Should Jews be worried about the author's statement that "50% of Muslims in America hold antisemitic views" while the current president wants to increase Muslim immigration seven-fold? And what will that mean to the state of antisemitism in America?
I've been a moderate Democrat my whole life but I can no longer support this Democratic Party. President Obama, who I voted for twice, ratcheted up this divisiveness during his second term. I now see him as having been the quintessential wolf in sheep's clothing. He put his stamp on identity politics and supported the false narratives of the racial grievance industry. Two strong human emotions are at play in having gotten us to this low place in American history: GUILT and FEAR. Shelby Steele, the kind and brilliant black scholar, gave a speech "Is White Guilt Destroying the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement," in which he opined that far too many white people have allowed race baiters to instill in them collective white guilt; and that because of this, white people have allowed themselves to be extorted and bullied for fear of being labeled a racist. Steele exhorts whites to acknowledge how far Whites and America have come in righting the wrongs of its' past and he asks Whites to stop allowing race baiters to silence them. I come from a family of leftist "activists" and have been slandered by two of my four sisters; labeled a "racist" for daring to suggest that they read Heather McDonald's book "The War on Cops." I did this to offer a different perspective on the BLM narrative that cops disproportionately kill blacks because cops are imbued with homicidal racism. But for far too many on the left there is only one perspective, and any person who dares to stray from the cult narrative is to be demonized and then destroyed. I'm sure it was their goal to permanently silence me from ever again daring to challenge their Stalinist dogma, but SILENCE is no longer an option for me. This is a safe forum for me and I assume many of the other's who joined this group. But in order to counter this totalitarian force that is menacing our country we must take chances. I am 65 years old and semi retired. I'm not in a position to lose my job or livelihood but I've lost friends, I've lost siblings, and I've been viciously slandered. I will no longer be cowed by these bullies, nor will I ever again remain silent in the face of anyone who spews anti-male or anti-white bigotry in my presence. The totalitarian left has been enabled too long and it's high time that they be put on their heels; to do otherwise will only continue to embolden them. Right now they can just about say whatever ignorant, bigoted, and deceitful thing they want with relative impunity. We must all, including myself, become more courageous and follow the lead of brave journalists like Ms. Weiss. Lastly, there is power in numbers and the Democrats know how to wield that kind of group power. Conservative, Moderates, and Classical Liberals need to join forces and let our numbers be seen and heard. After watching the Capital "riots" I recognize that there is peril to gathering in large groups, but I'm hoping that was an aberration. I live in the Chicago Metropolitan area and am willing to give my time to any event that serves to further the cause of defeating this culture of hatred and division that has seemingly come to dominate the Party I once supported.
Mr Martin, Thank you for your clear observation of the damage that obama has caused this country. I have felt as if I was by myself in that observation. The hatred from the marxist left of obama and his group is continuing on unabated and needs to be understood by more on the left that it is only damaging this country.
It's a strange aspect of internet commenting that someone can read an authors words and still not really "see" what they're saying and too boot, go on to assert the opposite of writers explanation. For example, Zaid said the following:
"The most important thing he impressed on me, calmly and without shaming me, was that my classmate, like me, was an individual. He wasn’t an avatar of some kind of monolithic group. And neither was I."
"Critical Race Theory sees people not as individuals, but more like the Borg from Star Trek. It insists that white people are inevitably oppressors and that African-Americans are inherently oppressed. And everyone else, like Schrödinger’s cat, exist in a kind of liminal position, playing the role of victims or victimizers depending on the situation."
"So why are so many self-described liberals embracing an ideology that seems to insist that white racism is the only kind of racism? That bigotry only counts when the perpetrator comes from a “powerful” group? That denies that the same person can be both a victim and a victimizer?"
"I suspect that many white liberals — ridden with guilt over American history and biases that still exist among the white majority — believe they are doing minorities like me a favor by denying us the responsibility of addressing our own prejudices. Critical race theorists often argue that the true definition of racism should be prejudice plus power, implying that only whites can be racist But hidden within that construction is the assumption that minorities can never be powerful."
