In Honor of MLK Day, Read MLK

One of the recurrent themes of the "anti-CRT" push by conservative politicians and activists is that they are merely upholding the legacy of Martin Luther King. Liberals counter by pointing out that Republicans seem to think MLK's entire legacy consists of one line from one speech, and that Republicans only like him because he's conveniently dead. But no no!, they say, MLK is the beacon of what racial relations in America should be! He is the antithesis of CRT!

So here is my suggestion for compromise: in every state which is currently enacting a "CRT" ban, school boards should develop a course that is simply and entirely devoted to reading the collected works of MLK. They can read statements like this:

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.”

And this:

Whenever the issue of compensatory treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree; but he should ask nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for the Negro.

And this:

First, I must confess that over the last few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action;" who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a "more convenient season." 

And these:

The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and racism. The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.

[...]

“Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifices. Capitalism was built on the exploitation of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor, both black and white, both here and abroad.”

There are many more besides. It is a rich corpus of work, after all, more than sufficient to support a semester's worth of study. Reading them all together, from the "I Have a Dream" speech to the "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" to the "Three Evils" speech could spark such interesting discussions and give a more thorough foundation to the ideas and ideology of a man whom -- liberals and conservatives agree -- is one of America's great heroes.

You want to ban "divisive concepts"? I dare Republicans to try and ban the "Collected Works of MLK" class as "divisive".

UPDATE: Nikole Hannah-Jones basically just did this in speech form.

What Do Holocaust Museums Do?

I thought this was a very powerful line from Dara Horn's criticism of Holocaust museums as a presumed panacea for curing antisemitism:

That the Holocaust drives home the importance of love is an idea, like the idea that Holocaust education prevents anti-Semitism, that seems entirely unobjectionable. It is entirely objectionable. The Holocaust didn’t happen because of a lack of love. It happened because entire societies abdicated responsibility for their own problems, and instead blamed them on the people who represented—have always represented, since they first introduced the idea of commandedness to the world—the thing they were most afraid of: responsibility.

Then as now, Jews were cast in the role of civilization’s nagging mothers, loathed in life and loved only once they are safely dead. In the years since I walked through Auschwitz at 15, I have become a nagging mother. And I find myself furious, being lectured by this exhibition about love—as if the murder of millions of people was actually a morality play, a bumper sticker, a metaphor. I do not want my children to be someone else’s metaphor. (Of course, they already are.) 

Quote of the Day: Shklar Translating Montesquieu on the Cruelty of the Spainards

Judith Shklar is my great-grand advisor (that is, she was the Ph.D advisor of the Ph.D advisor of my Ph.D advisor). I just picked up a copy of her book Ordinary Vices, and am reading its opening chapter on cruelty. Referring to the abject cruelties the Spainards imposed upon the indigenous population of the "New World", she writes (quoting Montesquieu):

Once the Spainards had begun their cruelties, it became especially important to say that "it is impossible to suppose these creatures [the indigenous population] to be men, because allowing them to be men a suspicion might arise that we were not Christian."

Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Harvard Belknap Press, 1984), 12. She's translating Montesquieu's De l'Espirit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), but it's her own translation.

It has become a refrain of progressives commenting on the Trump era that "the cruelty is the point" -- especially towards migrants being kept in inhumane conditions along the border or immigrants who've been quietly living in America for years terrorized by immigration enforcement. The contention that this behavior is "un-Christian", as a searing critique of the hypocrisy of the Christian right, is a common one, albeit one whose merits I'm ill-equipped to judge.

But it strikes me that the dehumanizing rhetoric towards immigrants that emanates so regularly from the right -- or perhaps, more "generously", the failure of the right to take seriously the full human robustness of immigrants as the sorts of persons who can experience fear, panic, and terror that is a regular accompaniment to the immigration regime they endorse -- is necessary precisely because of what would be implied by the reckoning. For if they are acknowledged as human, a suspicion might arise that those who endorse such terrible terrors upon them are not Christian. Or -- from my distinctly non-Christian vantage -- that they remain Christians, but that this is what Christianity is, or can be.

