Racism Starts With Discrimination

… And discrimination starts with distinctions one should not make. In particular with physical appearances, such as the color of the skin. Official philosophers, paid to philosophize by institutions of advanced learning, tend to hopelessly small thoughts, most rewarding to their ultimate employers, who are always looking for ever more efficient ways to make us all stupid and divided (Divide and imperially rule (the Romans said: divide et impera)). Indeed, those employers profit from great propaganda, and the deepest, most efficient propaganda is the one setting the concept, universe, and parameters, of the debate. A Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale, profits from the New York Times’ soapbox. The first part of Jason’s essay is certainly worth reading and somewhat disconnected from what I object to below… Yet it puts it in context. I reproduced it in the P/S below. Says Jason in “My Parents Mixed Message On The Holocaust”:

“I am a philosopher. My calling, at its very basic level, obligates me to question the beliefs with which I was raised. But on this topic — how to live — I was given two answers. Which view do evidence and reason command?

Plutocrats Prefer We The People To Sink Rather Than Think. Well Paid Pseudo-Philosophers Are Best For That.

Jason-the-paid-to-philosophize person pursues:

“I accept the legacy of my father. But it is impossible for me to shut out my mother’s concerns. Maybe the reality is that all groups are at war for power, and that to adopt an ethic of common humanity is a grave disadvantage. Maybe we should do what we can, but prioritize the safety of our families.

History speaks strongly on my mother’s side. So does my anecdotal evidence. I am white Jewish-American; my sons and wife are black Americans. I cannot retreat from my commitment to these groups. Being interested in the equal dignity of other groups is an additional burden.

It takes work to feel the suffering of Palestinians when I hear of the anger they bear toward my fellow Jews, even though I recognize its clearly justifiable source. It takes much more work to feel the suffering of poor white Americans when I hear it coupled with a thoroughly unjustifiable racism directed against my children. Is it work that I should be doing? Or should I be doing the work of attending primarily to the flourishing of my children?”

I sent a comment to the New York Times. It was censored. Of course. Here it is:

You call your sons “black Americans”. This makes them into what you call a “group”, and others call a “race” or a “tribe”.

Therefore you racialize and tribalize your own sons.

This is most strange, as your sons are actually, at the very least, half white Jewish-Americans. So why not call them “white Americans”?

But there is more. As most “black Americans”, even Michelle Obama, have already some “white American” ancestry, your sons are most probably more white than black. So why not call them what they are? White Americans?

Because racists anti-”black Americans” would call your sons “black Americans”? So you adopt the racist discourse to conceptualize your own sons?

To be a racist, one needs to discriminate AGAINST a “group”. To do so, one needs first to discriminate BETWEEN “groups”. Indeed, first, the “group” has to exist. Thus, to define a group by exerting enough discrimination to distinguish it is, by itself, discriminatory.

[End of comment censored by NYT. By the way, Jason the Philosopher, above, is author of “How propaganda works”]

This hostility to “racially” based discrimination is highly practical: all French Jews were not officially classified as “Jewish” by the state in France, as French law prevents the official establishment of religion or race, thus polls thereof. Thus, in France, there cannot be “groups” based on “race’, “religion”, etc. Consequence: during the Occupation of France by the Nazis, most French Jews escaped “the holocaust” (“only”, 75,000 were assassinated by the Nazis, most of them foreign Jews who had escaped to France, and whom the USA had refused to accept as refugees).

By contrast, The Netherlands required Dutch subjects who were Jewish to register as such. Conclusion: it was very easy for the Nazis to find them. Most Dutch Jews died. 125,000 of them. In comparison, the survival rate of the Jewish population in France was up to 75%, which is one of the highest survival rates in Europe. The Gestapo was much more active in France than in the Netherlands, but could not find the French Jews. In the Netherlands, IBM computer systems had them nicely listed.

In a broad perspective, classifying people under “religious” or “racial” appurtenance perpetuates religious discrimination, racial discrimination, and “racial” strife. As the USA is extremely mixed, the racial obsession boils down to treating the so-called “Blacks” differently (the “red” race has basically disappeared, and the “yellow” race is now tolerated… after being long outlawed…)

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Oh, last but not least, there was more than just one holocaust in the history of humanity. And some were more thorough. For example, the Cathars were fully (holo) burned (caust). Literally (once, in a particular mass assassination, 2,000 Cathars were burned, alive, together!) Judaism does not have the right to own the concept of “holocaust”, and to refuse to share it with any other “group”.

Doing so, monopolizing the concept and usage of “holocaust” would be an offense against countless groups, reason, and knowledge. Not a good way to avoid a repeat, or, at the very least, hostility.

As Voltaire pointed out ironically, official philosophers are not there to find the truth, but to comfort power. One does not find wisdom by following the money. Racism starts with discrimination, and, apparently, Yale philosophy professors are paid to discriminate between human groups. Not coincidentally, the famous “Skull and Bones” society was founded in Yale in the early Nineteenth Century. It inspired the Nazis, and even some of the most dreadful  SS propaganda.

We won’t build effective reason on lies, such is the overarching philosophical point against embracing “race”, supposedly to fight racism.

Patrice Ayme’

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P/S: Here is the first part of Jason’s essay, setting up the context. The New York Times (to which I subscribed for decades) has censored me so many times, for the worst reasons, that I feel morally entitled to quote it ever more:

My Parents’ Mixed Messages on the Holocaust
By Jason Stanley, Aug. 20, 2016
My childhood was privileged and fortunate. My mother was a court stenographer in criminal court, and my father was a professor of sociology at Syracuse University, who had written his doctoral thesis on British colonialism in Kenya. My parents divorced when I was young. But they each happily remarried, and in any case, when I was growing up in Syracuse in the 1970s and ’80s, it was the kids of non-divorced parents who were weird. I was on the cross-country team, the math team. And my mother and my father survived the Holocaust.

