Jews and anti-White Racism (Michael Lumish)

I recently published a Facebook tidbit titled, "The Grounding of Democratic Party Racism is the Progressive Left." There I suggest that the progressive-left is racist in three primary ways. These are anti-white racism, antisemitic anti-Zionism, and an imperial condescension toward those of non-European descent.

In response, Corinne Blackmer, a Professor of Biblical and American literature and gender studies at Southern Connecticut State University, pointed me to a 2019 article by Keith Payne published in Scientific American titled, "The Truth about Anti-White Discrimination."

The thesis is that anti-white racism is, itself, a racist delusion on the part of "white" people. Payne's conclusions are grounded in a piece published in Perspectives on Psychological Science by Michael Norton and Sam Sommers, titled "Whites See Racism as a Zero-Sum Game That They Are Now Losing."

Payne writes:

...a national survey reported that both blacks and whites believed that discrimination against blacks had declined over the past few decades, but whites believed that discrimination against whites was now more common than discrimination against blacks...

Whites tend to view increasing diversity as anti-white bias.

The implication is clear. The only reason that "whites" detect anti-white racism is out of their own sense of unearned privilege. It is not that there is any incessant cultural or academic tendency to berate "whites," but merely an irrational sense of weakness and vulnerability in the face of rising diversity and social justice in the United States.

The premise of Payne's argument rests on the undeniable fact of disparity of income between "white" people in the United States versus "black" people here. He claims that "the average black family earns about half as much as the average white family" and "that the unemployment rate for blacks is twice that for whites..."

Of course, none of this takes into account the fact that East-Asian Americans, Asian-Indian Americans, and American Jews, out-earn Americans of European descent. It seems hard to argue for "white privilege" in a society wherein those at the top of the economic hierarchy are not "white." Nonetheless, the disparagement of "white" people as essentially racist is obviously itself a racist notion and Jews are swept up in it.

Recently there has been considerable conversation around the notion of the "white Jew." The basic idea is that since Ashkenazim are "white" we enjoy "white privilege" and are, in fact, among the primary oppressors of "people of color." Democratic Party devotees of Louis Farrakhan even believe that Jews were the driving force behind that Atlantic Slave Trade and remain so to this day... as if that makes the slightest bit of sense.

The question then becomes, so what is the evidence for this political and cultural anti-white racism? I am not a sociologist and have not done independent research on the question. So we will have to make do with a few pieces of anecdotal evidence, and one scholarly study, that represents a tiny drop in the bucket if you decide to look into the matter further.

My favorite example is MTV's 2017 New Years Resolutions for White Guys. This one is fun because it is just so transparent in its contempt toward "white guys." Another interesting piece from the New York Times, written by Ekow N. Yankah, is titled, "Can My Children Be Friends With White People?" Can you begin to imagine a New York Times piece titled in all seriousness, "Can My Children Be Friends With Black People"? Yankah is not sure that his children can be friends with "white" people and this was published in The Times. Thankfully, Yankah tells us, "I have not given up on being friends with all white people."

And I have no doubt that "white" people -- whoever they may be, exactly -- appreciate that very much.

This one captured my attention shortly after the election of Donald Trump. This is a case wherein some young black kids tortured a mentally-handicapped white kid because Donald Trump won the 2016 election. The torturers made a point of calling the kid "white" as they stripped him naked into a bathtub and taped his mouth. The point, of course, is that he was tortured for being "white"... whatever that means, exactly. I feel reasonably certain that the people doing the torturing were not Republicans.

Finally, I want to point you to a piece written by Muneeb Hafiz, a PhD Candidate and Associate Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK, published in Critical Ethnic Studies by the University of Minnesota Press, titled "On Whiteness" (2018). Hafiz writes:

Whiteness “is on a toggle switch between ‘bland nothingness’ and ‘racist hatred,’” Professor Nell Painter tells us. It is a “metaphor for power” in James Baldwin’s vocabulary. According to Kehinde Andrews, Whiteness is “a process rooted in the social structure, one that induces a form of psychosis.” Whiteness, Achille Mbembe explains, “became the mark of a certain mode of Western presence in the world, a certain figure of brutality and cruelty, a singular form of predation with an unequaled capacity for the subjection and exploitation of foreign peoples.” A fantasy — no more real than Blackness, we should add — later transformed into a kind of common (non)sense, Whiteness “involves a constellation of objects of desire and public signs of privilege that relate to body and image, language and wealth.”

It is frankly astonishing that we can reify "whiteness" as a negative toxic epistemology in human history and not recognize this notion for the racism that it is. This does not only affect those of European descent. It represents racism towards Jews, as well.

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