A Bleg For Two Judicial Quotes

In my head, I remember two striking quotes from judicial opinions -- neither of which I can remember the source or even the precise verbiage of. In my mind, they're both from Judge Easterbook, though I can't confirm that.

The first goes something like this:

"On appeal, [Party] raises four issues, three of which won't survive the end of this paragraph...."

The second goes something like this:

"This case pits [Constitutional right], which is in the Constitution, against [other constitutional doctrine -- perhaps the Dormant Commerce Clause?], which is not."

Any help? Did they come from Will Baude? Did Will Baude used to have a personal website with favorite quotes? Am I completely hallucinating?

UPDATE: We got one! Bridenbaugh v. Freeman-Wilson (and yeah, it was a Judge Easterbrook opinion):

This case pits the twenty-first amendment, which appears in the Constitution, against the "dormant commerce clause," which does not.

Quote of the Day: Sartre on Just Remembering Jews

See if this one resonates with anyone:

In my Lettres Francaises without thinking about it particularly, and simply for the sake of completeness, I wrote something or other about the sufferings of the prisoners of wars, the deportees, the political prisoners, and the Jews. Several Jews thanked me in a most touching manner. How completely must they have felt themselves abandoned, to think of thanking an author for merely having written the word "Jew" in an article!

Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Schoken 1995 [1948]), 72.

Quote of the Day: Sartre on Argument and the Antisemite

This is a pretty famous quote, but it tends to get cut off. I wanted to include the entire paragraph:

The anti‐Semite has chosen hate because hate is a faith; at the outset he has chosen to devaluate words and reasons.  How entirely at ease he feels as a result. How futile and frivolous discussions about the rights of the Jew appear to him. He has placed himself on other ground from the beginning. If out of courtesy he consents for a moment to defend his point of view, he lends himself but does not give himself. He tries simply to project his intuitive certainty onto the plane of discourse. I mentioned awhile back some remarks by anti‐Semites, all of them absurd: "I hate Jews because they make servants insubordinate, because a Jewish furrier robbed me, etc." Never believe that anti‐Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti‐Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side.  

Jean-Paul Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew: An Exploration of the Etiology of Hate (New York: Schoken 1995 [1948]), 19-20.

More Memmi Quotes (on Autonomy as the Specific Liberation of the Jew)

Is it obvious what I'm reading these days?

You may choose, in spite of everything, to remain on the side of the oppressed, whatever the risks; but you cannot prefer to be oppressed. In any case I fail to see the glory in it. To uphold one's oppressed condition is an act of false daring and empty words, if it does not also mean an action to abolish it, the firm decision to do everything in one's power to cease being an oppressed person and to end the oppression.

For me the dignity of the oppressed begins, first, the moment he becomes conscious of his burden; second, when he denies himself all camouflage and all consolation for his misery; third, and above all, when he makes an effective decision to put an end to it. May all the victims of history forgive me. I know only too well how a victim becomes a victim. I understand the subterfuges which enable him to survive. I pity his inner ruin, but I do not admire his grimaces of pain or his scars. I do not find his suffering face the most beautiful in the world nor do I consider the plight of the victim to be very admirable.

Albert Memmi, The Liberation of the Jew, trans. Judy Hyun (New York: Orion 1966), 271-72.

The first condition of a specific liberation seems to me self-evident: the oppressed person must take his destiny into his own hands. My life must no longer depend on any treaty, often signed with other ends in mind, by anyone with anyone. Not that alliances or the aid of generous friends must be refused, but neither Socialist planning, nor the abstract humanitarianism of the Democrats, nor Christian charity are essential. Better still, no one owes us anything. I became adult, I believe, the day I understood that nothing was owed me. It was high time we became adult; in other words, non-dependent, neither in fear nor in hope. We should not have had to ask ourselves piteously and in vain why the Pope was silent or why the Americans abandoned us, why the Russians didn't budge. And why not the Red Cross! And the A.S.P.C.A.! Liberty is not a gift; bestowed, conceded, protected by someone else, it is denied and vanishes. Our liberation must depend on our own fight for it.

