Black and White Television Set-Ups, and the Horrible Truth about Wealthier White People

[image from here]

My thanks to Anxious Black Woman for reminding readers about two of many intersections of Black history, Nazi atrocity, and the matter of not forgetting genocide is not only in the past.

Her post made me think about the on-going ways in which genocide (which always includes gynocide) is invisibilised cross-culturally, across eras, and by global media.

As a little Jewish white boy, I understood from a very young age that something was terribly fucked up about suburban white Christians and Jews playing "cowboys and Indians". I had nothing resembling a clear analysis of white Christian male supremacy at the time but I knew this much: I didn't want to play, and to whatever extent I might have been coerced into playing, I never wanted to be a cowboy. EVER. The fact that the "game" wasn't called "white settlers and displaced Indians" or "genocidal european invaders and massacred Indians" remains a bit perplexing. Then again, in games like Monopoly, one can purchase railroads for two hundred dollars. It is worth noting that the game was created by a white Quaker, Elizabeth "Lizzie" Magie, who was interested in pointing out the dangers of private monopolies. By the time I was playing, it was VERY pro-monopoly, without a hint that there was anything morally or politically wrong with savvy individuals buying up everyone else's properties.

I've been watching some old b/w movies, also reflecting on some aspects of racism in television programs. "Black and White", as a term, becomes ironic at the very least, in cinematic movies or television programs where:

a) There are virtually no other people of color in these films, except for the random "Asian" (mostly from the North and East, sometimes the South) who is always a gross stereotype, or the "Mexican" who is either a seductress or some form of bandit.

b) The whites are usually mixed in class, but somehow the focus is on the ones with "class"--that term being used with sarcasm, and also a note of irony: think for a moment about the term "now he has real class!". Fucked up, right? These "classy" white folks in old movies often have a Black woman character, often not listed at all in the credits, assisting white women who are portrayed as never quite knowing how to dress themselves. Or there's a Black woman or man serving the white characters their meals, then quickly dashing off-screen, lest anyone dwell too much on what that says about race in Amerikkka. Or there's a Black man working in the house as a butler with one stereotypical accent and manner, often meant to be comical to whites. And of course there's the Black man who seems utterly at peace, if not gleeful, at the prospect of spending yet another day or decade shining white business-men's shoes. If the picture deals with traveling cross-country, there's the Black man as porter on the train of white passengers as a porter. I'm leaving out a stereotype or two, and not too surprisingly these stereotypes often dovetailed with real-life laws that prevented African Americans from being part of white-majority unions, white-dominated jobs, and working in any way that wasn't, rather directly, serving whitey. U.S. white cinema, as it is rarely called by anyone white, offered little to Black audiences that reflected anything meaningful about African American experience. For more on this subject, and for a history of U.S. Black cinema, see here.


c) Whites were and are rarely portrayed in cinema as the virulent racists we collectively remain, whether murderous directly or by proxy. Despite the harsh truth about those of us who own stocks, we are rarely clearly understood as being active genocidalists, for example. And in appallingly pro-white movies like "Dances With Wolves" white supremacist cinematic mores demand that not only the film center around the experiences of a morally distressed white person, but also that he be able to remain a hero in some sense. In that film, "hero" doesn't exactly equal "mass murderer of people of color"--even though at the era depicted, that's usually and often what "hero" meant in white society. Middle class whites, movie-going whites, and DVD-renting whites like our movies to show us in a positive light, even during those periods in history when we were overtly barbarous to people of color. And we like our movies to remind us we are superior to people of color, to this day. It's a delicate, if utterly corrupt, ethical balancing act well-accomplished in cinema and television.

