antisemitism Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

How in-group favoritism prevents our learning from history

I mentioned in another post my discomfort with a professor who was engaged in classic in-group/out-group deflection about Catholic actions. A Catholic, he was trying to show that Catholicism isn’t that bad, isn’t actually responsible for all sorts of actions in which Catholics engaged, and is better than Protestantism. When Catholic secular leaders behaved badly, then they didn’t really count; only official doctrine mattered. When doctrine wasn’t great, and it was Catholic officials who were behaving badly, then only the statements of the Pope counted. When the Pope was the problem, then individuals were the ones who really represented Catholicism. We all do that.

We are drawn to believe that in-group membership both guarantees and signifies our goodness because, no matter how bad we are, we are better than That Out-group. We do so because we like to believe that we’re good people, and we also like the certainty that comes with believing that our in-group membership guarantees that we’re good. Unfortunately, that desire for certainty about our goodness often means we end up giving ourselves and our in-group moral license.

When we are committed to believing that we are good because we are in-group, then we engage in all sorts of “no true Scotsman” and dissociation in order to deflect in-group behavior we don’t want to acknowledge. And this often applies to our own history. But, if we lie about our own history, we can’t learn from it.

Americans lie a lot about slavery, and especially American Protestants. We don’t like to hear that people like us found themselves fully committed to terrible things, like slavery, segregation, genocide, and so on. We tell ourselves that they fully and completely committed to the wrong in-group. But they fully and completely committed to our in-group.

Slavery and segregation were defended as Christian, especially by conservative and moderate Christians, and it was only progressive Christians who criticized those systems. Martin Luther King said that moderate whites failed him—white moderate Protestants are lying when they try to claim him as one of theirs. If you have to lie to make your argument, you have a bad argument.

When I made the post about the Catholic apologist, I thought I’d already posted something I hadn’t.

In the 14th century, there was a massacre of Jews in Brussels. It followed the script of so many massacres of Jews. The most likely explanation is that a priest got into trouble (perhaps debts to Jews) and tried to cover his problems by invoking the antisemitic libel of Jews who wanted to stab a consecrated host. This bigoted massacre, like many, was reframed as a miracle, and it was celebrated as a miracle until 1967.

And, in fact, some Catholics still believe the lie (I recently ran across a person commenting that Jews try to steal consecrated hosts).

When we find the nuances, uncertainties, ambiguities, and complexities of policy argumentation paralyzing, we resort to believing that all we have to do is belong to the good group. We believe that, were everyone in this good group, we would never have injustice, cruelty, bad policies, crime, genocide.

That is so very, very comforting. It’s also a lie.

There is no group that is and has always been right. And so, when confronted with times that members of our good group (our in-group) have done extraordinarily terrible things, we find reasons they weren’t really in-group.

But, if we really want to make good decisions, we need to acknowledge that our group has done terrible things, and then we would have to acknowledge that making good decisions isn’t a question of being in the right group. We can’t be guaranteed that we’re making just decisions just because we’re endorsing the policy of our in-group. We actually have to deliberate those policies, and that means treating the arguments of other groups as we want them to treat our arguments.

So, for Christians, it means that being Christian—even being fully committed to a personal relationship with Christ–doesn’t guarantee we’re endorsing the right policies and doing the right things. But treating others as we want to be treated—that is, refusing to give ourselves and our in-group members moral license–just might get us pretty far in terms of following Christ.

Why did British so many political leaders and media argue for getting along with Hitler as soon as he took power?

In two earlier posts about the British ambassador to Germany, Horace Rumbold, and several despatches he wrote back to the Foreign Office, I pointed out that he correctly understood and predicted Hitler’s goals and actions, and he did so on the basis of public and published statements on the part of Hitler and the Nazis. Anyone fluent in German could have drawn the same conclusions, and anyone not fluent in German just had to have a translator. It’s common for people to assume that Hitler was tolerated by Britain because British political leaders and media were misled about his goals and aims, or engaged in wishful thinking. But, actually, quite a few actively supported him and understood him pretty well. They tolerated (or supported) him because they sympathized with him more than they sympathized with his victims.

I emphasized Rumbold’s report on his May 11, 1933 meeting, and argued that Hitler relied on standard internet asshole moves, like deflection (especially through whaddaboutism), open embrace of an irrational argument, and blue lies. Being an internet asshole means, basically, discourse is about proving your commitment to your group rather than proving your case.

In the last part of his despatch, Rumbold describes Hitler’s reaction when Rumbold pointed out that Nazi persecution of the Jews had alienated a lot of people, just when Germany was beginning to get more sympathy. And the short version of this post is that, as in this meeting, Hitler was open in meetings about his antisemitism—he couldn’t stop himself–, so anyone who met with him had all the evidence they needed to know that he was completely committed to a judenfrei Germany. They just didn’t care.