And yet in a comment to this piece we get this:
"We want America to be a place where minorities feel as if this is their country too, where they don't feel persecuted for the way they were born. I think Heather McGhee's new book The Sum of Us explains a big part of the problem well. Americans (especially white Americans) need to understand how people of color are systematically disadvantaged, and how this current system actually hurts all of us.
This is a big part of why CRT ideology makes it difficult to have an honest conversation without treating people like avatars. One person says, "minorities are not disempowered and we all have different perspectives on how we feel about the state of race relations" And in response we get, essentially, "oh yes you are disempowered, persecuted and disadvantaged, and whites better think so and feel sorry for you."
Note the "we" that began the comment. We (whites) are a monolith. We want minorities (who are also a monolith) to feel the way we want them to. And we think minorities can be helped by our benevolent "understanding" or we're all doomed.
Now I'm absolutely sure this commenter means well. Perhaps in a way this person has been programmed to respond in such a knee-jerk fashion to a minority saying he is not suffering from racists around every corner. Maybe he honestly believes, in spite of Zaid's point about POC being able to be racist, that the only way to eliminate race based hate is for whites to read books by the right people, repeat things said by the right people, and to do "the work." Apparently part of this "work" is to remind brown folks that they can't take care of themselves even after they say they can and do just fine without help from the white anointed.
This talking past each other may be a bigger problem than the racism we all abhor. If we can't even listen, take time to reflect, and ask questions of each other, how can we move past the narratives of minorities being victims only and whites being our only hope for racial reckoning? Pointing and calling someone racist does the same thing. We can't talk to someone and say, "why do you feel this way?" and actually pause for the answer.
Listening and curiosity will help us understand each other a lot more than deciding how "we" want "them" to feel. Great piece!
Thank God for that thoughtful school administrator who set you on a path of discovery. Looks like we're all the better for it. I'm sure there are other school officials doing the same in our current climate, but my fear is that they are few and far between. This is a great piece and I'm so pleased to find a new writer to follow. Thank you.
It's outrageous that only one type of shooting by one type of shooter using one type of weapon is cause for outrage. Young black men are dying at the hands of other young black men, in droves, in every major city in America; but somehow that doesn't count.
Credentialed people, who consider themselves smarter than average, think that banning guns will stop the slaughter. If you ask them who will have the guns the day after the ban is passed and 450 million guns are magically vacuumed up they get flustered and dismiss you. If you mention that these perps and their victims come from schools with a 50% plus dropout rate and that the phony test scores have them reading at only a 3rd grade level you will be severely castigated. If you point out the absence of fathers in these neighborhoods you might need a bodyguard.
CRT does nothing for the people it presumes to speak for. It co-ops a genuine crisis to help the race baiters amass more power.
People want jobs and a chance to go to a decent school or at least a peaceful school with some structure. It's really that simple. The guns will disappear on their own as people are given access to the school of their choice. Education and skills and safety will bring jobs. This will take decades so we'd better start now.
I come from one of these neighborhoods. I am white. But black or white you feel afraid and helpless 24/7. You feel worthless. You just want the chance to go to the school of your choice not be forced into some raging hell hole that exists to provide job security to some education functionary.
Hate comes at you from all sides no matter your color in these dysfunctional places.. Hate is everywhere. It's a life sentence for the victim. You never get over the fear. I left the neighborhood at 23 and feel terrible guilt for leaving so many friends and family behind. Guilt and shame and fear make it hard to study and move ahead. I finally made it to the bottom rung of the ladder. I'm holding on for dear life. I still wake up out of breath and sweating all these years later. I'm being chased again by people who have nothing to lose - who hate me for no reason. I feel nothing but shame the rest of the day because I let it happen again. Because I ran like a coward again. Shame and fear trigger each other and consume you. It doesn't matter what color you are.
Then I go to work at a very progressive place filled with well meaning suburban white people confessing their privilege and expecting the same from me and I just want to cry.
Those of you with power and influence please help to fix these hell holes. Don't use us. Don't pit us against each other. Fucking do something - for a change!
