I forget sometimes that
I’m allowed to feel sad for Jews. The discourse in the School of Social
Work around anti-Semitism has dwindled in large part due to the
hyperbolic conflation of Jewishness with whiteness. I am therefore quick
to forget that Columbia often fails to treat anti-Semitism with the legitimacy it deserves. My mom’s simple acknowledgement allowing me to feel Jewish pain reminded me that it was ok to feel so deeply.
My
experience in the Columbia School of Social Work has often made me feel
hollow. It can seem like I have no role as a Jew in both the course
curriculum and in class discussions. “How Jews Became White Folks” is my
school’s single mandatory reading regarding Jewish people in
contemporary society. And, even though this piece takes a dive into
important assimilation markers of the American Jew, this is only a
20-page reading shoved in among the several books and 40 articles that
make up our curriculum. In discussions, fellow classmates have confessed
that they have become frustrated when Jewish people speak up about
their experiences. On one occasion, I tried to explain to a close peer
how my Jewishness guides my social justice work and she told me that I
needed to stop talking, since my white privilege dominated any authentic
form of solidarity I could claim as a Jewish person. During my time at
Columbia, I often wonder if I truly belong at the School of Social Work.
Why
do my peers dismiss my Jewish identity due to my white skin? Why do I
feel so disingenuous for being Jewish in social justice work?
This
message from my peers, that Jews are white, isolates the Jewish people
from the broader cultural context. It creates an assumption that renders
the dialogue around anti-Semitism obsolete and minimizes the Jewish
experience. Not only is this generalization detrimental to understanding
the nuances and diversity of Jewish identity, but it also inhibits an
honest conversation about the ways being Jewish has been contextualized
in discourses of race, ethnicity, and culture. Frankly, perceiving
Jewishness as a mere form of whiteness or as just a religion is
ignorant. Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel knew this, and cautioned us
against these toxic and reductive comparisons when he said, “No human
race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective
judgments are wrong. Only racists make them.”
Intersectionality—the
interrelation between race, class, and gender—is a central theme in our
curriculum that promotes a solidarity-driven approach to social
justice. Unfortunately, it seems that this ideology is not being taught
to address issues pertaining to anti-Semitism. Social workers are often
so concerned about abiding by these pre-established intersectionality
guidelines that they unintentionally perpetuate the very kinds of
discrimination that they supposedly oppose. Thus, Jewish students
whisper to each other in the secrecy of dimly lit dive bars about our
shared experiences of anti-Semitism, but we don’t risk speaking out in
class. An intersectionality gap exists between engaging in discussions
of anti-Semitism and those pertaining to other forms of racism. Rather
than avoiding discussions of anti-Semitism, we must break the silence by
discussing solidarity.
I didn’t know Mr. T pityed fool’s that weren’t woke, but that’s awesome. #respect
“I think about my father being called ‘boy’, my uncle being called ‘boy’, my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called ‘boy’. So I questioned myself:“What does a black man have to do before he’s given the respect as a man?” So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T so the first word out of everybody’s mouth is “Mr.” That’s a sign of respect that my father didn’t get, that my brother didn’t get, that my mother didn’t get.“
if your film studies/film history/film appreciation class talked about Birth of a Nation but not about Within Our Gates then I’m sorry but your professor failed you
further rant, because I’m not done yet, and more people should know about this
despite its massive success, the extremely racist and very historically inaccurate Birth of a Nation was not without controversy at the time of its release.
a lot of activist groups tried to prevent its screening in their areas, and there was debate about whether or not showing it in cities would prove to be incendiary and start race riots. Black Americans did not like the film and were open about how they did not like it.
one of the responses to it was a full-length motion picture made some years later called Within Our Gates, about the racism and bigotry that still existed in the US. it was written and directed by Oscar Micheaux (Wikipedia), a black author/auteur who ran his own film studio and independently produced over forty pictures. his films had all-black casts and lower budgets, but proved to be popular. some of them are lost, but some aren’t, and Gates is one that’s been preserved at its full runtime. Here it is on YouTube; the cast is in the description.