In his dispatch, Rumbold says that he mentioned that the Nazi treatment of the Jews had resulted in a revulsion of sympathy for Germany, and

“The allusion to the treatment of the Jews resulted in the Chancellor working himself up into a state of great excitement […] as if he were addressing an open-air meeting. “There is an immense amount of unemployment in Germany, and I have, for instance, to turn away youths of pure German stock from the high schools. There are not enough posts for pure-bred Germans, and the Jews must suffer with the rest. If the Jews engineer a boycott of German goods from abroad, I will take care that this hits the Jews in Germany. [….] Before leaving this subject the Chancellor added that the understood that Jews wishing to settle in Palestine must be in possession of the sum of £1,000. If the German Government had required the possession of a similar sum in the case of the Eastern Jews, who had entered Germany since the war, there would be no Jewish question in this country. As it was the Jews had brought every form of disease into Germany and made for the demoralization of the country generally.

[….] My comment on the foregoing is that Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German Government and that it would be a mistake to believe that it is the policy of his wilder men whom he has difficulty in controlling. Anybody who had had the opportunity of listening to his remarks on the subject of Jews could not have failed, like myself, to realise that he is a fanatic on the subject. He is also convinced of his mission to fight Communism and destroy Marxism, which term embraces all his political adversaries.”

So, Hitler moves from an argument that is rhetorically framed as though it is an issue of fairness “the Jews must suffer with the rest” to an argument rhetorically framed as legitimate self-defense to whaddaboutism to rabid antisemitism of a kind socially acceptable to many Brits. Before I walk through that argument more slowly, I have to point out that the second paragraph of that long quote is the most important for understanding the real lesson of Hitler: how racism is always rhetorically reframed as concerns about dangerous political commitment, social hygiene, and/or reducing crime. What most people don’t know is how important the notion of “executing partisans” (that is, killing socialists) was for justifying mass killings of Jews in what Timothy Snyder calls the Bloodlands. Nazis’ political agenda of serial genocides was, in public, always rhetorically framed as exterminating communism.

But, let’s get back to the first paragraph.

We’re still talking about internet asshole. One of the most frustrating things about arguing with someone committed to arguing irrationally is that they appropriate the verbal cues of fairness and rationality, while they’re irrationally arguing for their in-group being entitled to better treatment. But they hide their argument within modifying phrases.

Like all internet assholes, Hitler buried his weakest claims in adjectival phrases—pure German stock, pure-bred Germans—so he has an argument for entitlement rhetorically framed as an argument for fairness. This isn’t fairness as equal treatment across groups, but fairness as an entitled and powerful group being allowed to hold onto its power. It’s “fairness” as “a system that preserves a hierarchy we think is right.” So, it’s “fairness” as “our group being dominant.”

As I said, his most problematic claims are buried.

Let’s be clear: there is and never was any such thing as “pure German stock.” Hitler was relying on Madison Grant’s completely incoherent argument about race. Grant’s argument was that there were three white races: Nordic (what Hitler called Aryan), Alpine, and Mediterranean (what Hitler would have considered non-German speakers in Central and Eastern Europe), and he argued that inter-mixing of these races led to the destruction of a civilization. In other words, like a toddler who can’t stand the peas to touch the mashed potatoes, Grant believed that inter-mixing of races was bad. Yet, by his own narrative, the races were intermixed at various points, since the “higher” race slowly arose from a mixing of the “lower,” and the best civilizations were ones created by intermixing. A longer explanation of how bad his argument was is here.

It’s interesting that Hitler was not “pure German stock” even by his own standards. “Pure German stock” was a blue lie that Hitler sincerely believed, and that he phenotypically violated. His followers didn’t care. Hitler, very clearly not an Aryan, became the political leader to make Aryanism triumph. This isn’t particular to Hitler or his followers. Suckers often join a cult of a person not a Christian because they think he’ll make Christianity triumph or a financially unsuccessful person whom they believe will lead them to thrive financially.

Setting that aside, what his argument assumes is that Jews can’t be pure Germans. And that is the argument that needed to be proven on his side, and he never did because he never could. If a non-Aryan Austrian like Hitler can be a leader of pure Germans, why can’t German citizens be German? Hitler could never make that argument coherently, so he never tried. He just made arguments that rested on the premise that Germans who were Jews didn’t count as German. And that is the first step in politicide, religicide, classicide, or genocide, and people all over the political spectrum engage in it: declare your critics not really German, or American, or Christian, or whatever. They are people who keep us from the goal of a pure community, and so should be eliminated.

We need to stop doing that.

But, back to the May 11 memo, since I really want to post this on May 11.

What Hitler assumes, which is what all racists assume, is a zero-sum contest among races, and that not being dominant means being subordinate—equality is being dominated. But, more important, he assumes that people only look out for their own group. Thus, he can’t even begin to imagine that any non-Jews are objecting to the treatment of Jews, so the protest must be “engineered by Jews.”