"Then I go to work at a very progressive place filled with well meaning suburban white people confessing their privilege and expecting the same from me and I just want to cry."
Until we have honest conversations based on truth, we will never achieve our potential. Thank you for this. And God bless that administrator who saw humanity in all people. Just like we all should be doing.
Well written. And timely... My company (large corporation of course) has jumped on the bandwagon of bringing light to crimes against Asians, but has leaned towards white supremacy being the problem. They linked to the Stop AAPI Hate newsletter that ONLY shared stories of racism from white perpetrators.
Being Asian myself, and in quite a fury as I had just read it before a meeting with my manager, I not so calmly explained to him how misleading it all was, and later forwarded him a different article Zaid had written.
While top brass has gone woke, I’ve been blessed with sympathetic direct managers. Ones who are fighting to see if I truly have to attend our required racial bias training. I vehemently spoke up that coming from a communist country, with family members that were sent to re-education camps—I was insulted that they posted a quote from a “civil rights leader” (known communist) on the training materials...among other things.
Having a communist country history — it provides a natural, built-in BS sensor against CRT.
This is such an important narrative. We are none of us "avatars of a monolithic group" but each independent, free-thinking and sometimes contradictory beings with unique life experiences and perspectives. We marginalize people of all races when we try to put them into neat conforming boxes like this. Indeed, it is a very taboo subject to publicly point out that the majority of anti-Asian hate crimes have been perpetrated by Black men because it flies in the face of the woke narrative that only whites can be racist oppressors, and that the historically oppressed can never be faulted for the bad actions their disadvantaged status has "caused" them to take. Please let us regard one another rightly as individuals and not as caricatures propagated by radical progressives, who would divide us all.
Should Jews be worried about the author's statement that "50% of Muslims in America hold antisemitic views" while the current president wants to increase Muslim immigration seven-fold? And what will that mean to the state of antisemitism in America?
I've been a moderate Democrat my whole life but I can no longer support this Democratic Party. President Obama, who I voted for twice, ratcheted up this divisiveness during his second term. I now see him as having been the quintessential wolf in sheep's clothing. He put his stamp on identity politics and supported the false narratives of the racial grievance industry. Two strong human emotions are at play in having gotten us to this low place in American history: GUILT and FEAR. Shelby Steele, the kind and brilliant black scholar, gave a speech "Is White Guilt Destroying the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement," in which he opined that far too many white people have allowed race baiters to instill in them collective white guilt; and that because of this, white people have allowed themselves to be extorted and bullied for fear of being labeled a racist. Steele exhorts whites to acknowledge how far Whites and America have come in righting the wrongs of its' past and he asks Whites to stop allowing race baiters to silence them. I come from a family of leftist "activists" and have been slandered by two of my four sisters; labeled a "racist" for daring to suggest that they read Heather McDonald's book "The War on Cops." I did this to offer a different perspective on the BLM narrative that cops disproportionately kill blacks because cops are imbued with homicidal racism. But for far too many on the left there is only one perspective, and any person who dares to stray from the cult narrative is to be demonized and then destroyed. I'm sure it was their goal to permanently silence me from ever again daring to challenge their Stalinist dogma, but SILENCE is no longer an option for me. This is a safe forum for me and I assume many of the other's who joined this group. But in order to counter this totalitarian force that is menacing our country we must take chances. I am 65 years old and semi retired. I'm not in a position to lose my job or livelihood but I've lost friends, I've lost siblings, and I've been viciously slandered. I will no longer be cowed by these bullies, nor will I ever again remain silent in the face of anyone who spews anti-male or anti-white bigotry in my presence. The totalitarian left has been enabled too long and it's high time that they be put on their heels; to do otherwise will only continue to embolden them. Right now they can just about say whatever ignorant, bigoted, and deceitful thing they want with relative impunity. We must all, including myself, become more courageous and follow the lead of brave journalists like Ms. Weiss. Lastly, there is power in numbers and the Democrats know how to wield that kind of group power. Conservative, Moderates, and Classical Liberals need to join forces and let our numbers be seen and heard. After watching the Capital "riots" I recognize that there is peril to gathering in large groups, but I'm hoping that was an aberration. I live in the Chicago Metropolitan area and am willing to give my time to any event that serves to further the cause of defeating this culture of hatred and division that has seemingly come to dominate the Party I once supported.