d) In U.S. white cinema, historically, African American women and men are rarely if ever seen as "being in relationship" to one another, heterosexually or not. Black people seem to exist as hired satellites, orbiting around white people. These white people seem to have their own gravitational pull and, as a consequence of this fiction of physics or not, are also utterly self-absorbed. White women in cinema had a period where, although never free from oppressive white heterosexual male "beauty" standards, they were allowed a level of self-possession. Not that their lives didn't revolve around white men, of course. I mean let's not be ridiculous. But many white women in cinema, prior to WWII, demonstrated an ability to appropriately respond to misogynistic white men, and to have things called "careers". Black women didn't have "careers" exactly, unless lifelong positions of paid servitude to whites can be called "a career". If it was one, it was not likely one any child dreams about entering with glee when they become an adult. White women, on the other hand, could be news journalists, wear slacks, argue face to face with men, often of similar build and stature, and didn't yet have the perpetually polite and deferential posture found in white women's characters after the Second World War.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, there was a TV show, "I'll Fly Away", which I loved primarily due to the riveting performance of Regina Taylor as Lilly Harper. (And, um, that young white actor, Jeremy London, was kind of cute to me at the time, not that his personality did much for me.) And yes, boys, he had a brother in real life--a twin brother, in fact: Jason, whose personality I despised, for some reason.) Lilly DID have a visible, three-dimensional family, an inner emotional life, a will, a clear sense of what constituted injustice, and was neither mammy nor ho, although she was made to take care of several children, in two families. One was her own; she worked for a white one. She was a fictional character with depth. And I have always thought that Regina Taylor is a very talented actor--far more talented than many white women and men actors who get far more roles, get paid much more money, and have much fewer gaps between gigs. And, obnoxiously, even that TV show managed to make the lives of the white folks focus of the program. Just when there'd be a great scene with Lilly, we'd have to cut back to the white family's dramas and be reminded "Oh, right: Hollywood doesn't MAKE dramatic family shows with Black actors as the leads." "The Cosby Show" of the 1980s was fine, only because it kept white folks laughing. And then came "Seinfeld", which, along with plenty of other shows not featuring white Jewish characters, such as Saturday Night Live, reminded white audiences of every single racist and sexist stereotype known to dominant society.

To any white person who suggests that due to Michelle and Barack Obama occupying the White House, not as servants, is a sign that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream has finally come true, I recommend rereading the work of M.L.K., Jr., including the entirety of the "I Have A Dream" speech, and especially the writings from the last two years of his assassinated life. Below is but a portion of that speech he delivered, with a white woman in the vast sprawling audience who would, twenty years later, become my feminist mentor. We can note that this portion of the speech doesn't get replayed every year, as it is not, in any way, a liberal, white-friendly sound-bite, nor does it come down on the side of thinking "Monopoly" is a just a fun game.

From the "I Have A Dream" speech, by Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered in Washington, D.C., on August 28, 1963:

"In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

"It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

"It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges."

What about the girls? What about the women? Recognition, Discrimination, and Warfare

[the above image is from here]

Common issues that dovetail with matters of oppression are the definition of harm and the matter of whose pain is seen and responded to as if the ones in pain were human? In the dominant society in which I live, words are sometimes seen as acts that can do harm, but often are not. I grew up with the saying "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me". Uhhh, bullshit.

We are now, in this first decade of a new Christian calendar century, just realising that homophobic speech is a harmful act, harmful the way physical assault is harmful: injurious to the being of another; inducing shame; causing pain; changing who a person is so that they henceforth have lower self-esteem and are more prone to being self-destructive. We can now begin to collectively see, in the dominant media--between the latest fashion news, mid- and small-sized automobile crash-test results, Hollywood gossip, sports scores, weather reports, and kitchen recipes that can be cooked in less than twenty minutes--that harm through speech acts can and does cost some young and older people their lives. Witness the cases of the two boys, Carl and Jaheem, who committed suicide due to repeated anti-gay harassment. The speech acts alone, without adding in physical bullying, without these children also being punched or hit while being called those misogynist/homophobic names, are, in some cases deadly. Will those among us who use such terms repeatedly against one or more individuals be considered murderers, should the tormented child take their own life? If not, why not? (If I drink and drive, I might face a fine if caught, as long as I'm not in a car accident along the way from point A to point B. If I hit a vehicle and kill someone, serious charges can be, and ought to be, brought against me. Regardless of my intentions, if I get into a car while drunk, and end up hitting another person and killing them, I have committed, at the very least "(hu)man-slaughter".

I think of this also when I consider how, post-"9/11" it became a much more serious matter for white males, particularly non-Nordic looking ones, to "joke" about having a bomb while waiting on line to board an airplane. This has everything to do with a society's shared experience of threat or harm. Usually, only those who are in oppressor classes (whites, Christians, men, the rich, Westerners, the non-disabled, etc.) are understood by the media to have experienced a single act of harm or threat that was VERY SIGNIFICANT. I was deeply saddened, and at times angry, after "9/11" because it became extremely clear to me that only some people's pain matters. White folks' pain matters. Men's pain matters. Westerners' pain matters. The pain of those with wealth matters. The pain of those in nations bombed by our missiles don't matter, in our media.