As in the other two topics mentioned in the previous posts, he initially denies, then admits, and then deflects the accusation against him.

He denies the accusation by pretending that he is concerned with fairness, but his next argument confirms exactly what he started out denying—discrimination against Jews (since he’s saying “pure German stock” should have preference), and then he threatens retaliation for action that would itself be the consequence of the persecution he denied and then confirmed. It then shifts into a particularly irrelevant piece of whaddaboutism, before he exposes himself as having exactly the views he is accused of having.

The swipe about Palestine is typical. Hitler often made a point to representatives of other countries that their nations often had restrictive immigration regarding Eastern Europeans, especially Eastern European Jews (such as the US 1924 Immigration Act). And Hitler would say that they would do the same thing he was, but they didn’t have to, since they’d never let the Jews in in the first place.

It’s another argument that looks as though it has a point, but it doesn’t have one that is relevant. Britain did have the restrictions he mentions regarding immigration to Palestine, but, as far as I can tell, they didn’t require money to immigrate to the UK itself.

But, Hitler probably often found himself talking to someone who wished Britain did have such restrictive immigration, and so they would sympathize with his desire. Anti-semitic and anti-Slavic prejudices were widespread in Europe generally, including Britain.. And, while these people, ranging from Lord Londonderry to Viscount Rothermere (owner of the Daily Mail), might bemoan the most excessive violence, they wouldn’t empathize with the victims. Like Hitler, they considered various “races” (such as Jews and Slavs) essentially criminal and communist. And, like Hitler, they used the term “Marxism” for all their political adversaries. Thus, like the argument about Germans being victimized because they weren’t allowed to dominate, Hitler’s argument about Jews—as incoherent as it was—would resonate with some people because they didn’t really need the argument to be made; they already agreed.

How defending the in-group can land us in unintentional racism

A stained glass from the Brussels Cathedral showing Jews desecrating the host, a libel that led to a massacre of Jews and a Catholic cult was recognized until 1968.

I retired for several reasons, but one of them was so that I could work more. I love visiting campuses and classes (it’s teaching without the grading), doing podcasts, and writing. I think I wrote five or six contributions to book collections this year, visited three or four classes, and gave two or three workshops. I made a lot of progress on a new book. That’s what I wanted to do with my retirement. If anything, I’d like more class visits, workshops, contributed chapters, and lectures than I had this year. I’m saying this just to be clear that I don’t object to working, but I object to working when something is supposed to be play.

I signed up for a course that was supposed to be play—about the Inquisition (way out of my area of expertise). It wasn’t play; it was work. The first part of the course was about various heresies in the early Christian church, and it was fascinating, useful, thoughtful, and nuanced. And then we got to the Inquisition. And I dropped the course because it turned into work.

But the way that this class was work is a useful example for something I’ve had a lot of trouble explaining in my writing: how in-group favoritism can seem and feel harmless, since it happens when we’re focused on praising or defending (especially defending) our in-group, and we don’t necessarily mean to do so by denigrating, blaming, or negatively stereotyping some out-group. But it happens. What I have trouble explaining is that in-group favoritism can easily lead into defending the in-group in such a way that problematic in-group behavior gets minimized, redefined, dissociated, and deflected onto the victims, and then it becomes racist.

And that’s what happened in this class. And you see it all the time—people trying to defend Prince Philip end up diminishing (or seeming to justify) his racism, probably out of the impulse to give a very, very old guy a break.[1]

When we admire a person, civilization, or policy of the past, we’re almost certainly admiring something racist, colonialist, misogynist. That’s just how history works. It doesn’t mean that we can’t admire anything or anyone in the past. The false assumption that things (people, institutions, actions) are either good or evil, and that it is an absolute binary—good things are purely good, and anything not purely good is evil—means that we have trouble talking usefully about racism. If we think of racism as an evil, and that no good person has any evil, then we either have to condemn everyone as equally evil, or we have to find ways to say that the in-group wasn’t evil. And so we justify, deflect, and rationalize the racism of people, institutions, or practices that we believe aren’t completely evil.

And then we’re enabling racism.

If we stop thinking about racism as an evil pit in which evil people live, and instead as an unconscious and damaging way that we understand our world, then we can simultaneously say that someone was racist, and that that someone did a lot of good things. We can praise that for the good things, and yet condemn their racism. In other words, condemning racism isn’t condemning a person as a being spit into the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth—it’s condemning what they’ve said or done. Similarly, condemning an institution for racism isn’t necessarily saying that the institution has never done anything good; it’s saying the institution engaged in racist practices.