Id. at 274-75.

Still none of this was specifically Jewish. All impossible conditions call for a radical solution, all absolute misfortunes demand an absolute revolt. How were we to discover the specific conditions of each liberation? Here I proposed another criterion: the liberation of an oppressed person must be made as a function of the specific conditions of his oppression. In other words, our starting point had to be the complete description of the Jewish condition, which I have attempted to give in my last book and in this book. The reader may now understand why I have dwelt on this problem; it was not only because I needed to free myself of it, or to exorcize my own ghosts. The liberation of the Jew must be deduced from his particular misfortune.

 The misfortune of the Jew is then a total misfortune; in other words, it does not encompass only one aspect of his life, his political autonomy, his economic function, his culture or his religion. It concerns his whole existence, his relations with himself and with others; it affects the unity of his personality, divided into a private individual and a public person; and his whole dimension as a questionable citizen and an historically impotent man. It is true that all oppression has a strong tendency to become a total oppression, but it is a question of degree and nuance, of generalities and accent. The specific conditions of each oppression consists precisely of such degrees and particular intonations. The Jew is not oppressed as a member of a class, which distinguishes him from the proletariat, for example. Nor is he oppressed as a member of a biological group, which distinguishes him from Negroes or women. He is affected as a member of a total, social, cultural, political and historical group. In other words, the Jew is oppressed as a member of a people, a minor people, a dispersed people, a people always and everywhere in the minority (which distinguished him from the colonized, also oppressed as a people, but a people in the majority).

Therefore the Jew has to find a total solution, one which answers every aspect of his threatened existence, which guarantees his present but also rehabilitates his past and restores to him possession of his future. In other words, the Jew, oppressed as a people, must find his autonomy and freedom to express his originality as a people. Therefore to overcome absolutely, the revolt of the Jew must include that particular aspect which will necessarily rehabilitate and recognize him as a major and majority people.

In effect, if the Jews do not pull themselves together as a people they will necessarily remain a separated minority, threatened and periodically exterminated. If they do not defend themselves as a people they will remain subject to the benevolence of others, in other words, to the fluctuations of their moods, more often bad than good. They will remain condemned to serve as a too-convenient scapegoat, a target for other people's economic and political difficulties, to live in ambiguity and by subterfuge and in fear--his own and that of others, to which he strangely clings, like a hated ghost.

Only this collective autonomy will give us at last the daring and the taste for liberty which alone are the foundations of dignity....

Humanism yes, but humanism after the liberation and not this fake humanism, a one-way street where I must consider all men as saints in a humanity in which I still have no place.

Id. at 276-79.

Quote of the Day: Arendt on Why Eichmann Was Tried in Jerusalem

Arendt answers those who asked why Eichmann should be tried in an Israeli court rather than an international tribunal.

[T[hose who asked the question did not understand that for Israel the only unprecedented feature of the trial was that, for the first time (since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans), Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people, that, for the first time, they did not need to appeal to others for protection and justice, or fall back upon the compromised phraseology of the rights of man--rights which, as no one knew better than they, were claimed only by people who were too weak to defend their "rights of Englishmen" and to enforce their own law. (The very fact that Israel had her own law under which such a trial could be held had been called, long before the Eichmann trial, an expression of "a revolutionary transformation that has taken place in the political position of the Jewish people" ...) It was against the background of these very vivid experiences and aspirations that Ben-Gurion said: "Israel does not need the protection of an International Court."

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin 2006) (1963), 271-72.

It is worth noting that Arendt was quite the skeptic of trying Eichmann in Jerusalem. But nonetheless, here I think she aptly summarizes one of the key drivers as to why so many thought it was so essential that he be tried by Jews, in Jewish court, in a Jewish state.

