I haven’t been a big booster of of James Lindsay since he announced he was voting for Trump, but since he’s done good work before (his book with Helen Pluckrose on the intellectual origins of critical theory is a must-read), and because I don’t erase people just because they vote for morons, I want to highlight his latest essay on his New Discourses website (click on screenshot to read). It is in fact a good analysis of the dilemma Wokesters face when confronted with “the Jewish question”, though, unfortunately, the essay is more than twice as long as it needs to be.
What is the problem? It’s how to regard the Jews if you’re Woke. Are they white? Where do they fit in the hierarchy of oppression that’s a leading tenet of Critical Theory? After all, Jews have been historically oppressed, and even today are demonized not just in the Middle East, but are the most frequent victims of ethnic or religious group “hate crimes” (on a per capita basis) in America. They get attacked regularly in France. And many Jews aren’t even “white”, whether you go by genetics, pigmentation, or historical victimization.
So we have a group of high achievers, who were historically oppressed and are still marginalized by many, but who are also seen by the woke and many on the Left as oppressors, and de facto as white people who must check their privilege since they’ve benefitted from their “white privilege”. (Some chowderheads have tried to classify Ashkenazi Jews as “white” and Sephardic Jews as “people of color”, but that’s a ridiculous exercise that will go nowhere).
The dilemma of how to regard Jews been resolved by ignoring their historical oppression and the attacks on them that still occur in the West, and considering them identical to whites regarded as universal oppressors. In fact, it’s even worse because Jews are associated with Israel, which itself is seen as “colonialist”, so all Jews carry the taint of that as well. The upshot is that Jews appear to have risen to the top of the oppression scale (i.e., the least oppressed), despite the undeniable fact of their oppression for two millennia. The problem that Lindsay outlines that it’s hard to justify this placement using Critical Race Theory itself.
A few quotes from Lindsay:
Under Critical Race Theory, many Jews are Theorized as having been granted and to some degree embraced—as a matter of effectively indisputable fact if not explicitly in both cases—the status of “whiteness” in contemporary American (and sometimes European) society. This would imply that under Critical Race Theory, Jews have an intolerable privilege they need to check. So demands the new “successor” ideology Weiss warns about in her Tablet piece.
Placing aside the obvious complication that not all Jews are white by any reasonable definition (which therefore may not have anything to do with Critical Race Theory’s definitions), there’s a huge problem with this formulation that every Jewish reader of this essay will immediately realize. Jews have quite the incredible history of incredible oppression, including imperial destruction, diaspora, enslavement, and a literal genocide in the Holocaust. This set of horrors tended to follow a familiar pattern as well, which we now name “anti-Semitism.” That pattern is that Jews are made out to be a group that stands by its own claim as separate from broader society in some significant way and yet finds a way to gain significant privilege, eventually to the point of usurping control of the institutions that shape society. We would be remiss to avoid pointing out that assigning “whiteness” to Jews repeats the opening act of this tragic play.
More:
The uniquely Jewish combination of a long history of terrible oppression of a people that isn’t just (at least partly) fair-skinned but also highly successful in what the Theorists would deem a “white” milieu is, in fact, completely intolerable to Critical Race Theory. The Theory distrusts Jewish success as such and, as with everything it analyzes, believes it must have something to do with having been granted access to the privileges of whiteness—illegitimately, by betrayal, and at the expense of blacks. It would then, in due course, demand that (“white”) Jews accept and atone of their whiteness by the familiar process: recognize it in themselves, acknowledge their de facto complicity in “white supremacy,” critique their own unwitting participation therein, and then submit to and promote the Critical Race Theory worldview in both ideology and deed, which takes the form of their brand of “anti-racist” social activism—for life. This, however, requires asking Jews to deny both their history and what makes them Jews in the first place.
The crux of the problem:
Adherents to Critical Race Theory, for all their claims upon sophistication in analyzing group standing in society and its subtle meanings in terms of power, do not possess the conceptual resources needed to deal with historically oppressed white people—unless they’re fat, disabled, maybe gay (that’s complicated now), or trans, none of which would have anything to do with them being Jewish in any case. Critical Race Theory therefore places Jewish people into a very dangerous spot within their Theory: they are a group that has tremendous privilege they don’t deserve who also have an apparently ironclad excuse not to “do the work” of dismantling their own whiteness.
