Showing posts with label antisemitism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label antisemitism. Show all posts

Friday, July 22, 2016

From what I've noticed, white supremacists often have conflicted feelings about Jewish people. On one hand, they're quick to stereotype and ostracize them. On the other, they love using the Jewish community as an example of white people being oppressed based on race (never mind the fact that Jewish people were oppressed for being Jewish, not for being white, and were even considered an ethnic minority as a means to justify the persecution. Also, they were attacked by other white Europeans, not POC). Additionally, racists often assume that all Muslims are anti-Jewish and will cling to that as an Islamophobic stereotype, even if they themselves feel hostile toward Jewish people.

Another factor I've noticed is how they will either say that race isn't the same as nationality/religion or that it is, depending on whether that will further the "white people are oppressed" narrative. This is a pattern that occurs often:

Person: "White people are targeted. Look at what happened to the Irish and the Jews!"

Then the same person will rail against affirmative action, calling it "racism against whites." When told that Irish and Jewish scholarships exist and benefit a lot of white people, they'll backtrack and say, "Well, that doesn't count because those benefits are based on nationality/religion, not race."

Blather, rinse, repeat.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Marginalized groups don't create bigotry

Various forms of bigotry are very often excused by saying that a person only became a bigot after having a bad experience with (insert marginalized group here). But bad experiences are not responsible for such beliefs, because the person in question has most likely also had negative run-ins with those of dominant or privileged groups and did not hold those groups responsible.
This judgment is often made when a member of a persecuted population does something that matches a stereotype. A white person who has been assaulted by a racial minority could use that as justification to hate that ethnicity and say the stereotypes are true, but odds are that they've also been attacked by other white people, or known someone who has, and didn't decide that whites are violent. I've known straight people who were sexually assaulted by gay people and concluded that the gay community is mostly composed of rapists, but they don't look at all the hetero folks who commit rape and decide that straight people are sexual predators. I've known people who were cheated out of money by Jewish individuals and used that as justification for anti-Semitism, but they've also been swindled by plenty of non-Jewish peers and they don't associate financial scams with non-Jews.
This is not at all to say that a person from an oppressed group is justified in doing abusive or otherwise unethical things, or that they shouldn't face social/legal consequences for it. I'm saying that these behaviors are not due to their minority status. (Certain behaviors may be connected to oppression, such as a poor person who robs others out of desperation, but that's a topic for a whole other discussion.) To develop bigotry toward a disadvantaged populace because someone of that group has wronged you, you must have already believed stereotypes about them in order to make that connection and generalization. A person who does this while not holding dominant groups responsible for those same actions, and not assigning overall blame to dominant groups, does so because they see such people as the default—yet another example of their preexisting unawareness of privilege.