Quote of the Day: Justice Jackson in the Steel Seizure Case

No comment other than to note that Justice Jackson took time off from his duties as a Supreme Court Justice to be the lead prosecutor in the Nuremberg Trials:

Executive power has the advantage of concentration in a single head in whose choice the whole Nation has a part, making him the focus of public hopes and expectations. In drama, magnitude and finality, his decisions so far overshadow any others that, almost alone, he fills the public eye and ear. No other personality in public life can begin to compete with him in access to the public mind through modern methods of communications. By his prestige as head of state and his influence upon public opinion, he exerts a leverage upon those who are supposed to check and balance his power which often cancels their effectiveness.

Moreover, rise of the party system has made a significant extraconstitutional supplement to real executive power. No appraisal of his necessities is realistic which overlooks that he heads a political system, as well as a legal system. Party loyalties and interests, sometimes more binding than law, extend his effective control into branches of government other than his own, and he often may win, as a political leader, what he cannot command under the Constitution. Indeed, Woodrow Wilson, commenting on the President as leader both of his party and of the Nation, observed, "If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible. . . . His office is anything he has the sagacity and force to make it."

I cannot be brought to believe that this country will suffer if the Court refuses further to aggrandize the presidential office, already so potent and so relatively immune from judicial review, at the expense of Congress.

But I have no illusion that any decision by this Court can keep power in the hands of Congress if it is not wise and timely in meeting its problems. A crisis that challenges the President equally, or perhaps primarily, challenges Congress. If not good law, there was worldly wisdom in the maxim attributed to Napoleon that "The tools belong to the man who can use them." We may say that power to legislate for emergencies belongs in the hands of Congress, but only Congress itself can prevent power from slipping through its fingers. 

The essence of our free Government is "leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the law" -- to be governed by those impersonal forces which we call law. Our Government is fashioned to fulfill this concept so far as humanly possible. The Executive, except for recommendation and veto, has no legislative power. The executive action we have here originates in the individual will of the President, and represents an exercise of authority without law. No one, perhaps not even the President, knows the limits of the power he may seek to exert in this instance, and the parties affected cannot learn the limit of their rights. We do not know today what powers over labor or property would be claimed to flow from Government possession if we should legalize it, what rights to compensation would be claimed or recognized, or on what contingency it would end. With all its defects, delays and inconveniences, men have discovered no technique for long preserving free government except that the Executive be under the law, and that the law be made by parliamentary deliberations. 

Such institutions may be destined to pass away. But it is the duty of the Court to be last, not first, to give them up.

343 U.S. 579, 653-65 (1952).

Quote of the Day: Frederick William IV on Jews

I found this in Hannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harvest 1994), p. 33 n.31. Asked what he intended to do with the Jews, Frederick William IV, King of Prussia, replied:

I wish them well in every respect, but I want them to feel that they are Jews.

The quote is used to illustrate the paradox of 19th century European elite views towards Jews -- simultaneously expressing (sometimes) warm feelings towards Jews in the abstract, while nonetheless continuing to harbor openly antisemitic attitudes.

This is also reflected in a quote by Wilhelm von Humboldt which Arendt was very fond of: "I love the Jew really only en masse; en detail I strictly avoid him." This was notable because von Humboldt -- great liberal that he was -- was known as one of the great allies of the Jews at the level of political theory. And indeed, contrary to the text of the quote von Humboldt did actually have several Jewish friends. Nonetheless, it reflects the push and pull between abstract commitments to equality (or even fraternity) as against deeply-entrenched antisemitic attitudes.

Interesting side note: The Origins of Totalitarianism was written in 1951. But in 1948, Arendt published in article in Jewish Social Studies titled "Privileged Jews", which presaged some of the content. It's an interesting read: discussing the status of certain elite Jews who in pre-emancipation Europe really did enjoy certain privileges (on account of wealth or education), and how that (partially) privileged status interacted both with antisemitic sentiment in European society and with later moves towards general emancipation.

Quote of the Day: Nozick on a REAL "Powerful Argument"

No joke, I had remembered Nozick said something like this but couldn't remember the exact quote -- then spent forever searching for it fruitlessly before someone completely randomly posted it on twitter today.