Mr Martin, Thank you for your clear observation of the damage that obama has caused this country. I have felt as if I was by myself in that observation. The hatred from the marxist left of obama and his group is continuing on unabated and needs to be understood by more on the left that it is only damaging this country.
I think we should always differentiate between hatred and prejudice (and indifference).
It's a strange aspect of internet commenting that someone can read an authors words and still not really "see" what they're saying and too boot, go on to assert the opposite of writers explanation. For example, Zaid said the following:
"The most important thing he impressed on me, calmly and without shaming me, was that my classmate, like me, was an individual. He wasn’t an avatar of some kind of monolithic group. And neither was I."
"Critical Race Theory sees people not as individuals, but more like the Borg from Star Trek. It insists that white people are inevitably oppressors and that African-Americans are inherently oppressed. And everyone else, like Schrödinger’s cat, exist in a kind of liminal position, playing the role of victims or victimizers depending on the situation."
"So why are so many self-described liberals embracing an ideology that seems to insist that white racism is the only kind of racism? That bigotry only counts when the perpetrator comes from a “powerful” group? That denies that the same person can be both a victim and a victimizer?"
"I suspect that many white liberals — ridden with guilt over American history and biases that still exist among the white majority — believe they are doing minorities like me a favor by denying us the responsibility of addressing our own prejudices. Critical race theorists often argue that the true definition of racism should be prejudice plus power, implying that only whites can be racist But hidden within that construction is the assumption that minorities can never be powerful."
And yet in a comment to this piece we get this:
"We want America to be a place where minorities feel as if this is their country too, where they don't feel persecuted for the way they were born. I think Heather McGhee's new book The Sum of Us explains a big part of the problem well. Americans (especially white Americans) need to understand how people of color are systematically disadvantaged, and how this current system actually hurts all of us.
This is a big part of why CRT ideology makes it difficult to have an honest conversation without treating people like avatars. One person says, "minorities are not disempowered and we all have different perspectives on how we feel about the state of race relations" And in response we get, essentially, "oh yes you are disempowered, persecuted and disadvantaged, and whites better think so and feel sorry for you."
Note the "we" that began the comment. We (whites) are a monolith. We want minorities (who are also a monolith) to feel the way we want them to. And we think minorities can be helped by our benevolent "understanding" or we're all doomed.
Now I'm absolutely sure this commenter means well. Perhaps in a way this person has been programmed to respond in such a knee-jerk fashion to a minority saying he is not suffering from racists around every corner. Maybe he honestly believes, in spite of Zaid's point about POC being able to be racist, that the only way to eliminate race based hate is for whites to read books by the right people, repeat things said by the right people, and to do "the work." Apparently part of this "work" is to remind brown folks that they can't take care of themselves even after they say they can and do just fine without help from the white anointed.
This talking past each other may be a bigger problem than the racism we all abhor. If we can't even listen, take time to reflect, and ask questions of each other, how can we move past the narratives of minorities being victims only and whites being our only hope for racial reckoning? Pointing and calling someone racist does the same thing. We can't talk to someone and say, "why do you feel this way?" and actually pause for the answer.
Listening and curiosity will help us understand each other a lot more than deciding how "we" want "them" to feel. Great piece!
This was a truly excellent post and the message is so needed in America today. Thank you!!!!
Outstanding, Zaid. I look forward to more. Bari, thank you for publishing Zaid's essay here. Solidarity!
Damn. Dead on. Well done Zaid
Thank God for that thoughtful school administrator who set you on a path of discovery. Looks like we're all the better for it. I'm sure there are other school officials doing the same in our current climate, but my fear is that they are few and far between. This is a great piece and I'm so pleased to find a new writer to follow. Thank you.
It's outrageous that only one type of shooting by one type of shooter using one type of weapon is cause for outrage. Young black men are dying at the hands of other young black men, in droves, in every major city in America; but somehow that doesn't count.
