Would Beauchamp, I wonder, feel the same way if anti-racists talked about Jews in the same manner Jeong talks about whites? Aren’t Jews included in the category of whites?” he asks.

The example, I assume, is chosen deliberately: Andrew knows I’m Jewish and sensitive to the real problem of anti-Semitism on the left. So this seems like it should be a hard example for me, as a Jeong defender. But it’s not at all. In fact, it makes the distinction between what Jeong is doing even stronger.

First of all, not all Jews are white. Second, even for those Jews who are, our inclusion in the category of whiteness is historically contingent. For the modern alt-right — the people going after Jeong — Jews don’t actually count as white. Leading alt-right thinker Richard Spencer has said that in his ideal world, Jews would be expelled from the United States.

Jews are not marginalized in the exact same way that other minority groups are — on average, Jews are wealthier while black people are poorer — but there is deep-seated anti-Semitism in the United States and (even more so) in other Western countries. When you talk about “Jews” as a group, you aren’t just talking about a specific kind of white person; you’re talking about a historically marginalized group, one that has experienced the consequences of actual eliminationist rhetoric firsthand.

And this is what the conservative critiques of Jeong — even the good-faith ones, like Sullivan’s and French’s — miss entirely. When you talk about race and identity, the context in which you’re operating is absolutely inescapable. The sentence “white people run America” may use most of the same words as “Jews run America,” but the former is mostly true while the latter is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Historical structures of oppression, along race and other identity lines, shape the way Americans see the world deeply and profoundly. Everything that’s said about minority groups is interpreted through the weight of these expectations. One study found that children start thinking in racist terms when they’re about 8 years old. It’s absurd to pretend, given centuries of racialized oppression, that the phrases “white people” and “black people” can be swapped in a sentence without profoundly changing the meaning.

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