Below: its effect on college students. Many Jewish students have experienced pretty severe opprobrium, always accused of being boosters of Israel, even when they aren’t or don’t think about it. The inevitable association with “colonialist” Israel (anti-Zionism) is one way that Woke anti-Semites use to alleviate their cognitive dissonance. Here’s a quote from a Tablet essay by Bari Weiss:
“It’s hard to overstate how suffocating this worldview is to specifically Jewish college students,” Blake Flayton, a progressive Jewish student at GW, wrote me recently. “We don’t fit into ‘oppressor’ or ‘oppressed’ categories. We are both privileged and marginalized, protected by those in power and yet targeted by the same racist lunatics as those who target people of color. The hatred we experience on campus has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It’s because Jews defy anti-racist ideology simply by existing. So it’s not so much that Zionism is racism. It’s that Jewishness is.”
Let me pull that out for you. This isn’t about Zionism or landlords or capitalism or AIPAC. We live in a world in which everyone is being told to side either with the “racists” or the “anti-racists.” Jews who refuse to erase what makes us different will increasingly be defined as racists, often with the help of other Jews desperate to be accepted by the cool kids.
One more note on the ludicrous lengths that the Woke go to ignore the historical oppression of the Jews. This comes, unsurprisingly, from the anti-Semitic Linda Sarsour, and the quote is from an academic paper, “Critical Whiteness Studies and the ‘Jewish Problem’ by Balázs Berkovits:
Linda Sarsour, the “new face of intersectional feminism,” who had also been invited to the “Jews of color” gathering before she participated in the panel on antisemitism at the New School for Social Research, was very clear on the subject. Speaking in a video published by the Jewish Voice for Peace, she said: “I want to make the distinction that while anti-Semitism is something that impacts Jewish Americans, it’s different than anti-black racism or Islamophobia because it’s not systemic. […] Of course, you may experience vandalism or an attack on a synagogue, or maybe on an individual level… but it’s not systemic, and we need to make that distinction.” Here, Sarsour implies that first, it is not a collective or structural phenomenon, but the sum of scattered individual acts, and second, and more importantly, that antisemitic attacks carried out by other minorities (which is most often the case) cannot be significant, for those are not the actions of the dominant (white) groups, who determine the permanence of structural racism. The theoretical underpinning of this view, besides “intersectionality,” comes from a theory of structural racism. (pp. 88–89)
Critical Theory has other problems, too, for Muslims are seen on the one hand as people of color, but on the other can be seen as oppressors—especially in Muslim countries that oppress gays, women, apostates, atheists, and, of course, the rare Jews who still live in such countries.
I wish someone would dump Linda Soursewer in Mauritania, without her cell-phone.
The problem for the Woke is that Jews have long been oppressed and yet they are generally pretty successful in Western societies. And they have succeeded, not through external factors such as reparations, but through their own efforts. One can see why that concept is anathema to Critical Race Theorists.
I think the other issue is that woke thought seems to buy into this myth that all minorities have to be one big happy family. Thus if Jews and Palestinians are both oppressed minorities, but they also politically oppose each other, then one of them can’t count as a minority. If they were both minorities, that would imply the world is not simply divided into majority oppressors and minority victims, and we can’t have that now can we?
I’ve mentioned before that I came to the United States at age 9, not knowing English. At that time, most American public schools were overwhelmingly English speaking, so I had a full immersion. (I may have been one of 2 or 3 Spanish speakers in my elementary school.)
But working hard-especially pronunciation which in English can be hellish; wanting very much to learn, being a reader, and the factors above meant that I know English better than most educated people. (My parents never learned English, a typical immigrant story.)
At some point I noticed a strange phenomenon: certain people would get upset when I would tell them that I came to the US not knowing English, even putting me through a kind of Socratic back-and-forth to see if I was lying.
And here is the punch line: every one of those people were progressives, even one who said that the reason I spoke English as well as I do is because I am “white”.
My background in the progressive mind meant “victimhood”, yet my speaking meant educated and upper-middle class. My presence and achievement upset because it’s an affront to what a normative victim ought to be.