The harm of grossly intensified discrimination against anyone who looks "Middle Eastern" or who is categorised, often stupidly, as "Muslim"* is not really registered in the hearts and minds of the oppressor-class masses as real harm. (*For example, Sikhs wearing a turban with a chunni, or one or the other, is part of traditional Sikh attire, and is not a form of religious dress connected with any branch at all of Muslim attire.) "Their" pain becomes "our" pain, if "we're" white and not Muslim or Middle Eastern, only when "one of our own"--a middle aged "clean cut" (read: not swarthy) white male, an elderly white woman with grey and white hair, is detained and frisked at the airport because they happened to be the seventeenth person randomly chosen to be detained and frisked before being allowed to board a plane that day.

Only when that happens does discrimination against a non-dominant group, in recent years particularly against Muslims and Middle Eastern people, globally, become remotely real. Derogatory language and other violence against anyone who looks Muslim or Middle Eastern*, regardless of their ethnicity, religion, or region of family origin, is experienced in the form of harassment, threats, taunts, physical shoves, misogynist slurs, and other forms of violence against women, girls, men, boys, property, and land. (*Only about 20% of the total world Muslim population live in Arab countries.)

So when "our" economy, for example, takes what's termed a "downturn" (as opposed, say, to naming it a necessary step in the ending of capitalism), suddenly the media is aware of "people's distress and anxieties" about money and property. This "new concern" more deeply invisibilises the anxiety, distress, and pain many feel who were already not economically secure, inside and outside the U.S.

Whole classes of people only know economic distress; they never experience the "comeback". Some of my family falls into that category, of the permanently poor. Others in my family fall into the category of those who have "wealthy white folks' blues", which is to say, they are upset, worried, anxious, or distressed about whether the value of their half-million dollar home has gone down by 20%, or what's happening to their financial investments. Wealthy white folks speak to one another about "the market" and the condition of their stock portfolio often in earshot of people who will never own a stock portfolio, or a home. I say all of this because if you are wealthy, but are less wealthy now due to the downturn in the economy, please don't expect poor and working class people to offer you a back rub or foot massage if they overhear you being so rude as to discuss such matters in mixed class spaces. For example, telling your corporate colleague, over breakfast at a nearby diner, about "how much your stock fund has taken a hit" in front of the woman who is serving you eggs, bacon, and toast with extra butter, please, may be experienced by her as both of you being "jerks", at least. For good reason.

What we experience is often determined, if only partly, by past experience. Because, where I live, what happens to white men in certain kinds of off-shore wars is viewed as some kind of "standard" for what we comprehend as "traumatic" and "disablingly distressing", we can commonly refer to the U.S. white male war vet as having "post-traumatic stress disorder". Rarely do those of us who are white and male in the U.S. see the civilian war survivor--usually of color, often female as a likely sufferer of "post-traumatic stress disorder". Rarely do white men, as a group, see women and girls as "survivors" of a gender war. Someone "fighting as military personnel" counts as being a human being, often a hero, especially if you are white and male and from a white-majority country. Such a man is understood immediately as "probably having gone through something that has been so awful that he may never be the same". Note how invisibilised the civilian war survivor is, and women and girls across region and race, when we express only this amount of concern about "those impacted by men's military wars".

If we understand both the military war veteran and the civilian military war survivor to have varying forms of PTSD, we might appreciate and be sensitive to the fact that sudden loud noises might have a different effect on "them" than they do on "us", unless we're also survivors of trauma that involved sudden noise. It is not for "us" to tell "them" they are "over-reacting". What constitutes "over-reaction", in other words, is contextual, and depends, in part, on what someone's life has been up to the current moment. My experience of white men, generally, is that we "under-react" to most things, except when a woman doesn't coddle and care for us.

The experiences of the disabled and the oppressed are usually invisibilised by dominant media. Rarely does popular media show us what it means to be oppressed or disabled, in a way that registers viscerally as well as cognitively. And obviously there are a great number of ways to experience oppression: defiantly, depressively, aggressively, hopelessly, etc.

In the U.S. during the last forty years, the general population, including the oppressor classes, have been sensitised, to varying degrees, to the reality of sexual violence by men against women. What has yet to make the mainstream press, on any consistent basis, is an understanding of this violence, both endemic and systematic (not "accidental" or "anecdotal") as a form of warfare. That guns and knives are often used against women when men do their misogynistic harm, does not suffice to make it "count" as warfare. That men maim and kill women routinely does not warrant the phrase "war against a group of people by an aggressive enemy" being uttered.

