Antisemitism

[BmorePat87]

(07-17-2020, 06:01 PM)Dill Wrote: Sure, but it's "worse" when "Blacks do it too," setting up deflections of white racism and the like. Someone like Martin, teaching in the Africana area, should know that.

So I am curious as to why some Black scholars would go that direction, given they supposedly get more history and are held to higher professional standards than laypersons. It's understandable that people with little secular history and a lot of fundamentalist religion might be subject to more magical narrative making. If Pat Robertson and millions of followers think that Hurricane Katrina was punishment for feminism and tolerance for gay rights, then no surprise some of their minority counterparts could buy into claims that slavery was divine punishment upon the "real" Jews.

This phenomenon suggests to me there is a subculture influencing Black politics I know little about and whose appeal is broader than I expected. Perhaps it is enabled by the same breakdown in social authority that enables birther and truther conspiracies to flourish.

I don’t think education will always insulate you from being influenced by prejudice. We’ve had centuries of scholars push white centric and sometimes openly racist history and scholarship. You’re bound to find a small minority within black scholarship that will go this route.

I think your remark on birther popularity holds truth too. These fringe ideals can spread so much further with the internet, and combined with the social upheaval, people are going to be attracted to antagonistic ideas.

I think identity plays a big role too. Diverse African identities were stolen because of the slave trade and reforged in the US out of survival and necessity. There’ll always be a draw to this ancestral identity, and it’s the same with white nationalists drawing on a shared European identity. White identity only exists to serve as an “us” against “them”, having been a foreign concept until recent centuries as almost any white person wpuod have identified with their ethnicity rather than the concept of race. 120 years ago, Italian wasn’t “white”.

So I think the need to forge a unifying identity led to adopting this mythology of the original chosen people of the Abrahamic god, and while it seems counter intuitive to then vilify a similarly subjugated people, it was a necessity to hold that identity