Nothing About Charlottesville is Shocking

People keep saying they're "shocked" by what's happening in Charlottesville.

Or they're shocked by the failure of the President to give a clear, unambiguous condemnation of White supremacist and neo-Nazi violence. I saw someone on TV say he "could not understand" how the President of the United States could sit back and keep quiet on vicious White nationalist violence done as part of his movement and in solidarity with him.

I don't find it shocking. I don't find it difficult to understand at all. It's only shocking, it's only hard to understand, if one cannot allow yourself to fathom racism as a live explanation.

We've made it so that "racism" is a charge so serious it cannot be spoken. It's so extreme that the very fact that an event is happening in America or a person of even moderate prominence is saying something automatically falsifies the hypothesis. And so when overt racism crashes to the surface, we're left dumbfounded -- unable to understand. This thing that by stipulation cannot be, is. And so we're shocked.

We shouldn't be. Objectively, there's nothing shocking about a country which has been explicitly White supremacist in structure for far longer than it's even been nominally egalitarian seeing White supremacy manifest. There's nothing shocking about a people who have never been forced to seriously reckon with having committed treason-in-defense-of-slavery to proudly carry up that mantle today. There's nothing shocking about a political movement that was built entirely around "White racial resentment" showing the colors of "White racial resentment."

Likewise, there's objectively nothing shocking that a man who rose to political prominence via racist demagoguery and conspiracy-mongering being fine with racism. There's nothing shocking that a President who craves adoration and is adored by nobody more than White supremacists will side with his adorers. There's nothing shocking that Mr. "Obama was born in Kenya" and "grab 'em by the pussy" and "build that wall" and "total shut down of Muslim immigration" and "sheriff's star" will act exactly how he's always acted, every time he's had the opportunity to do so.

Nothing about Charlottesville should shock us. It is entirely in keeping with the character of the ascendant political movement in America, the one that currently helms the Republican Party, the one that currently occupies of the office of President of the United States. To be "shocked" at this is to be in willful denial of the reality in front of us. It is symptomatic of a sort of pale innocence that, as Baldwin put it, itself constitutes the crime.

As we saw the dead dimly through rifts of battlesmoke and heard faintly the cursings and accusations of blood brothers, we darker men said: This is not Europe gone mad; this is not aberration nor insanity; this is Europe; this seeming Terrible is the real soul of white culture—back of all culture,—stripped and visible today. This is where the world has arrived,—these dark and awful depths and not the shining and ineffable heights of which it boasted. Here is whither the might and energy of modern humanity has really gone.

-- W.E.B. Du Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920).

I always found it a disservice that we only read Du Bois at his most conciliatory. His later work has more bite and more sting. Does his indictment hurt? Do you find it too simple or too sweeping? Well don't boo -- vote! It has always been in the power of White folks to falsify this hypothesis. We had the option in Reconstruction, and we didn't take it. We had the option in 1920, and we didn't take it. We had the option in 2016, and we didn't take it.

There are of course other moments when we came closer to taking it; Du Bois, sadly, didn't live to see them. We can be proud of those moments, but can we honestly deny that they were our aberrations? We can, actually, but it is up to us to supply the proof -- not by reaching back into a glorified history, but by stretching forward and crafting a future that is so consistently egalitarian, so bereft of racial strife and struggle, that we could justly say that a future Charlottesville is an act of madness. It's possible. Such is the virtue of democracy, that it always continues to be in our power.

But that is a possible future, and if present trend lines hold not the most probable. Right now, there's nothing shocking.

Boycott .... or Else

One interesting but often-overlooked aspect of the debate over the proposed Israel Anti-Boycott act is how it merges two very distinct cultural arenas where Israel boycott politics play out. In the United States, the BDS movement is (for the time being) largely about individuals or small organizations making their own decisions of conscience. Now to be clear, one can make a bad decision "of conscience" -- a baker who refuses, as a matter "of conscience", to bake a cake for a gay couple would be a great example. So I don't mean that as an apologia.

What I mean is that Israel-boycotters, in the US, are making a decision that by and large is not tied to state-coercive power. That may well be less the result of any principled limitations and more because prospective boycotters do not have the political power to enlist state-coercive power, but it is a descriptive quality that is fairly noted. Likewise, the line between "boycotts" or "conscience" and "discrimination" is a thin one (as the anti-gay cake-bakers demonstrate). But there is at least a plausible claim that liberty allows one to expressively refuse to associate with those one hates -- even if one's hatred is nothing but hatred, even if the expression is naught but prejudice.

