The Anti-Semitism We See Today Can be Traced to the ‘Anti-Racist’ Left

The Anti-Semitism We See Today Can be Traced to the ‘Anti-Racist’ Left

The anti-Semitism we see on college campuses and other places did not appear overnight. It’s a result of the left’s embrace of ‘anti-racism’ and social justice policies.

Barton Swaim writes at the Wall Street Journal:

How ‘Antiracism’ Becomes Antisemitism

In the 2010s an assemblage of radical writers—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Robin DiAngelo, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ibram X. Kendi prominent among them—became celebrities by alleging that American society had been a racist project from its earliest days. Theirs were more elaborate versions of claims by ’60s radicals that “Amerikkka” had been a source of oppression since its founding; the difference was these weren’t hippie outcasts but tenured professors and award-winning writers, fawned on by journalists too dim to realize the radicals were calling them racist monsters. In a 2014 essay for the Atlantic, Mr. Coates made the case for racial reparations—a policy premised on the idea of punishing people for sins they hadn’t committed. He reproached whites for thinking that “if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.” Well-intended, deliberately nonracist white Americans, in Mr. Coates’s analogy, are at once murderers and idiots.

Then, in May 2020, the consequences of these twisted ideas spilled into the open. The death of George Floyd under the knee of a white police officer, recorded in a harrowing nine-minute video, shoved American liberals’ failure on race into their faces. But progressives, having by that point sequestered themselves in their homes in a terrified and ultimately vain effort to escape Covid-19, were in no mood for self-criticism. There would be no rethinking the premises of the Great Society. Otherwise-sane people burst into the streets proclaiming the truism that “black lives matter” and denouncing the evils of “systemic racism.”

With this latter term, the effort to double down on the logic of the Great Society reached its ludicrous conclusion. Racism, if it’s systemic, infects everything. You can deplore it, but if you’re part of the system, you’re perpetuating it. Everything is racist. The term was, in many ways, logically congruous with the loose accusation of “racism” to which Americans have long been familiar. To earn the “ist” suffix, you must at some level cultivate, or at least be conscious of, the thing named as an “ism.” You can’t be a royalist if you dislike the monarchy, or a nationalist if you’re indifferent to the nation. A communist cares about the commune or community and has a long list of reasons for rejecting individualism. A Buddhist cares about the Buddha, and an atheist can’t love God. But in the modern progressive worldview, you can be a racist while abominating racism. You may think a person’s race says nothing about his character or competence, and still be a racist.

So everybody’s a racist. Or everybody other than the people spreading resentment by the “systemic racism” lie.

The only thing to do is destroy the entire “racist” system. Of course, America’s progressive VIPs were never going to tear down the system that had given them status, privilege and income. What the George Floyd protests mainly accomplished was to make the protesters a little more comfortable with hatred of Bad People. In 2020 it was the cops, especially white cops. But hatreds can expand.

At each stage of this ugly evolution, some substantial minority of left-wing commentators and politicians became more comfortable with what looked and sounded like straight-up racial bigotry. That the target of their hatred was white people made their rhetoric and behavior appear harmless. But it wasn’t harmless, as anybody might have foreseen.

For several years a variety of academics and writers had argued that Jews are “white” or “functionally white” or “white passing.” “White,” in this usage, has nothing to do with national or religious identity or genetic characteristics. It signifies allegedly unjust privilege and legacies of oppression. Calling Jews “white” was a way of depriving them of any cover as a racial minority and classifying them with persecutors and exploiters.

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