I think this means dominant society and its media is in huge denial about men's war against women and girls.

One of most common liberal issues I see use up a lot of people's time and energy is when someone who is experiencing being oppressed by someone--verbally, states that is the case, the verbal oppressor states "You're just taking that the wrong way" or "You are too sensitive" or "You are over-reacting--chill out!" or "Why do you take offense to so many things!!"

Each of these responses is not only insensitive, but is another layer of emotional harm to the one being oppressed. Personally, as a white gay Jewish man, I don't need any white non-Jew telling me what is and is not "anti-Semitic" in speech. My gut tells me just fine, thank you very much. And if I'm speaking or behaving in a way that is condescending or threatening to a woman, and don't realise it or intend it, that doesn't mean my actions are not what the hearer says they are.

Oppressors historically define reality, including what constitutes fair and reasonable treatment of those they oppress. Inside many white Christian communities, for example, even those that are not "fundamentalist" there is a notion, an idea, promulgated, that women and men are "compliments" not "equals". This argument is used to spiritually support up all manner of misogyny and sexism, and many forms of male supremacist behavior and attitudes. If a man sees women as "his compliment", I'd assume the man has some serious sexism issues he hasn't bothered to check at the doorway of his social world.

What I think about whenever I hear about the media's presentation of human pain and atrocity, is "who else is suffering in this or other ways"? We know that the pain and suffering of males, whether they are males in only-oppressor classes or not, is real. We understand, for example, that boys who have been and are being molested by Catholic priests and other Christian preachers, are being harmed, irreparably. A great deal of media attention was brought to bear, critically, if also exploitively, on the horrid matter of priests sexually abusing boys.

And white men suffer too, of course. I have suffered as an adult, as has my brother, and other white male relatives in my family of origin. Our suffering, or dimensions of it, at least, is registered as real and is also transformed, as Andrea Dworkin once noted, into great theatre, visual art, and literature. We assume, here in the U.S., at least, if not also in the U.K., that Shakespeare writes of "human" suffering, even while he writes of a specific kind that is very gendered and raced. Which students are being taught that Shakespeare wrote colloquial ethnically specific stories primarily about the inner and outer worlds of those with gender and sexuality privilege?

I do not wish to minimise anyone's pain, except when its expression is grossly insensitive to those who are suffering far more.

When I hear the stories of the abused, including of white male military war veterans, and of white Catholic boys I feel sadness and sometimes rage at the unchecked harm produced by white male supremacist societies. This is the case whether stories are of young males being bullied, teased, taunted, exposed to homophobic and female-hating slander or slurs, enduring spiritual and physical and psychic betrayal at the hands of those entrusted to spiritually care for young people, or of boys neglected and abused in other ways.

And, mixed in with that sadness and rage, I often wonder: what about the girls? Is their pain also being recognised? Are there as many reports about girls who kill themselves because of lesbophobia and heterosexism? If a woman who knows her sexuality not to be "hetero" becomes the spouse of a man and has children with him, and also becomes increasingly depressed and despondent, does her depression and despair count as being caused by homophobia and heterosexism? If she has committed suicide, is her death registered as "in the same category" as those others who have taken their lives due to these forms of oppression and discrimination? If women are "never the same" after being raped and battered by a father, boyfriend, or husband, or due to growing up impoverished, or because they were given up for adoption because they are female, or were not given up for adoption but knew, very clearly, that their care-givers value boys more than girls, is their pain registered in the dominant society's psyche and told in its media, accurately and honestly, not exploitively and sensationally? Does it, too, become great art?

The question I want the answer to, if there is one, is this:
What else has to happen to girls and women for the dominant media to regularly report on what happens to them as "part of men's war against women"? We in the U.S. seem to barely grasp economic class warfare, although elsewhere in the world Leftists seem quite clear about it: capitalism kills, not just when a caught, criminal corporate executive shoots himself in the head. We seem to barely grasp racist warfare, the war of whites against all people of color, although at least some anti-racists are clear about that. The plights and plans of those of us who are Indigenous are never spoken of it dominant society, and the destruction of Aboriginal people is rarely seen as "genocide".