The terminology of philosophical art is coercive: arguments are powerful and best when they are knockdown, arguments force you to a conclusion, if you believe the premises you have to or must believe the conclusion, some arguments do not carry much punch, and so forth. A philosophical argument is an attempt to get someone to believe something, whether he wants to believe it or not. A successful philosophical argument, a strong argument, forces someone to a belief.

Though philosophy is carried on as a coercive activity, the penalty philosophers wield is, after all, rather weak. If the other person is willing to bear the label of "irrational" or "having the worse arguments," he can skip away happily maintaining his previous belief. He will be trailed, of course, by the philosopher furiously hurling philosophical imprecations: "What do you mean, you're willing to be irrational? You shouldn't be irrational because..." And although the philosopher is embarrassed by his inability to complete this sentence in a noncircular fasion - he can only produce reasons for accepting reasons - still, he is unwilling to let his adversary go.

Wouldn't it be better if philosophical arguments left the person no possible answer at all, reducing him to impotent silence? Even then, he might sit there silently, smiling, Buddhalike. Perhaps philosophers need arguments so powerful they set up reverberations in the brain: if the person refuses to accept the conclusion, he dies. How's that for a powerful argument. Yet, as with other physical threats ("your money or your life"), he can choose defiance. A "perfect" philosophical argument would leave no choice.

For the record, it's from Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1981), p. 4.

On Trusting White People, Redux

Ekow Yankah has a column in the New York Times about whether his children will be able to be friends with White people. People are reacting with the usual levels of charity and grace, and so I thought it might be worthwhile re-up this post I wrote on the subject back in 2008. It was inspired by the following passage from W.E.B. Du Bois' Darkwater (1920), responding to the question, from a roomful of students, "Do you trust White people?"

You do not and you know that you do not, much as you want to; yet you rise and lie and say you do; you must say it for her salvation and the world’s you repeat that she must trust them, that most white folks are honest, and all the while you are lying and every level, silent eye there knows you are lying, and miserably you sit and lie on, to the greater glory of God. 

Quote of the Day: Bernard Williams on Unadorned Hatred

In one of those statements that is obvious on reflection but which I hadn't really thought of until it was pointed out to me, Bernard Williams argues that virtually no one really argues that people should be treated differently or worse "simply" or "solely" because of their race (or sex, or other like identities):

This point is in fact conceded by those who practice such things as colour discrimination. Few can be found who will explain their practice merely by saying, 'But they're black: and it is my moral principle to treat black men differently from others'. If any reasons are given at all, they will be reasons that seek to correlate the fact of blackness with certain other considerations which are at least candidates for relevance to the question of how a man should be treated: such as insensitivity, brute stupidity, ineducable irresponsibility, etc. Now these reasons are very often rationalizations, and the correlations claimed are either not really believed, or quite irrationally believed, by those who claim them. But this is a different point; the argument concerns what counts as a moral reason, and the rationalizer broadly agrees with others about what counts as such -- the trouble with him is that his reasons are dictated by his politics, and not conversely. The Nazis' 'anthropologists' who tried to construct theories of Aryanism were paying, in very poor coin, the homage of irrationality to reason.

Bernard Williams, "The Idea of Equality," in P. Laslett & W.G. Runciman (eds.), Philosophy, Politics, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell 1962), 112-17.

That last line, about paying "the homage of irrationality to reason", is what earns the quote a place on the blog. But the whole argument matters. Again, virtually all assertions of hate against a particular outgroup are dressed up in this sort of garb -- albeit some wearing more layers than others. Recall the "bombing a synagogue isn't antisemitic if its based on dislike for Israel" case. They don't hate Jews, the argument goes, they hate alleged bad conduct done by Jews. But this is utterly ordinary as a case of antisemitism.  People who hate Jews do so, they say, because Jews are greedy, or bloodthirsty, or conniving, or murderers. It virtually never unadorned, and so the fact of adornment itself doesn't falsify the hypothesis that the attitude is discriminatory.