And, once we can say and see that someone or some institution we admire has done and said racist things, then we are more open to seeing how we do racist things. And then we can try to be less racist. As long as we refuse to see or acknowledge racism in our in-group, we will not change the actions and beliefs that are racist.

As I’ve argued elsewhere, neither demagoguery nor racism are necessarily intentional—in fact, I think it’s pretty rare that someone believes that they are engaged in demagoguery or being racist and does so anyway.[2] And racism is not about individuals who are consciously hostile to members of other races, or individuals who decide that they will get up today and be racist; it’s often about how in-group favoritism fuels, justifies, or enables us to ignore systemic differential treatment of various groups. It’s about how people only think about this particular policy, person, incident, issue, or case affects us without thinking about how what we’re saying has larger and longer implications and consequences.

And here I should explain briefly about in- and out-groups. In-groups are groups we’re in—they’re groups we use to identify ourselves to others, and whose basic goodness is intermingled with our own. If I believe that my rescuing dogs from shelters is a good thing, then I will think of myself as in the category of people who rescue dogs from shelters—I’ll identify with them, in Kenneth Burke’s terms. And, since I think I’m good for rescuing dogs, then I’m very likely (illogically) to decide that people who rescue dogs are good. (Since I’m good for rescuing dogs, people who rescue dogs are good.) They’re in my in-group, and, if that group is accused of bad behavior, I’ll defend it as vigorously as I’d defend and deflect accusations of bad behavior against me.[3]

That’s what this prof was doing (and what we all do). He was responding to ways that Catholicism has been under attack. And, to be clear, it has. Most of our notions about the torture devices of the Inquisition are 19th and 20th century tourist trap bullshit or anti-Catholic demagoguery. And, like many people defending their in-group, he engaged in textbook in-group favoritism and its attendant deflection and dissociation (in the rhetorical sense, explained below). He over-defended his in-group to the point that he got into very creepy and not okay territory. As do we all. And that is my point in this (very long) post.

Here was his argument about the Inquisition. Initially, the “inquisition” was the first step in someone having been accused of heresy, and it was conducted by the church, and oriented toward persuasion. It only involved “minor” torture (he used that term multiple times), and the vast majority of people expressed sorrow that they had been wrong in their doctrine, and were happy to have been corrected. They were given some minor penance. Only a small percentage were handed over to the secular authorities, who tended toward execution. So “the Church” didn’t execute people; secular authorities did. The Spanish Inquisition was entirely secular authorities. The official position of the Catholic Church was that conversos (Jews who had been forcibly converted or only converted to escape death) could renounce their conversion with no punishment. Many didn’t, and so, when the Spanish Inquisition started—which he was clear was initially completely out of control, and basically a witch hunt—and conversos were particularly victimized, many came forward to prevent being executed, and they blamed their drifting back into Jewish practices on Jews (since they often chose to live in Jewish communities). So, the secular authorities decided that Jews were infecting the state and expelled them. The question of the burning of the Torahs also came up, which he described as, after the initial burning, very minor. As long as authorities didn’t know about the Torahs, they wouldn’t do anything, so, when it happened, it was because another Jew had reported that there was a Torah.

Like much in-group favoritism that drifts into racism, it was thoroughly well-intentioned. He was trying to counter the anti-Catholic demagoguery of the 18th and 19th centuries that created myths we still have about the Inquisition and Catholicism. Richard Hofstadter once said that “anti-Catholicism has always been the pornography of the Puritan,” and he was right. People opposed to pornography in principle could read descriptions of convents as whorehouses for priests and feel simultaneously pruriently stimulated and self-righteous. Six Months in a Convent and Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk were best sellers, after all.

Torture devices attributed to the Inquisition are almost all semi-pornographic (or full-on pornographic) imaginations of Protestants, such as the Iron Maiden (which was never used in the Inquisition). But, there is one device they used (as did the Nazis), the strappado. Since strappado is so horrifying, but I will link to something, and, just all the content warnings. It’s torture. This professor said the strappado was “minor” torture, and that people who were threatened with it were “persuaded.”

So, let’s take seriously what he was claiming (more seriously than he did). If the strappado was minor torture, and someone told, “Agree with me, or we’ll apply the strappado to you” was an object of persuasion and not coercion, then were I to say to him, “I think you’re wrong, so, either agree with me, or I’ll use the strappado against you,” then he would say I persuaded him.

Of course he wouldn’t. But, if he wouldn’t, then his whole argument about the “inquisition” being about persuasion and not coercion collapses.

He could say that people confronted with strappado were facing “minor” torture (and people who were threatened with their holy books being burned was “minor”) because he never imagined himself as the object of that behavior. I want to stop here for a moment, and emphasize this point. He would never have told the story of the Inquisition the same way he did had roles been reversed, and Catholics been treated exactly as Jews and Muslims were. He would never make the claims about the Inquisition had he been the one “persuaded” by the threat of the “minor” torture of the strappado.