To this list of grievances I add one more: what of this endemic and systematic violence against girls and women by men? Why doesn't that count as "warfare" too?

On Earth Day: Derrick Jensen, on Civilisation and Enlightenment

END OF POST.

The Whiteness Problem, by Kai Chang

Here's an itty bit of another important piece of anti-white supremacist analysis from Kai Chang over at the blog, Zuky, linked to from my blogroll.

The Whiteness Problem

The backhanded boycott of the historic UN anti-racism conference in Geneva by mostly-white diplomats from Western nations, whose fortunes just happen to stand upon centuries of white supremacist colonialism, slavery, and imperialism, is farcical on its face. The story being peddled is that the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the Czech Republic are sitting out Durban II because of the sheer scandalousness posed by the singular figure of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad delivering another one of his branded ahistorical anti-Zionist tirades. I don't buy that story; in my world, simply swallowing the line that's being peddled by political hacks and fake news outlets is called being a sucker.

Without question, Ahmadinejad's twisted vision of omnipresent Jewish imperialism is unsound and indeed dangerous. But does it really make sense to pretend that one politician of dubious power, among thousands of conference attendees and hundreds of nations, is some dark overlord whose words carry the weight of the world? Of course not. This is not a tenable diplomatic position: Well, we were thinking about working with y'all to stop genocide but this asshole Ahmadinejad is gonna be there so we'll pass. In fact, if one wanted to denounce anti-Semitism, you know what would be a really good place to do that? How about a global anti-racism conference? Norway’s foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre said in his speech before the assembly: "We who have made a point of defending freedom of expression cannot opt for non-attendance as a strategy, leaving the floor to precisely those who hold opposite views. We will not surrender the floor of the United Nations to the extremists. The President of Iran has just exercised that human right. He did so, I believe, in a way that threatens the very focus of this conference." See? It's called firing back from the same podium. You're allowed to do that at UN gatherings. You can crush flimsy arguments with strong substantial ones. That's how debate and dialogue work.

I think it's pretty clear that certain countries were looking for an excuse not to participate and ended up thanking their lucky stars that Mahmoud came along to provide a useful caricature in their diplomatic charade. Why would white-majority countries such as the US, Germany, and Australia want to avoid an international conference aimed at ending racism? Hmm, let's think this one through, shall we? Okay I'm done, how'd you do? Here we go: People who benefit from racism generally do not want to talk about racism. That's like asking bankers to talk about ponzi schemes and money laundering. It's like asking a drug warlord to talk about processing facilities and smuggling routes. It's like asking a system administrator for the superuser password and hidden directory structure. It's not gonna happen.
________________________

Julian's note:
For the rest of the piece, please click here.
END OF POST.

Eleven Year Old Jaheem Herrera: Also Committed Suicide Due to Anti-Gay Bullying

[image of Jaheem Herrera, from here]

As is the case with all forms of sexual violence, anti-gay bullying is one of those atrocities that generally goes unrecognised and remains unremarkable. To acknowledge and honor each and every victim and survivor, every incident of sexual or heterosexual male supremacist violence, including those who commit suicide after enduring it: how many blog posts would that take?

Rather than repeat here what another gay man has already expressed and reported on, I'll link to Living Out Loud with Darian's blog post on this boy's life and death.

My heart goes out to Jaheem's family and friends, with a special wish for healing to his ten year old sister, Yerralis, who discovered Jaheem’s dead body.
END OF POST.

TAKE BACK THE NIGHT (AND DAY)

[image is from here]

Here is a link to a listing of where Take Back The Night Events are taking place in the next several days.

And here is a blog devoted to Take Back The Night 2009.
END OF POST.

Yom Hashoah, Israel, Adolph Hitler, and the U.S.: some thoughts by an ignorant citizen

[A member of Einsatzgruppe D is about to shoot a man sitting by a mass grave in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1942. Present in the background are members of the German Army, the German Labor Service, and the Hitler Youth.[144] The back of the photograph is inscribed "The last Jew in Vinnitsa". Image and information that goes with it was found here]

I live in the United States, the country in which I am a citizen. This is a fact I take for granted--this secure citizenship--most days of my life. My father was born in the Ukraine, however, but managed, with his relatives, during a period of pogroms killing and displacing Jews in that country, to come to the U.S. several years before the above photograph was taken. My father's family lived approximately one hundred miles from Vinnitsa, which is about the same distance that exists between Tampa and Orlando, Florida. The town in which my father was born no longer exists.