I think what I experience is very present, in much, much larger quantities, to what Lindsay writes about and some commenters on this thread have noted.
BTW, Asians are now in the same boat and I think most know how many people react to their accomplishments.
Oh, I feel you.
When I worked for an art museum where a good percentage of the curators and administrators were trust fund babies, they gave lip service to the idea of people climbing up out of poverty, hard work, the American Dream, blah, blah, but these people also bragged about what colleges their grandmothers went to. Then first-generation college graduate me comes along, lets out a few details about my life, and wham! It’s a conversation-stopper.
That scene in “Hillbilly Elegy” where the main character halts conversation at a white-tie dinner with details of his past and someone refers to “rednecks”? Well, a supposedly progressive person asked me if I was “white trash.”
Might I inquire as to how you responded to the “progressive person?”
This simply reflects a new twist on ancient anti-Semitic dichotomies — that Jews are clannish separatists, yet bent upon infiltrating the wider goyishe society; that they wield vast hidden powers to be feared, yet are Untermenschen to be loathed.
At bottom, the same old tired crap.
If Critical Race Theory was based on sound data and reason then it would be able to cope with cases like the Jewish ‘race’ or other ‘edge cases’. But since it cannot deal with these cases Critical Race Theory is unsound and shouldn’t be used to determine peoples’ lives.
If you argued that CRT was really about ‘white man bad’ rather than ‘victim person good’ then it would be more consistent internally, but throw its flaws in sharper focus.
But isn’t Critical Theory one of those fiendish Jewish inventions to undermine society? 🙂
sub
“Critical Theory has other problems, too, for Muslims are seen on the one hand as people of color, but on the other can be seen as oppressors” – agreed, but are there any examples of Critical theorists calling them out?
From my understanding, Arab Muslims are considered POC, but Arab Christians are not.
Not only is the theory based on unsound suppositions and poor observation of humanity, it is not even close to consistent.
That is why it cannot account for Jews or Asians or even high-achieving African immigrants.
Someone will always be the rich peasant.
Aha, more about Cultural Theory.
Once upon a time, the word “theory” in the sciences referred to grand, overarching generalizations which unified and explained many different observations and data. Examples include the Cell Theory, the germ theory of disease, the theory of evolution through natural selection, the atomic theory, the kinetic theory of gases, plate tectonics theory, Einstein’s special relativity theory, and so on. Far-reaching generalizations of this sort achieve general acceptance because they are in turn confirmed by the many disparate kinds of data that they unify.
But postmodernists, who have been grazing in the groves of academe for the last two generations, insist that the independent physical world from which data are drawn is a mere “social construct”, or just another narrative among many, like Beowulf, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Marvel Comics. So the concept of corroboration by data was lost on them. But they were impressed by the universal acceptance of these general theories in the sciences, and concluded that the key to their acceptance must lie in the magic word “Theory”. Why not, they said to themselves and to each other, attach the same magic word to their own vaporings?
And so were born such academic buzzwords as Post-Structuralist Theory, Critical Cultural Theory, Critical Race Theory, Gender Theory, Media Theory, Feminist Theory, Post-Colonial Theory, and so on, including the best of them all, Queer Theory. [For this droll locution, we can apparently thank Professor Judith Butler of Berkeley, whose expository writing in English, or something distantly related to English, is so notable.] Innumerable academic institutions took this hustle—as transparent as it would be to paste the words “Federal Reserve Note” on Monopoly play-money—seriously enough to construct whole departments of assorted mock subjects which pretended tp have “Theory”, just like Astrophysics. The rest is the history of the ivory tower in the late 20th century, from which the woke Left draws its verbiage.
It seems to me that probing the logical defects of any of these confections is rather like bringing data from the Mercury, Venus, Mars, and outer planets space probes into a discussion of Astrology.
Spot on.