Quote of the Evening: Sander Gilman on the Most Assimilated Jews

Writing on the intersection of Jews and "race" at the turn of the 20th century, Sander Gilman writes something very interesting:

But the more Jews in Germany and Austria at the fin de siecle looked like their non-Jewish contemporaries, the more they sensed themselves as different and were so considered. As the Anglo-Jewish social scientist Joseph Jacobs noted, "it is some quality which stamps their features as distinctly Jewish. This is confirmed by the interesting fact that Jews who mix much with the outer world seem to lose their Jewish quality. This was the case with Karl Marx . . ." And yet, as we know, it was precisely those Jews who were most assimilated, who were passing, who feared that their visibility as Jews could come to the fore. It was they who most feared being seen as bearing that disease, Jewishness, which Heinrich Heine said the Jews brought from Egypt.

Sander L. Gilman, “Are Jews White? Or, the History of the Nose Job”, in Les Back & John Solomos, eds. Theories of Race and Racism: A Reader (London: Routledge 2000), p. 234.

There are, in short, elements at both ends here. On the one hand, there is significant historical evidence that Jewish assimilation has gone hand in hand with Jewish stress of our particularities. The more we are viewed as "like" our contemporaries, the more some of us wish to emphasize that which makes us distinct. Yet, as the latter half of the paragraph emphasizes, there are also those Jews who fear this reemergence. For them, their own Jewishness lurks in the background and threatens their status as unmarked (or -- perhaps more aptly -- marked in the ways they would like). Such persons, one would suspect, would rush to disassociate themselves from the markers of Jewishness -- to make very clear that they do not bear "that disease, Jewishness."

Memmi on the "Mistaken" Belief of Jewish Suffering

I'm trying to return to Albert Memmi this summer, and so I've been reading his book Portrait of a Jew.. I've pulled quotes on this blog from Memmi before -- his discussion on the meaning of Zionism (from Jews and Arabs) and why the nation-state is part of Jewish liberation (from The Liberation of the Jew). This passage deals with how other people react to Jews when we try to claim that we are marginalized, that we do suffer.

Earlier in the chapter (pp. 22-23), Memmi discusses an interesting phenomenon where Jews claimed to not have been truly "aware" of themselves as Jewish, of their marginalized Jewish status, until a particularly robust event of anti-Semitism revealed it to them. Einstein encountering German anti-Semites, Herzl facing down the mobs clamoring for Dreyfuss. As Memmi observes, there is something odd about this -- as if any Jew of that era could really be unaware of the broader currents of anti-Semitism -- and furthermore, the celerity with which these persons are able to describe their situation following the triggering event belies the idea that they really lacked any awareness of its contours prior to that date. What's really going on is a sort of self-deception, where Jews try to tell ourselves that we're fine, happy, assimilated people. And because we tell it so insistently to ourselves, it maybe isn't too surprising that non-Jews are also sometimes incredulous when we do finally feel compelled to express it out loud.

In any event, after noting the default incredulity -- he analogizes it to Europeans who can't fathom that natives suffer under colonialism and accuse them of being "too sensitive" or just "out of [their] mind[s]" -- Memmi writes the following:

"Very well,"" I, too, have often been told, "you suffer because you are a Jew. I believe you because you say so. But you are wrong to feel that way."

[*29] After denying that the situation exists, they say it is a "mistake," after refusing to believe in the Jew's anxiety, they declare it is unfounded. In the end they even lose their temper and retort sharply: "You think of yourself too much! Come now! You enjoy pitying yourselves! Have a little pity for others!"

One of the best arguments I have heard accused me of selfish complacency.

"You are not the only victim--if there are any victims at all!" they told me. "Look at the Negroes, at the Spanish Republicans, at all the displaced persons. And what about the gypsies! What social outcasts they are!"

 A fine argument indeed! They are going to chip off your leg (and sometimes your head) but just look at that poor man in the bed next to you, they say. They cut on both his legs and he was so brave. Aren't you ashamed! A little more and they would blame you for not singing while they dismember you!

Far from thinking I am the only one in this situation, I believe, on the contrary, that racial discrimination is more widespread than anything else in the world. I note, with horror, that most individuals, most peoples, are basically inclined to xenophobia. Far from believing I am the sole victim in a world of peace and justice, I think, unfortunately, that the statement should be reversed: the Jewish tragedy is part of a much broader human category--the category of oppression and misfortune.