I find that we who are educated here in the U.S., especially in universities and colleges, consider ourselves experts in many things--perhaps in everything. What follows flows from the mind of someone who has been raised by an arrogant society that encourages me to think "what I think" is important and has the right to be shared. I have also been raised, within my own family, to believe I had no right to my thoughts or feelings, and to keep them to myself as best I could. It is this paradoxical tension which appears and is leaned into every time I write or speak. Today I speak about Israel, and Hitler, and the political function of scapegoating people of color as "the source" of all of our problems.

The State of Israel has organised its national existence based on the forced relocation of non-Jewish Palestinians, making it, from the start, an occupier nation and a nation of colonisers; in essence, a racist State. It's founders and leaders have done this in a place where Europeans and those from the United States were outsiders--not of the land, regardless of their faith. Only faith declared otherwise.

I suspect that if there were no white European Jews and no white U.S. Jews in Israel, the only reason for U.S. leaders to maintain "relations" with that nation would be to use it as a military landing pad in its quest for world domination--oh, and to hopefully get control of some of those nearby oil fields as well. The U.S. cares about places where white people live. And white people occupy many places so that Europe and the U.S. can then care about those areas, "protecting them" with military might. It is not only the U.S. that functions rather effectively as a racist State. G-d knows, the Israeli government is far from egalitarian in its treatment of Black Jews relative to white ones. G-d knows the class differences between Israelis of many faiths, and Palestinians of many faiths, is blatant. Guess which group, overall, more closely approximates the U.S.'s white middle class? Yes, the Israelis, if they are seen as white, light-skinned, and not of color.

I do not know a goddamned thing about what it is to live in or around Israel. I have no bone-deep sense of how threatened Israeli Jews feel, nor the extent to which Israeli Jews are right to feel this way. I intuit some sense of how Palestinians in the region feel, and the fact of regular suicide bombing speaks to a level of desperation and grief I have not experienced in my lifetime. If I have learned nothing else from dominant media, it is that it will blame the victims every opportunity it gets. Women ask for rape, men say. Blacks would have not been so persecuted in the 1950s and 1960s (oh, and the '70s, and '80s, and '90s, and currently) if they weren't so uppity, whites say. Never mind that women of any ethnicity and African Americans of any gender are never not persecuted, and have never enjoyed luxuriously long (or pathetically short) periods of U.S. history in which oppressive hostility was not acted out against their bodies and minds.

And I do know this: there was a man born two days and one hundred and twenty years ago, named Adolph Hitler, who demonstrated that it was possible, within certain regions of Europe, mind you (and not others), to wipe out half of the world's Jews in just a few years.

This didn't happen in the Middle East, though historically Middle Eastern Jews (not white ones) have been enslaved there, by Egyptian rulers. What has happened to Jews, mostly from Europe, over the millennia has been posted elsewhere on this blog. The assumption that any or every Middle Eastern country's leadership has both the will and the means necessary to generate anything like a Nazi Holocaust is as yet completely unfounded and is bound to a fiction that allows white male supremacy to flourish. We might presume, stupidly, that Iran's bigoted leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wouldn't think of doing such a thing, as in his view "such a thing as the Nazi Holocaust" never happened to begin with. But by what means shall Iran destroy Israel, really? Bigotry alone is not enough. What Israel has plenty of is racism, misogyny, and military force. This is a dangerous and deadly combination. Palestinian people know of this force. It has ripped them from their homes, and torn their flesh from their bones.

The world's Jews have a holiday, Yom Hashoah, or "[Nazi] Holocaust Remembrance Day". According to the omnipresent white Christian calendar, it precariously fell this year on the day after Adolph Hitler's birthday. Last year it was Christian calendar date May 2, and next year it will be C.c. date April 11. As a note to non-Jews, it actually falls on the same day every year, if you get out your Jewish calendars: Nis 27.

One of the things we Jews ought to remember, at this time of the Jewish (5769) and Christian 2009 calendar years, is exactly who Adolph Hitler was in the context of the region, culture, and methods in and by which he rose to power. What we also ought never forget is the fact that millions of Jewish, Roma, lesbian and gay people; Polish resistance fighters and intellectuals, Soviet prisoners; the mentally and physically disabled, and other groups were turned to ash, or were shot and buried--transformed in moments from terrified community of captives to an egregiously large lump of land, under which horrendous piles of corpses lay to rot with casual disregard in the eyes of the assassins.