Internationally, things are different. "Boycotting" Israel, in many parts of the world, is an exercise of governmental-diktat, a feature of state coercion and an impediment to human liberty. Iran, for example, just handed down a lifetime ban against two soccer players who (while on the roster of a Greek team) participated in a match against an Israeli squad. Another Iranian journalist just was granted asylum in Israel after Iran threatened to prosecute her for "spying" due to her publication of articles in an Israeli newspaper. A Bangladeshi politician was charged with sedition after meeting with an Israeli official in neighboring India; Bangladesh has no diplomatic relations with Israel and citizens are forbidden from traveling there. The original law that the Israel Anti-Boycott Act is modifying was addressed to the latter problem -- states which were seeking to mandate a boycott against Israel as an exercise of coercive state power (in my post, I discuss this as the secondary boycott problem).

In these contexts, the movement to boycott Israel takes on a (more) unambiguously illiberal bent. It's primary function is as an annex to state repression. To speak of the movement to boycott Israel as an international movement without considering these contexts is badly incomplete. To be sure, one can, I think, defend the right of individuals to boycott whomever they like as a form of free expression (subject, of course, to the difficult parsing that requires vis-a-vis anti-discrimination requirements -- a parsing that itself has not been addressed with requisite seriousness). But a discourse about boycotts that takes "free speech" as its foundation but which does not account for these cases is fundamentally dishonest. The fact that the movement to boycott Israel has, in its original (and longest-standing) manifestation taken such a clearly oppressive form is something that should be dwelled upon.

Israel's First Arab Supreme Court Justice Retires

Salim Joubran, the first Arab Justice on the Israeli Supreme Court, has retired (he reached the mandatory retirement age of 70).

I had the pleasure of getting to hear Justice Joubran speak at the University of Chicago Law School, where he was an engaging and witty presenter (I particularly liked his musings on what would happen if he became the deciding vote in a case determining "who is a Jew" under Jewish law). As a Justice, he's been a defender of gay rights and a skeptic of Israel coddling illegal outposts in the West Bank. He's also been, unsurprisingly, the subject of attacks from right-wing ultras, but hearteningly he was backed by none other than Bibi himself (and other Likud heavy-hitters).

Best wishes to Justice Joubran on his retirement.

They Would Say It About Jews; They'd Say It About Others Too

An apparel company is on attack for selling a t-shirt with a rainbow Nazi swastika and the caption "peace". It says its goal is to reclaim the symbol as a positive one -- but that's rather belied by the shirts it's selling with captions like "Hitler did nothing wrong ever" and "We're all Hitler now." [UPDATE: Apparently the rainbow swastika shirts are made by a different designer than the "We're all Hitler now" shirts. Only the former says their project is to "reclaim" the image. To which I still say "bullshit", but, you know, context is context].

Why do I bother sharing this? Sometimes, people say that things like this would never happen to the Jews. In contrast to other groups, everyone knows the Nazis are terrible and the Holocaust was awful and Hitler is evil.

That's not true. As we see, these things most certainly do happen. Those things we think nobody would ever say when it comes to the Jews, are in fact said.

Others, perhaps reading this story, have the opposite reaction -- people would never do this about other minorities. In contrast to other groups, its acceptable to say this about the Jews -- to throw Nazism in our face, to insist that we're overreacting, to tell us we should just get over a genocide that was, what, a half-century ago by now?

And that's not true either. Things akin to this most certainly do happen to other minorities (as anyone paying attention to continued Confederate glorification can attest to). Those things we think nobody would ever say when it comes to people of color, are in fact said.

Last year, I commented on the odd mirror-image that's developed whereby (some) Jews contrast the supposedly tepid response certain institutional actors take towards alleged antisemitism to the supposedly swift condemnation that occurs in cases of racism; and (some) people of color contrast the supposedly tepid response certain institutional actors take towards alleged racism to the supposedly swift condemnation that occurs in cases of antisemitism. My observation was that both sides were right and wrong -- we see the obstacles in our own path, and are less attuned to the travails of others, and wrongfully conclude that they have it easy while we have it hard.

So my goal is simply to reiterate my call for humility and empathy. Those who are confident that Jews are uniquely protected from the slings and arrows of racist bigotry are wrong; those who are confident that Jews are uniquely vulnerable to such viciousness compared to other minority groups are also wrong. The truth is, they would say it about Jews. They'd also say it about all the others too.