In-group favoritism is always a failure of imagination. It means we deflect, dissociate, rationalize, or minimize behavior toward others we would be outraged were that behavior oriented toward us because we are imagining the situation only from the in-group position. We don’t imagine ourselves being the object of in-group action, only the subject.

We are all drawn to defending our in-group, and we therefore do what he did. We minimize the actions of our in-group (strappado was minor), put our behavior in the most favorable possible light (threatening someone with strappado if they don’t confess and renounce their beliefs is “persuasion”), deflect responsibility onto the victims (Jews turned other Jews in—this was an important point for him), engage in the most hair-splitting of rhetorical dissociation (so “the Catholic Church” is not what Catholics, nor Catholic governments do, even if they have officials of the Catholic Church participating, but only [the most rhetorically useful] statements on the part of the Pope).

I want to pause on a point that is easily lost. The Catholic church banned the Torah—he made a big point that Jews were allowed to argue for it not being banned—and so any Jewish community with a Torah had to live in constant fear that they would have their Torah confiscated and burned. He dismissed that condition as minor, and he said a Torah was only burned if a member of the Jewish community reported that there was a Torah.

He may be technically correct that Jews during the Inquisition and throughout the many years of the Torah being prohibited were “turned in” by other Jews. Why make that point? People who want to defend the slaveocracy of the US will often point out that African slaves were initially enslaved by other Africans. Why is that point relevant?

When I’ve asked people, they say, “Well, it’s true.” Well, lots of things are true. It’s also true that the “secular” authorities that engaged in the behavior he wants to deflect and dismiss were Catholic governments, who saw themselves as promoting Catholicism. It’s true that the Catholic church actively venerated the massacres of Jews until the 1960s. Simon of Trent was in the Roman Martyrology until 1965. The cult over the Brussels massacre of Jews was recognized by the Catholic Church until 1968. I could go on. (I could also go on about Protestant abuses of Jews.) It’s also true that conservative white Evangelicals defended slavery (and segregation), and still do.

That some Jews turned in a Jewish community for having a Torah, or that Africans sold other Africans into slavery has no relevance to the question of whether Catholics persecuted Jews or Americans bought slaves. Nor do those facts make the persecution of Jews or American slavery any less appalling and immoral than they were.

So why did he emphasize it?

People who are irrationally committed to defending the in-group shift the question of “did our in-group do this bad thing” to “are we, and we alone, responsible for the tragic consequences of our behavior?” And then we try to find other groups on whom we can fling some of the blame, as though that’s relevant. It isn’t. Whether Catholics who banned and burned Torahs were sometimes assisted by Jews doesn’t change that Catholics banned and burned Torahs. Whether Africans sometimes sold other Africans into slavery doesn’t change that Americans are entirely responsible for American slavery.

What if looking at history wasn’t about defending our in-group, but about understanding what happened? What if the question was one about rhetoric? Instead of trying to deflect, dissociate, and diminish the bad behavior of our in-group, what would it be like if we instead asked a question about rhetoric: how did our in-group–which we want to believe is good–get persuaded into doing that bad thing?

And then we don’t have to blame Jews for Torahs getting burned or Africans for US slavery. We don’t have to have a contest about Protestants v. Catholics in terms of bad behavior. We don’t have to call behavior “minor” that we would be outraged were it to happen to us. We can acknowledge that being a member of our in-group doesn’t guarantee that we’re right. We can be part of the vexed, complicated, and unclear world of doing wrong when we don’t mean to, of failing to think from the perspective of others.

Just to be clear: I think the professor is a very good man, and a great scholar, and almost everything he said was (technically) true—except calling strappado minor torture. That’s just false. Setting aside that (kind of horrifying) rationalization of Catholic practices, I’ll say that it wouldn’t surprise me at all if he genuinely had very good friends who are Jews, and he would be outraged, I think, at the implication that he was even mildly anti-semitic. He was very clear that the treatment of Jews under Torquemada was appalling, and he didn’t defend the expulsion of the Jews from Spain at all. He is not hostile to Jews; he doesn’t want Jews expelled from anywhere; he doesn’t want Jews tortured. He’s just very invested in defending Catholicism.

So, I’m not writing about him because I think he is a terrible person—I think he’s a good person. He’s a careful scholar, and a dynamic teacher, and working hard to combat anti-Catholic demagoguery.[4] What I’m saying is that he is us.

We like to imagine that racism is a self-conscious hostility to members of another race, but I think it’s most often in-group defensiveness. People who refuse to think that policing might be racist are more interested in defending an in-group (white police officers) than they are in deliberately promoting violence against non-whites. Regardless of the intention, defending the police to the extent that it involves a refusal to acknowledge racist policing means defending racist policing. People who are committed Lutherans, Republicans, Democrats, vegans, second-wave feminists who are more interested in defending Lutherans, Republicans, and so than we are in trying to make our in-group less racist are racist.