 But, I repeat, I do not understand how the misfortune of others can be reassuring and comforting. All the misfortune in the world gives me no consolation at all for my own. It does not console me for anything. All the injustice in the world cannot make me accept the injustice I suffer. On the contrary, it feeds my anger, it whips up my fury against the shame and the outrage. Because I am a Jew, am I to console myself with the [*30] thought of anti-Negro racism or racial difficulties in the colonies? What my would-be comforters suggest to me is that since, after all, xenophobia does exist, it is up to me to suffer patiently the insults to the Jews! I understand perfectly. There are, in short, two attitudes: either one accepts all the sufferings or one rejects it all. Well, I reject it in totum as I reject in detail each face of oppression.

Albert Memmi, Portrait of a Jew (Elisabeth Abbott, trans., New Yor: Viking 1971) (1962), pp. 28-30.

Quote of the Day: Why Does Everyone Bring Up the Holocaust?

[H]e immediately said, "I'm so sick of hearing about the fucking Holocaust" (which I hadn't mentioned).

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz manages to distill everything I've wanted to say about anti-Semitism discourse in (less than) a single sentence.

The citation is Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz, "To Be a Radical Jew in the Late 20th Century," in The Issue is Power: Essays on Women, Jews, Violence and Resistance (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1992), p. 99. The context was a complaint regarding a progressive radio station which used an Orthodox Jew as the sole representative of a conservative viewpoint, justified on the grounds that "I've always wanted to pick on an Orthodox Jew." The above quote came when Kaye/Kantrowitz tried to explain her shock at the "pick on" justification.

Quote of the Day: Rawls on the Human Good of Instrumental Value

I've been reading A Theory of Justice. Turns out this Rawls guy is pretty smart. I'm glad he didn't die in the Pacific Theater in WWII:

[I]f some places were not open on a basis fair to all, those kept out would be right in feeling unjustly treated even though they benefited from the greater efforts of those who were allowed to hold them. They would be justified in their complaint not only because they were excluded from certain external rewards of office such as wealth and privilege, but because they were debarred from experiencing the realization of self which comes from a skillful and devoted exercise of social duties. They would be deprived of one of the main forms of human good.

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard UP 1971) (2005), p. 84.

This would have fit in great inside my Racism as Subjectification article, which concerns how people "want to be wanted" and consequently how they are damaged when social structures deny them instrumental, objective value -- value in terms of their usefulness to the projects of others. That article is forthcoming in the Berkeley Journal of African-American Law & Policy, and should be coming out ... well, it should have come out months ago, actually. I'm not sure what the hold up is. Maybe I could still slip it in yet.

Quote of the Day: Hobbes on Reason

"As oft as reason is against a man, so oft will a man be against reason."

-- Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural and Politic (J.C.A. Gaskin, ed., Oxford: Oxford UP 1994) (1650), p. 19.

I need to keep writing on motivated cognition so i can use this as an opening epigraph.

Quote of the Day: Adorno on the Limits of "We're All Just People"

Today's quote comes from Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia:

The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang.... [P]roofs that the Jews are not a race will . . . scarcely alter the fact that totalitarians know full well whom they do and whom they do not intend to murder. (102)

Adorno has recently been rising up my list of "theorists whose work I am relatively unfamiliar with, but know I should become more familiar with."

I should say that this quote applies, I think, with equal force in the race context. We can assert until we're blue in the face the biological truth that "race is a construct". That notwithstanding, the racists are fully aware whom they do and do not intend to oppress.

Quote of the Day: What's in a Name?

From Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza (1936):

"What's in a name?" Anthony went on. "The answer is, practically everything, if the name's a good one. Freedom's a marvelous name. That's why you're so anxious to make use of it. You think that, if you call imprisonment true freedom, people will be attracted to the prison. And the worst of it is you're quite right."

Quoted in Charles Leslie Stevenson, Persuasive Definitions, 47 Mind 331, 335 (1938).