OPINION:
In an opinion poll recently published by YouGov, 20% of Americans 18 to 29 believed that the Holocaust is a “myth.” And 23% said that they agreed with the statement: “The Holocaust has been exaggerated.” Furthermore, DEI intersectionality groups, including LGBTQ organizations, have issued statements in recent weeks dismissing the Holocaust.
These antisemitic views held by young Americans do not arise in a vacuum. We doubt that college professors all of a sudden began teaching the works of David Irving — an infamous Holocaust-denying historian. Instead, the rise of Jew hatred on college campuses is the direct result of the authoritative status of diversity, equity and inclusion ideology throughout American educational institutions.
The actors in DEI thinking are categories, not individuals. DEI teaches that White people are the oppressor race, and its categorical thinking then implicitly adds to this the unspoken assumption that all White people are, in some metaphysical sense, the same person.
It is this implicit assumption that allowed critical race theory founder Derrick Bell to refer to a ruling defending a White person against discrimination as “protection of whites’ race-based privilege” in his 1992 article “Racial Realism.”
Bell argued that the ruling was “ignoring social questions about which race in fact has power and advantages and which race has been denied entry for centuries into academia.” Here, the claims that erase the harm of discriminating against one White person are actually claims about other White people.
DEI does not seek to harm White people; rather, it defines harm to White people as not harm because they are members of the White race, which amounts to the same thing. Thus, the target that DEI seeks to destroy is not racial discrimination but colorblindness.
As DEI philosopher Ibram X. Kendi put it in his influential 2019 book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” “The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.”
Then, what is the link between anti-White sentiment and Jew-hatred and Holocaust-denying? The connection is simple. Since Jews are perceived as White by the DEI crowd and White people are oppressors, then Jews, who are “successful Whites,” are viewed as “primo Whites.”
On the popular podcast of Glenn Loury, an economics professor at Brown University, he hosted a former DEI officer at California’s De Anza College named Tabia Lee. In their talk, Ms. Lee explained that she had brought to her school’s DEI committee the concerns of Jewish students and faculty at the institution about the rise in antisemitism on campus, asking to make a statement condemning it.
The DEI committee members and the supervising dean rejected her request, stating that “Jews are White oppressors” and their goal should be “decentering whiteness.”
From here to Holocaust denial, the logic is simple: White people are oppressors and cannot be oppressed. Therefore, it is impossible that Jews, as White oppressors, can actually be the victims of one of history’s most atrocious crimes. In other words, since the genocide of Jews does not fit the DEI narrative of oppressor vs oppressed, it must not be true, or at least not as big a deal.
Therefore, it is no surprise that the DEI-captured media have gone silent on anti-Jewish hate crimes over the past few years, and there were no solidarity protests by “anti-racist” activists, despite Jews being the No. 1 target of hate crimes per capita for many years, according to FBI statistics. If Jews, who are first-class Whites, are targeted, it’s not news, given their privilege and oppressor status.
So what should be done about it? Start with raising awareness of the goal of DEI.
“A House Divided: What Americans Really Think About Controversial Topics in Schools,” a recent study by researchers at the University of Southern California, showed that many Americans who support critical race theory, the root of DEI philosophy, actually don’t know that it rejects colorblindness, the very principle that it most opposes.
• Dave Brichoux is a lecturer at the University of Kansas’ Political Science Department who focuses on teaching American politics, public opinion and political theory. Asaf Day is a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas’ Political Science Department, whose main areas of expertise are international conflict, populism and Middle Eastern politics.
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