As a child, this fact was not as salient to me as it is today.

I grew up hearing stories from my father of Central Park and the Ethical Culture Society. New York City in the 1940s and ’50s seemed like a magical place. But between these stories were interspersed ones whose contrast couldn’t have been stronger.

My father told me of watching Nazi marches from his grandparents’ balcony, begging his grandparents to allow him to join. He told me what the signs on the streets said when he started learning to read. He told me of the fear of being in hiding, and of the lessons my grandmother gave him in how to dress quickly. More recently, reading family letters, I learned about the beatings he suffered on the streets of Berlin, his 5-year-old hands outstretched to fend off the truncheon blows raining down on his head.

My mother’s family is from eastern Poland. Her father served in the Polish cavalry and fled with his wife and first child when the German Army swept in. She was born in Siberia, where she spent the first five years of her life in a labor camp, surviving on potato peels.

When the war ended, she, her mother and sister were packed into the trans-Siberian railroad headed west. Her father had been taken to a separate camp before she was born. At each stop, they stepped off the train and onto the platform, praying that he had survived. One day, they stepped out of the train and there he was, bags packed. Every morning for weeks he had headed to the station, waiting to join his family, the daughter he had never met.

No one was waiting for them when they arrived in Warsaw. My grandparents had many siblings, each with large families of their own. As far as we know, no one survived. Warsaw was still a dangerous place to be Jewish. The children were put in an orphanage for their safety. One day in the late 1940s anti-Semites beat my grandfather almost to death. Soon after, United States visas arrived, and they set off for a new life in Brownsville, Brooklyn.

My parents explained to me that these pasts meant that they were not Holocaust survivors. My mother told me that in her labor camp, they were hungry, they were put to work, but no one was shooting or gassing them. When they went back to Poland, it was hard, and Jews were hated. But this, she explained, was the fate of Jews. Anti-Semitism was a permanent feature of the world, not special to the Holocaust.

My father’s reaction to describing him as a Holocaust survivor was more severe. He angrily questioned my motivations. Was I seeking a special status as a victim? He urged me to reflect about how offensive this is to those who have to actually live under oppression. He argued powerfully against the stance of the victim. It was morally dangerous, he said, using the actions of Israelis and Palestinians toward one another as an example. He was scornful when he saw signs that I was taking the Holocaust to mean that Jews were special. “If the Germans had chosen someone else,” he often said, “we would have been the very best Nazis.”

Most frequently and passionately, he would reprimand me for taking the Holocaust to be about me, or about my family. The Holocaust was about humanity. It was about what we are capable of doing to one another. It could happen again, it could happen here. The Holocaust was about everyone. Helping to prevent such events from occurring required agency and good moral sense, and good moral sense was not consistent with preferring one’s own people.

My mother’s most frequent advice was about knowing when to get out of a dangerous situation. The moment where one must accept that a situation is genuinely dangerous is usually well past the time when one can exit it. Her advice would come out especially during any patriotic moment. She was afraid I would develop an attachment to a country and would not flee early enough.

My mother and father both believed that normal people could do unimaginably terrible things. As a court stenographer in criminal court, my mother witnessed the racial injustice of the American legal system up close. I remember her sometime in the late 1980s saying to me with a rather flat affect, “They are targeting black people in this country.” That didn’t mean she was about to march out on the street in protest of injustice. That would be a completely incorrect interpretation of my mother. My mother believes that injustice is the normal, unchangeable state of things. My mother believes trust is foolishness. She thinks it is not only naïve to live as if justice were an attainable ideal; it is self-destructive. My mother believes they will kill you if they can.

My father was always critical of Israel’s policies toward Palestinians, convinced that the establishment of the state of Israel was implicated in the horrors of colonialism. He was equally abhorrent of Palestinian violence toward Israeli citizens. I grew up hearing other American Jews speak of Palestinians in pre-genocidal ways; that Palestinians have always wanted to kill the Jews, and must therefore be kept locked away and controlled. Regular exposure to such talk has made me permanently afraid for the safety of the Palestinian people. Comparisons between Israeli treatment of Palestinians and Nazi treatment of Jews are absurd. But my background has made me sensitive to the grimmest of even remote future possibilities. I have exactly the same reactions when I hear such rhetoric directed against Israeli citizens.

After the passage I quoted and used in the essay, Jason the paid-philosopher concludes by saying more work should be done… Right… But, so doing, praises the idea and practice of groupthink at its most basic, namely thinking by groups, for groups; he also normalizes racism, by claiming “a world… with equal human dignity… is no doubt far-off“; in other words Jason rationalizes and justifies US racism has the norm; well, sorry, Jason, but I (mostly) met institutionalized and in-my-face racism in the USA (although some racists bombed me in France). Here is Jason’s conclusion:

It takes work to feel the suffering of Palestinians when I hear of the anger they bear toward my fellow Jews, even though I recognize its clearly justifiable source. It takes much more work to feel the suffering of poor white Americans when I hear it coupled with a thoroughly unjustifiable racism directed against my children. Is it work that I should be doing? Or should I be doing the work of attending primarily to the flourishing of my children?

If equal human dignity for all groups is impossible, then my mother is right: Striving for it as an ideal is not only naïve, it is dangerous for our families. While we are striving, there will be violations, which we will then overlook at our peril. And yet, for all we know, equal human dignity is possible. And so taking my mother’s view of life will most likely diminish this possibility.

A world in which this ideal is realized is no doubt far-off. The temptation to surrender it is strong. But history has provided us with too many events that show how important it is not to be complicit in making it unattainable.

    

Tags: Black Americans, Discrimination, Philosopher, racism