Your Humble Blogger is, as Gentle Readers will be aware, a fan of Young Adult specfic. Well, and it isn’t the Young Adultness—Farah Mendlesohn, more or less correctly, uses YA as a derogatory term for the sort of Moral Introduction to Gruppness that you often find in books sold as YA. But often books aimed at a juvenile audience concern themselves with plot and world-creation (hooray!), and are not as annoying as grupp books. So, for whatever it says about YHB, the library more often sees me browsing through the YA specfic shelves than the grupp fiction shelves. Also, those books are lighter, and more portable.
Anyway, I have enjoyed a few books that, while aimed at juveniles, are genuinely scary dystopias, so when I heard about The Cure, I thought I would give it a try. The gimmick here is that there are two dystopias (two! two! two!) for the price of one; the future (year 2407, according to the back of the book) and the past (1348, the Year of the Black Death!). Unfortunately, while the future dystopia is interesting and evocative, it acts only as a frame for the history section, and doesn’t have any real substance. And the history section is a YA historical novel, with all the exoticism, icky romance, and mawkish noble-ancestor worship you might imagine.
Sonia Levitin, I suspect, mostly wanted to trick children into reading a book about the plague pogroms, the mid-fourteenth century series of slaughters that wiped out hundreds of ghettos and shtetls, and provides an important historical background to the Holocaust, and to the way Jews reacted to the Holocaust. It’s true that these events have dropped out of our historical narrative, and that by allowing them (and the long history of Judaism in Europe) to drop out of that narrative, we have warped our own telling of its recent events, and warped Christian telling, too. So I have a good deal of sympathy for Ms. Levitin’s goal, there.
The other thing that I should talk about, in relation to the book’s portrayal of Anti-Semitism, is that it addresses (in fairly simple form, as one might expect from a juvenile book) the relationship between two different forms of Anti-Semitism. It’s a subject I wound up talking about recently with a young fellow of seventeen or so, and I don’t think I got it right.
There are, on the whole, two kinds of racism (to take the matter more generally, as the topic came up in relation to Mark Twain, racism, and use of the word nigger in Huck Finn): there’s the kind that thinks that Jews are pushy, greedy and vulgar but should have civil rights equal to anybody else’s, and there’s the kind that thinks there shouldn’t be any Jews at all, at least not near real people. Well, and it’s more complicated than that, of course, but I do think that they are very different feelings. And we in this country hardly ever see the second, more vicious kind of racism. Oh, it comes out every now and then, but really, when we talk about racism, we are usually talking about the first kind. And the first kind is problematic, not least because when it comes down to it, the equal civil rights that those racists hold dear often turn out not to be quite as equal as all that. When they inconvenience the racist at all, the civil demands of the Jew (or the black, or the woman, or the Latino, or the Asian, or the queer, or the cripple, or the other-than-me) appear to be special pleading, made because the Jew is so pushy, greedy and vulgar, and not because there is any actual civil rights issue at hand.
But often, in our histories, there are times when that kind of racists as slowed down, or even defied the second kind. Many all of the Poles who hid Jews in their attics and barns thought that Jews were pushy, greedy and vulgar. Many Jews who opposed Jim Crow thought that blacks were lazy, ignorant and had natural rhythm. Abraham Lincoln certainly didn’t think that skin color was irrelevant. When the second kind of racism is rife, some of the first kind of racist joins in, and some doesn’t. It’s not predictable, that way. But the thing is that the first kind of racist doesn’t think of himself as racist, particularly when he is against lynchings, against the death camps, against the Trail of Tears, against the Defense of Marriage act.
But again, it’s not that simple. People who subscribe to the first kind are likely to validate the second kind. People who subscribe to the first kind may well raise children who become the second kind. The second kind of racist often finds comfort in the first kind, whether that person intends to offer it or not. And, you know, people are not all one, or all the other, or neither. People are complicated. My point in rambling about this, and I think Ms. Levitin’s to some extent, is that it’s easy to think of the first kind of racism as the moral equivalent of the second, which is false, and it’s easy to think of the first as nothing at all like the second, which is false. We don’t need to forgive Mark Twain for his casual racism, but we do need to recognize that he was against lynching. Both are true. Both are relevant. The longstanding non-genocidal Anti-Semitism in Europe was not altogether indistinct from the convulsions of genocidal Anti-Semitism, but not every Anti-Semite wants Jews to die. All that is true, and relevant, and, you know, more complicated than that.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Your differentiation of two different forms of racism is useful, because they do interact in complicated ways.