talking about the influence of Nation on US cinema and by extension world cinema while removing it from its historical context makes it seem like everybody back then was just okay with the blatant racism and horrific plot, but they weren’t. and black Americans who were contemporaries of the film and of Griffith weren’t powerless victims needing to be saved, either. they had concerns and voices of their own, and they created art to express their feelings and strike back against the dominant narrative.
if your film history/film appreciation classes aren’t talking about this, I’m sorry, but they’re failing you.
One of the major shortcomings of liberalism is the way it treats racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice as character flaws rather than inevitable superstructural manifestations of the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. It shifts the moral failing onto the individual and away from society as a whole, so systemic inequality can continue to exist as long as we crucify the occasional bigot for show.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) claims he is being “bullied” by former Ohio State wrestlers who accuse the congressman of turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse of hundreds of student athletes while he worked as the assistant wrestling coach from 1986 to 1994.
According to a CNN report Wednesday, Jordan will contact the Capitol police after receiving emails from one of the wrestlers who has accused Jordan of doing nothing about the sexual abuse by the team doctor, Dr. Richard Strauss.
Oh boy if you’re mad about the US separating children from their parents, putting people in camps, and having a zero tolerance policy towards asylum seekers that has led to deliberate extensive cruelty as a futile deterrent wait until you hear about Australia.
…what’s going on in Australia?
Buddy! Strap in because there are two parts to this:
The past 100+ years of ripping kids from their families, racism, and attempted genocide
The past 20+ years of racism, but now island torture prisons! LEVEL UP!
Australia has had a long history of separating children from their parents. The government decided that mixed raced children of Indigenous Australians were not OK so literally kidnapped them and raised them to assimilate into white society and “breed the colour out.” This started about 1905 and ended about 1970. We call them the Stolen Generations. This has had long lasting negative effects on Indigenous Australians as it was a decades long attempt to absolutely destroy their culture and commit genocide. “But that was the past?” Surprise! By “ended in 1970″ I mean “the reasons in which we en masse tear children away from their families now has a different reason” and Indigenous children are now being taken away at even higher rates than during the stolen generations. Australia saw its Indigenous population, thought “how do we destroy their culture?” and when we were done thought “gee, how do we blame them for having all these issues in their communities?”
BUT THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING!
Fast forward to now: Trump is using kids as political leverage to stop people from coming to the US right? Buddy he’s ripping Australia off. Scott Morrison, Minister for Immigration at the time once did that.
OK so for context: when people try to come to Australia via boat seeking asylum because they’re fleeing war/persecution we do either 2 things: turn them back and let them just… die elsewhere… Or we lock them up in detention centres on Manus/Nauru Island. That’s where we keep them indefinitely in bad conditions, give them dodgy medical care, smear them in the press, and react indifferently when they die from suicide/negligence/assault… and cover up sexual assaults from guards and the incredibly high rate of self harm and depression even in children. The entire idea is to be as cruel as possible so other people hear about it and go “geez, let’s not go to Australia. They’ll literally torture us before they give us a protective visa.” And when I say indefinitely I mean indefinitely. Some refugees have spent 5 years wasting away in these prisons. Some children have spent their entire life in these prisons. And the government openly admits that they’re genuine refugees. They’ve been rigorously vetted and known to be safe people with no intention of harming us but it’s the zero tolerance principle. You tried to come here via boat? You go jail but we call it “detention.”
The main line of attack against refugees: “they’re just coming here to take advantage of our welfare.” Oh no! It’ll cost the taxpayer money to subsidise a refugee to live in a safe country! So instead of having them “rip off” the taxpayer with a couple hundred a fortnight we’ll just lock them up on an island where it costs $1 million per person on average over the past 4 years and operational costs have wasted $5 billion in 4 years. Why help someone for barely enough money to survive when you can torture them and keep them imprisoned for several times more!