Being Catholic, Republican, or supporting the police doesn’t mean you’re racist. Defending Catholics, Republics, or the police doesn’t make you racist. Being Protestant, Democrat, or criticizing the police doesn’t mean you aren’t racist. Supporting our in-group by deflecting or diminishing our in-group racism is racist.

It doesn’t matter if our in-group is gun owners, Lutherans, vegetarians, Texans, Democrats, Christians, dog-lovers, or anything else. Being right means admitting we’ve been wrong. It means not deflecting, dissociating, and minimizing about how our in-group has been very wrong.

The irony of this very good, and I think very devout, Christian promoting narratives that defend his in-group (Catholics) at the expense of his non-in-group (Jews) and his out-group (Protestants) is that he is, as are we all, rejecting what Christ said. He is a good scholar, but he’d be a better one, and we’d all be better people, were we to take seriously: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

[1] Instead of refusing to call him racist, or pretend he didn’t say racist things, it would have made more sense just to say, “Yeah, racist.”

[2] I’m saying rare just because I don’t like all or never statements, but I honestly can’t think of a time. Even racists like David Duke or Adolf Hitler insisted that they were being realists, not racists.

[3] If I slip from believing that adopting surrendered dogs is a good thing to believing that adopting surrendered dogs is what good people do, then I’ll start to denigrate people who do something else, like get dogs from responsible breeders. That’s a different post.

[4] Which, oddly enough, still exists. For reasons to complicated to explain, I recently ran across work by a major figure among fundagelicals who gets lots of churches to support his work to spread “Christianity,” oriented entirely at Catholic areas.

Racism isn’t about feelings

Notice that Japanese Americans must report for internment

If you stop someone on the street and ask them, “What does it mean to be racist? And what’s wrong with racism?” you’d probably get an answer something along the lines of, “Racism is a feeling of hostility that some individuals have toward members of other races, and it’s harmful because, when they express that hostility, it hurts the feelings of others.” (Or perhaps, “It offends other people.”) In other words, racism is about individuals having feelings that are likely to create bad feelings in other individuals.

It’s one of the least useful, and most damaging, ways of thinking about racism and what it does.

For instance, it flattens various actions, as though they’re the same—if racism is about hurt feelings, then my feeling hurt that you called me racist seems just as important as your feeling hurt that I said something racist.

It also prohibits third parties from being able to call out racism (or mischaracterizes their objecting to racism as “being offended”–still about their feelings). If racism is a problem because it hurts the feelings of members of the race who’ve been “insulted,” then no third party has the right to say, “Hey, what you said was racist.” After all, they weren’t insulted, so their feelings weren’t hurt. There was no harm.

I have a friend whose mother is from Mexico, and my friend self-identifies as bi-racial Latina, but she doesn’t fit the physical stereotype that racists tend to have about Latinas, and so she has often found herself in a group of people where someone says something racist about “Mexicans.” If she objects to the racism without revealing that they’re insulting her, then she gets called “politically correct” and they double down on their racist claim, saying something like, “Well, you know it’s true.”

If she reveals that she’s in the group they’re attacking, then they apologize. But they don’t apologize for thinking the racist thing, or for saying it, but for saying it in front of her.

Each of those responses—refusing to listen to someone objecting to racism on the grounds that person is just being “politically correct” and apologizing, not for being racist, but for being racist in front of her– seems like a reasonable response to them because, having been taught that racism is harmful because it hurts the feelings of people of that race, it would seem that a person not of that race has no real reason to object, and their only injury to someone of that race was an injury to her feelings by saying racist things in front of her.

But the harm of saying something racist is not that it offends or hurts the feelings of individuals in the maligned race. It isn’t that they say those things that’s the primary problem; it’s that they think them. I’m occasionally mistaken for Jewish, which I’ve discovered when people have tried to make me feel bad by flinging an antisemitic slur at me. What they did is wrong, but not because it hurt my feelings—it didn’t—and not because they expressed hostility to Jews. It’s wrong because racism is not an emotion–it’s a set of beliefs, ones we don’t necessarily know we have. And those beliefs harm our world because anti-semitism is a persistent ideology that erupts periodically into extraordinary violence, and into individual acts of violence on a regular basis.

It isn’t just the feelings; it’s the beliefs. Racism isn’t just about hostility—it’s about beliefs, about Jews as masters of international finance, African-Americans as criminal, Latinx as lazy, Asians as not really American. People are hurt by those beliefs because those beliefs become the basis for how we deliberate on juries, vote, hire, fire, drive, rent.

To frame the problem of racism as though it is a question of individual feelings (racists feel hostility, and objects of racism feel offended) misses the whole point of our shared world being damaged by racism. People who object to racism aren’t doing so because of feeling hurt or offended, but because racism is harmful.