A theory is essentially a framework built from a set of explicit specifications of concepts that one may invoke in presenting an account of somewell-defined domain of phenomena. No version of critical ‘theory’—of race, gender, sexuality or whatever—provides an irreducible analytic toolkit, and the domain over which that toolkit is applicable, in anything remotely close to what science understands by the word ‘theory’. Sokal and Bricmont dispatched the rubbish produced by those faux disciplines in one of the greatest lines from *genuinely* critical thought: speaking of poseurs such as Lacan, Irrigary and others of that ilk who write rubbish under the rubric of ‘theory’:
‘They imagine, perhaps, that they can exploit the prestige of the natural sciences in order to give their own discourse a veneer of rigor’.
Cargo cult scientists like to imitate hard scientists and thus use words like power dynamics, systemic oppression and intersectionality. As Chomsky said: “They can talk incomprehensibly, we can talk incomprehensibly”.
Indeed, Feynman, Chomsky, Sokal and Bricmont nailed this stuff decades ago, but amazingly many people don’t seem to have noticed.
Music keeps rediscovering the 60s and the 80s, maybe this is just the equivalent for pseudo-intellectuals.
I recently followed a ‘Gender & Intersectionality’ MOOC. The Course Leaders presented a puff piece from the source of note ‘USA Today’ on the leaders of the 2017 Women’s March, Sarsour, Perez and Mallory. I pointed out their antisemitism to the CLs. They replied that was not relevant and that I should stick to the point which the course was making. Which seemed to be that everything is terrible and we are nice: cool, even.
I responded that I could provide links to show their AS (thanks for the work you did, Jerry, on that – invaluable). I suggested that they might consider revising their course materials.
No response. They had prepared a devastating meme on ‘Mansplaining’ as a runic addition to the academic canon. It may have been aimed at me. Who knows what it was doing in a MOOC? That was before they asked us to fill out a teen-mag-style questionnaire called ‘Check Your Privilege’. Peer-reviewed by BuzzFeed, apparently.
I’ve informed their bosses of their colleagues’ indifference to hymns of praise to conspiracy theorists, as well as of other dishonest academic presentations in their course materials. Again, no reply.
Good job, though. Thank you for speaking up
Blake Flayton says: “We are both privileged and marginalized, protected by those in power and yet targeted by the same racist lunatics as those who target people of color.”
Since people can be “targeted” by soap advertisements, the word doesn’t mean much of anything (that’s why it’s a popular term among the woke™) , but Jews in the US are physically attacked almost exclusively by black teenagers and young men, and in Europe Jews are physically attacked almost exclusively by young Muslim men.
It seems to me there is a “Muslim problem” in CRT too, since most of the world’s Muslims are Asian and not Middle Eastern and thus not “brown,” and therefore actually “white” to some chowderheads.
CRT is utterly removed from reality.
> most of the world’s Muslims are Asian and not Middle Eastern
These are included in BAME and certainly not viewed as white. Technically Chechens are white, but their numbers in Europe are too small for their status to matter.
CRT is anti-white, not anti-Jewish. So the history of the Nazis enslaving and exterminating other whites is not all that important to them.
You may say CRT is “not anti-Jewish”, but boy, are a **lot** of CRT devotees and shills massive antisemites.
“Systemic” is rapidly rising to the top of my “words and phrases I detest” list.
I wrote about the above topic a few months ago: (published variously, here first)
https://themoderatevoice.com/the-woke-and-the-lefts-israel-problem/
Secondly – Linda Sasour is SO obnoxious!
D.A., NYC
25 years ago a colleague and I identified the inevitable anti-Semitic implications of critical race theory and other radical movements: “Is the Radical Critique of Merit Anti-Semitic,” available for free here https://scholarship.law.vanderbilt.edu/faculty-publications/325/ . What’s old is new again . . . .
But the paper does not consider the woke explanation of the relative economic success of Jewish Americans, Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Indian-Americans: “white privilege”. Since the latter three groups are manifestly not white, the theory of Critical Race Theory must postulate that
these groups enjoy “implicit whiteness”. We can soon look forward to a new volume by Robin DiAngelo on the theory of implicit whiteness.
Lindsay’s text is OK, but all the core ideas were taken from the article of Balazs Berkovits, in which there is a much more systematic development. This the original one. It is also not more difficult to read.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/324145071_Critical_Whiteness_Studies_and_the_Jewish_Problem
This does an excellent job of explaining some of the issues with Critical Race Theory