To the extent that anti-Semitism flourishes in any region, Jews anywhere are imperiled. This statement ought not be disregarded or taken as mere rhetoric by non-Jewish people who have not endured genocide. When your own cousin's story includes the fact that every one of our family of 300, except for Uncle David--who somehow survived Auschwitz at the age of seventeen--was killed within four years in Eastern Europe in the late '30s and early '40s, it gives one pause. So too does the fact that anti-Semitism is on the rise across white-dominated countries. Muslims are frequently blamed for this increase, but we should know better by now than to point a finger at one group of people, particularly when the pointer's finger is white, and the singled-out "problem" people are of color. Whenever two groups of oppressed people are seen as primarily responsible for each other's demise, you can count on it that there's at least one other group, an oppressor of each of the two embattled groups, that is writing up such responsibility-relinquishing reports, spreading such conveniently self-serving lies*. It is also misleading to think that only white-dominated countries known for past anti-Semitism are now emerging as pro-Palestinian. The social-political history of the Danes disproves this "theory".

(*The U.S. supplies 90% of the arms to make Mexico's drug wars highly lethal; why aren't they "our" drug wars then, if our munitions are being used to kill? And Europe's role in destabilising governments and rending the cultural fabric of people across regions of sub-Saharan Africa are rarely reported in the white Western press as requisite factors for the violence that gets blamed on "one" ethnic group or "the another". Nor do we hear much about the flow of arms from Europe to embattled regions of Africa. I hope the picture is getting clearer.)

Racism and anti-Semitism are hard for my foreigner's mind to untangle when our media sloppily suggest that all Jews are white and racist, and all Muslims are anti-Semitic and aren't Israeli. Muslims and Jews, in the Middle East, lived as relatives for centuries, let's not forget. The economic exploitation and political execution of Christian/Aryan anti-Semitism in Europe transformed many Jews' desire for a Jewish homeland into an historically, uniquely desperate need.

After all, it was the merger of European cross-cultural/regional anti-Semitism, the political forces necessary to make turn otherwise "good citizens" into accomplices and engineers of mass murder, makers of the mechanistic means to do so--the technology that turned Hitler's idea of killing all Jews into something heinously plausible, his mission half-way accomplished. We must not forget what it was that supported him: his officers, the SS, universities, churches, the post office, the Finance Ministry, drug companies, the builders of the crematoria, and the other constituencies comprising the madman-made machine for pulverising Jews and so many others into dust en masse. Many things had to be in firmly place or be quickly manufactured in order to destroy so many so swiftly. Not the least of these components was virulent and abundant cultural anti-Semitism. (Check.) But is not bigotry alone that generates genocide.

In the cultural worlds I learn about or are part of, I observe that U.S. whites' feelings about the Israeli government are mixed up with feelings about Israeli and non-Israeli Jews. Among some Europeans, feelings about Israeli Jews are mixed up with feelings about European Jews, most of whom have never set foot in Israel. Among some U.S. people of color, feelings about white Jews have been historically combined with experiences of non-Jewish whites. White's feelings about Jews, both white and of color are often enough blended into general white supremacist racism. And so on.

What little the U.S.'s "good citizens" learn from history, its media compels us to promptly forget. For example, we forget, on an appalling routine basis, that those of us who are white are here in large part as colonisers; we are part of a racist and misogynist State; our Founding Fathers were rapists and slave holders who, in order to form a more pure... I mean perfect union, required the displacement and mass murder of tens of millions of Indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island, later called North America. This mass murder was a genocide approximately five to eight times larger than the one known as the Nazi Holocaust, if dead body counts matter.

So when you hear the media ridiculously promulgating notions that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Israeli government are each different incarnations of those heinous leaders of Nazi Germany, please take a moment and remember the truth of our history.

Recommended reading:
Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, by Andrea Dworkin (2002)
"In 2009 Europe, the Jew remains the scapegoat", by Stan Goodenough (2009)
"Russian Anti-Semitism and the Scapegoating of Jews">, by James L. Gibson and Marc Morjé Howard (2007)
"The Strange Phenomenon of Black Anti-Semitism", by Larry Elder (2009)
"The Muslims Need a Scapegoat", by Ibrahim Abdul Mu'min (2005)
"The Black Jewish or Hebrew Israelite Community", by Rabbi Sholomo Ben Levy (2009)