Antisemitism is a thread interwoven into all parts of the political tapestry

German Jews in Berlin

[I’m normally a big advocate of linking for claims. In this post, I won’t, for various obvious reasons—I’m talking about what people on really awful websites are saying, and I’m uncomfortable giving them the traffic. My decision not to include links means that I’m not presenting this as a set of defensible claims in an argument about policy, but a personal reflection based on my wandering around dark corners of the internet. My hope is that it will make people curious so that they will google the various claims I make. If you google, and think I’m wrong, feel free to comment.]

A lot of people are shocked by the current rise in antisemitism, but I’m not, nor is anyone who knows anything about how racism works. It’s confusing to a lot of people because far too much public discourse about politics relies on the false binary of left v. right (a false binary not made any better by pretending it’s a continuum) and actively damaging stereotypes about what racism is.

For people whose (racist) stereotype of Jews is that they’re lefties, it seems puzzling that other “lefties” would be antisemitic. For people who think that racism is undying and relentless hostility, and whose (racist) notion is that Jews are all supporters of the most extreme policies of Israel, then it’s puzzling that anyone on the right would be antisemitic, let alone any supporters of Trump would be, since his daughter and son-in-law are Jewish.

That there is violent antisemitism on the part of people our gerfucked political discourse identifies as left and right gets rabid factionalists biting their own tails and engaging in a lot of no true scotsman, but it really should be seen as the kind of anomaly that gets people to reconsider the taxonomy.

Our culture is demagogic because it makes every issue a question of identity instead of policy, a rhetorical choice openly advocated by the GOP “Southern Strategy” in 1968, but as old as antebellum politics about slavery. As long as we try to understand our political world in terms of left v. right, we will never understand the pernicious strain of antisemitism in American politics. Antisemitic terrorist incidents will be things we fling at one another as proof that Dems or GOP are evil, rather than facing, honestly, that antisemitism is a thread deeply interwoven into American politics, all over the political tapestry.

Antisemitism is often identified as the first racism, and the origin of racism is often placed in the moment that Spain decided to purify itself of Jews and Muslims (which would mean that antisemitism and Islamaphobia are fraternal twins). Selecting that moment in time might seem weird to anyone who is familiar with earlier writings. Julius Caesar was pretty dismissive about various other groups he fought, and John Chrysostom (an early father of the church) flung himself around about Jews. Cicero has a speech in which he argues that certain witnesses should be ignored because, you know, they’re Jews, and you can never believe them. At least one scholar has argued that racism in the Western world started with the Greeks.

The argument for putting the germ of racism in Spain in the era of the converso policies is that this was a moment when assimilation wasn’t enough. This was the moment was policies were grounded in the sense that some people are essentially different and can never really assimilate.

I think that’s a good way to think about racism: it isn’t about personal hostility, nor about stereotyping other groups (even if negatively) but about a sense that those people are essentially different, and can never really assimilate (I think there are weird exceptions made for token whatevers, which I’d like to call poliocentrism, but that’s a different post).

Every group, from your book club to your nation-state, will fuck up. And when it fucks up, you have a lot of choices. You might decide that it fucked up because everyone was engaged in bad ways of making decision. Or, you might decide it wasn’t about how we decided but these decisions, that somehow triggered us too much to decide well. Or, you might decide that it was about that bitch eating crackers who somehow forced a decision on us or seduced those assholes… or something. You’ll scapegoat the bitch for everything.

Sensible people genuinely engaged in processes of good decision-making take the first choice. The rest of us take the third. And, for most of the history of Western Europe, the bitch eating crackers was Jews.

My family (for reasons I still can’t fathom) once took a road trip that involved our driving along I-5 in California right after it was paved. There were signs saying “NEXT GAS 225 MILES.” We were driving a station wagon with luggage strapped (badly) to the roof. At some point, we realized we’d lost a suitcase far too long after it was reasonable to go look for it. For years after, if any of us lost anything, we would tell our mother that it was in that suitcase. We would tell our mother that things had been in that suitcase we didn’t even own when the suitcase was lost. If what we had been claiming was true, that suitcase would at least have been the size of an intercontinental container. Perhaps two.

Jews are the lost suitcase of Europe.

Some have argued that, since Jews and Muslims were essentialized at the same moment, they’re just as much victims of racism as Jews. But, Muslims were never scapegoated for the ills of Europe. They were other, but not Other (although now they are Other).

Once you understand that Jews are the lost suitcase of Europe—that is, a group that can be scapegoated cheerfully free of any rational argument that might involve coherent arguments with actual evidence—then you can understand the role of “Jews” in demagoguery. It’s never about actual people who are actually Jewish who are actually engaged in actual acts. It’s about a kind of Platonic ideal of “Jews” that can be used as a weapon in the factionalized argument you’re having.