Scott Morrison, or Sco-Mo as we kids call them, loved the US’s Muslim Ban idea by the way. He said it was proof that the rest of the world was “catching up to Australia.” Yeah. Geez guys. What took you so long to be as bad as Australia?
Mandatory detention has had bipartisan support from the two major parties since its creation by the Keating government in 1992. We have been keeping people in prison for seeking asylum for 26 years.
We also don’t want to get rid of them. There was a deal under the Obama administration to take some of these refugees but this process has carried on into the Trump administration. He was livid the idea that he should uphold this deal because 1) OooOBaMaaaa!! 2) REFUGEES?? In America??? So that’s currently going nowhere. Meanwhile New Zealand, our good ally and close neighbour, has said “I’ll take some of them” and the current PM (Turnbull) has said no. His excuse? We have a deal with the US. We should see where that goes. It’s going nowhere. So he conveniently can just pretend his hands are tied and let refugees continue to be tortured and die under his care.
(And he hasn’t said it but I bet he’ll never let refugees settle in New Zealand because if they become NZ citizens they’ll have travel rights to come to Australia without the same visa restrictions as other countries AND THEN THE REFUGEES WOULD WIN).
So let’s top this all off with the icing on the cake: a phone call between Trump and Turnbull when Trump was getting acquainted with all the world leaders last year. Turnbull explained our zero tolerance refugee policy and the cruelty as a deterrent that is employed and Trump said “That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
“That is a good idea. We should do that too. You are worse than I am.”
Let that sink in.
And that’s where we’re up to now in modern history. See everyone likes to go to the obvious big example we have of the Nazis and their camps but the truth is… this never stopped. There are similar examples of this abhorrent behaviour happening right now and have been for decades. Governments have been putting people in camps and trying to destroy cultures, or ethnicities, or deny people safe havens from wars, and be utterly heartless and deliberately cruel since forever. This is the ongoing drive of conservatism: keep people out, keep people a certain way, and the current example in the US is just that bubbling over the horribly inescapable surface. We are deluded to think that this cruelty took a 70 year respite when WW2 ended and it’s taken this long to get this strong.
The world has always been racist. Trump just doesn’t bother to filter it. And Australia just wants to keep it on an island so no one can see it.
Also, that Australia/New Zealand immigration deal? Australia has slowly been taking away the rights of New Zealanders resident in Australia – including children born in Australia to Kiwi parents – and making it nigh-impossible for them to actually get Australian citizenship, basically all because of paranoia that brown people will move from NZ to Australia. They’re aggressively deporting Māori and Pasifika New Zealanders, even those who may have come as small children and have no memory of New Zealand, both for things like being convicted of any crime and for things like “being of bad character”. Or, rather, they don’t deport them. They put them in offshore prison camps and tell them they can’t leave until they agree to leave Australia. (It’s not that these things don’t affect Pākehā NZers, it’s that we’re not the real targets.)
During our election campaign last year, the Deputy PM of Australia openly said that if Labour were elected to government it would be bad for Australia because they would encourage refugees to try and get to Australia hoping to be taken by New Zealand. They have an island fortress mentality Trump hasn’t even started to achieve.
My grandpa lives in clarksdale, Mississippi and HATES white people with a passion. I grew up listening to stories like this. His cousins had to flee to Chicago in the 60s for trying to fight a group of white landowners who wanted to hang them for trying to leave the land they worked on.
Slavery turned into “share cropping” if you kept your slaves ignorant and isolated then they didn’t know they had been freed. This went on well into the 60’s the fucking 60’s these people are still alive dealing with this type of shit in the deep south.
My friend said to “fact check” this and I’m like…black ppl are literally saying they were kept as slaves what is there to fact check. Anyway, sharecropping was still slavery as far as I’m concerned.
gw_kimmy
man i haven't used this shit since like 2007 
Recent Comments