Credentialed people, who consider themselves smarter than average, think that banning guns will stop the slaughter. If you ask them who will have the guns the day after the ban is passed and 450 million guns are magically vacuumed up they get flustered and dismiss you. If you mention that these perps and their victims come from schools with a 50% plus dropout rate and that the phony test scores have them reading at only a 3rd grade level you will be severely castigated. If you point out the absence of fathers in these neighborhoods you might need a bodyguard.
CRT does nothing for the people it presumes to speak for. It co-ops a genuine crisis to help the race baiters amass more power.
People want jobs and a chance to go to a decent school or at least a peaceful school with some structure. It's really that simple. The guns will disappear on their own as people are given access to the school of their choice. Education and skills and safety will bring jobs. This will take decades so we'd better start now.
I come from one of these neighborhoods. I am white. But black or white you feel afraid and helpless 24/7. You feel worthless. You just want the chance to go to the school of your choice not be forced into some raging hell hole that exists to provide job security to some education functionary.
Hate comes at you from all sides no matter your color in these dysfunctional places.. Hate is everywhere. It's a life sentence for the victim. You never get over the fear. I left the neighborhood at 23 and feel terrible guilt for leaving so many friends and family behind. Guilt and shame and fear make it hard to study and move ahead. I finally made it to the bottom rung of the ladder. I'm holding on for dear life. I still wake up out of breath and sweating all these years later. I'm being chased again by people who have nothing to lose - who hate me for no reason. I feel nothing but shame the rest of the day because I let it happen again. Because I ran like a coward again. Shame and fear trigger each other and consume you. It doesn't matter what color you are.
Then I go to work at a very progressive place filled with well meaning suburban white people confessing their privilege and expecting the same from me and I just want to cry.
Those of you with power and influence please help to fix these hell holes. Don't use us. Don't pit us against each other. Fucking do something - for a change!
"Then I go to work at a very progressive place filled with well meaning suburban white people confessing their privilege and expecting the same from me and I just want to cry."
Oh, man. Yeah. :-(
Boy, well said.
Hear, hear. Superbly written, and devastating.
Would be interesting to see if this newsletter could be expanded into a full-fledged publication
Bravo!
Until we have honest conversations based on truth, we will never achieve our potential. Thank you for this. And God bless that administrator who saw humanity in all people. Just like we all should be doing.
Excellent. And the community comments are so well articulated and thought provoking.
Well written. And timely... My company (large corporation of course) has jumped on the bandwagon of bringing light to crimes against Asians, but has leaned towards white supremacy being the problem. They linked to the Stop AAPI Hate newsletter that ONLY shared stories of racism from white perpetrators.
Being Asian myself, and in quite a fury as I had just read it before a meeting with my manager, I not so calmly explained to him how misleading it all was, and later forwarded him a different article Zaid had written.
While top brass has gone woke, I’ve been blessed with sympathetic direct managers. Ones who are fighting to see if I truly have to attend our required racial bias training. I vehemently spoke up that coming from a communist country, with family members that were sent to re-education camps—I was insulted that they posted a quote from a “civil rights leader” (known communist) on the training materials...among other things.
Having a communist country history — it provides a natural, built-in BS sensor against CRT.
Thanks Bari. Love this newsletter.
p.s. Zaid, you're lucky that journal wasn't online or on social media or you'd be forced to resign in today's cancel wars (like the teen vogue EIC)
This is such an important narrative. We are none of us "avatars of a monolithic group" but each independent, free-thinking and sometimes contradictory beings with unique life experiences and perspectives. We marginalize people of all races when we try to put them into neat conforming boxes like this. Indeed, it is a very taboo subject to publicly point out that the majority of anti-Asian hate crimes have been perpetrated by Black men because it flies in the face of the woke narrative that only whites can be racist oppressors, and that the historically oppressed can never be faulted for the bad actions their disadvantaged status has "caused" them to take. Please let us regard one another rightly as individuals and not as caricatures propagated by radical progressives, who would divide us all.