There are three narratives about Jews that have been used to argue for their marginalization, expulsion, or extermination, and we’re seeing all of them right now.

First, they aren’t really “us.” Jews are more clannish, less tied to the country than they are to Zion, better at money. Sometimes, this difference is presented as admirable (as in a recent speech of Trump’s); more often, it’s presented as a reason they should be prevented from joining our country, let alone our country club, or actually expelled as dangerous—an argument that was persuasive in such disparate situations as Madison Grant’s successful arguments that there should be severe limits on Jewish immigration in 1924 and Josef Stalin’s successful pursuit of the Doctor’s Trials.

Second, they are Christ-killers, who need to be kept present so that we can convert them at the last minute and thereby enact our (exegetically indefensible) reading of Revelation. This was, until very recently, the official position of the Catholic church, and a lot of pro-Israel anti-Semites share it. What a lot of people don’t know is that much of the current “evangelical” support of Israel—the kind dominant in the Trump Administration–is a consequence of their reading Revelation in an incoherent and intermittently literal way. Granted, these are the same people who read the story of Sodom as a condemnation of homosexuality, so their exegetical skills are not exactly reasonable, and they’re pretty much a case study in confirmation bias and Scriptural cherry-picking, but what matters about them is that they want nuclear war in the middle east.

Many self-described Christians believe that Jesus will come when “the Jews” are converted to Christianity. That’s a belief that has been repeatedly disproven, but we’ll set that aside. (The people who saw themselves as founding a New Jerusalem thought it meant them. It didn’t.) The important point is that there are a lot of people who support confrontational politics in regard to the middle east because they want a nuclear war that would reduce the number of Jews who need to be converted (I think Pence is among them).

So, anti-semitism is deep among a certain kind of evangelical, even if it’s coupled with support for Israel and a weird kinda sorta if you squint support for Jews (whom they hope will either die or convert).

Third, we aren’t expelling or exterminating Jews because of their race, but because Jews all have bad politics (or you can’t trust any single Jew not to have the bad politics of some of them—the poisoned peanut analogy). It’s important to remember that much of the genocide in Central Europe was under the cover of killing “partisans.” People making this kind of argument says it’s about politics (or culture) but that political determination is always based in race, and they’d really appreciate if you didn’t mention that.

And antisemitism sometimes masks itself as praise. I am old enough to remember people saying, “I’m not racist; I admire that colored people are great with children, and have such a wonderful sense of rhythm.” They thought it was praise as it wasn’t saying that all African Americans were bad, but it was racist af because it was praising a group for talents that aren’t valued. And granting African Americans some (only sorta) “good” qualities, was what they seemed to think was a “get out of racism free card” for what they were about to say next. (Much like, “I’m not racist, but….”) In the case of “the Jews” (as though they are all the same), the “praise” is precisely what Trump said: Jews are good with money and ruthless in their pursuit of it.

That “praise” is the fuel for the narrative that equates modernization, globalization, “international banking” and Jews. That false equation is as old a connection as the volkisch myths on which the Nazis drew. The argument is that Jews don’t have a nation, they have a global relationship. The Nazis and neo-Nazis love(d) that narrative, although it’s cheerfully fact free (after all, the same could be said of Christians, Muslims, or any other religious group that claims to value their religion over other ties).

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Nazis, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists would promote old and busted narratives about Jews being involved in global conspiracies to control all the money, but exactly the same narratives are promoted by far too many people who self-identify as lefty.

I crawl around dark corners of the internet, and, for complicated reasons, at one point I found myself crawling around the weirder parts of the anti-globalist rhetorical world, and I found that antisemitism is alive and well there. I found Holocaust deniers (Holohoax, they call it), people citing the Protocols as though that were a reasonable source, promoting exactly the same myths as neo-Nazis (Jews control the media, own more of the world’s wealth than actually exists, and so on). Every once in a while, I’d run across the old and busted claim that none of the Jews who worked in the WTC showed up that day for work (they did).

My point is that antisemitism is all over the political tapestry. It isn’t an issue of left v. right. It’s an issue of antisemitic tropes being ones that people all over the political tapestry find useful because it’s woven in there, and, yet, oddly enough, the accusation that they are antisemitic is also all over the political spectrum.

We need to stop saying that having a Jewish friend or relative means a person can’t be antisemitic—Adolf Eichmann made the first argument, and Magda Goebbels made the second (and it was true in both cases). We need to stop saying that supporting Israel means you aren’t antisemitic—supporting Israel because you want most Jews to die is antisemitism. We need to stop pretending that simply because you have a lefty agenda you couldn’t possibly be endorsing racism.

We need to understand how deep antisemitism runs in our culture, and we need to stop pretending it’s only a problem for them. It’s true; they are antisemitic. But so are we.