I’m going to politely and firmly disagree that we in this country hardly ever see the second kind of racism, the kind that you describe as “the kind that thinks there shouldn’t be any Jews at all, at least not near real people.”
I grew up around widespread anti-Semitism. On Long Island. A local pastor taught in Sunday School that Jews literally had horns. That was in the 1970s and 1980s.
I’ve talked to Holocaust deniers. It’s a surreal experience. That was in the 1990s.
I just spent yet another holiday listening to people complain that the Hispanics are stealing various services: health care, education, etc., and should be forcefully expelled from the United States. That was yesterday, in 2005.
Not a one of these people would admit to racism. Some may sit around on Christmas Day bragging about how much they’d like to shoot someone, but they wouldn’t participate in a lynch mob. Much of the anti-Hispanic racism today is politically motivated. And none of that makes me willing to write it off as merely the first kind of racism.
Welcome, Shlomo! And thanks for your disagreement, it’s what I blog for. Specifically, it compels me to clarify, restate and generally improve my thinking.
I grew up in Arizona, and although I think nearly everybody I knew there in the seventies and eighties was the first kind of racist, I never knew anybody who was the second kind. Well, I never was certain that anybody I knew was the second kind. And the first kind was sufficiently ingrained that Phoenix was effectively segregated, white and black and Chicano. My problem is that I forget not to extrapolate my own experience to a general one. On the other hand, the number of violent racist incidents are astonishingly few for a nation so big and so fucked-up.
Which leads me to more musing … is it possible to be a Holocaust denier and only be the first kind of racist? I mean, it’s a matter of history, and in theory there’s no logical conflict between believing that Jews have civil rights and believing that the Holocaust never happened. On the other hand, the only way to believe that the Holocaust didn’t happen is to take the word of some very crazy (second kind of racist) people over others. It’s hard to believe that anyone who really thinks Jews are, you know, people would do that.
The whole thing about expelling Hispanics is also strange. Where I grew up, there was a clear distinction made between legals and illegals, unless, you know, it was inconvenient to make that distinction. At any rate, although I heard a lot of racist shit, I never really heard anyone saying we should expel citizens. It was the (incorrect) assumption that the people who were stealing the welfare, health care, jobs, etc, etc, were illegals that allowed the racist to advocate expulsion without admitting to racism.
And, you know, although I do think that there is a difference between the two kinds, I’m not sure that it’s always easy to tell which kind a particular person is. Just that fact should be scary enough, shouldn’t it?
Thanks,
-V.
If it walks like a duck…
1. We should expel illegal immigrants.
2. Illegal immigrants are Hispanic.
3. Hispanics are illegal immigrants.
Put these together, stir in a healthy dose of pointing out differences in names and physical appearance, and the fact that nobody is saying “we should expel citizens” won’t be much comfort.
Stormfront doesn’t even admit to racism. They just want to “preserve the white race.” If you add self-acknowledgment to your definition of second-degree racism, you’ll find the world in far better shape. Just don’t be a currently-disfavored minority, or the mental whiplash may hurt almost as much as the efforts to deny you health care, schooling, voting rights, access to the courts, dignity, or celebration of your heritage beyond an annual parade or two.
Yes, what I’m saying is that where I grew up, lots of people believed (1) and (2), but nobody I knew believed (3).
And I hope I made clear, I certainly meant to make clear, in fact it was the whole point of writing about racism in the first place, that the first kind of racism is bad. If the first kind is widespread, a currently-disfavored minority will be damaged in a wide variety of ways, as you say.
In fact, the point really is that the first kind of racism is distinguishable from the second kind but is deeply connected to it. At a moment in our country when there are very few violent race crimes (I exclude property damage), the first kind comes into relief, and we can deal with it. In fourteenth century France, or nineteenth century America, when thousands of people were being killed on the basis of race, when ghettos were be enforced by the law, when minorities were explicitly denied the status of real people, then the first kind of racism has sometimes been in opposition to it.
And often, when a racist of the first stripe is in explicit opposition to violent racism, or to expelling Hispanics, or to the Inquisition, their racism still fosters the second kind. Yes, Abraham Lincoln was a racist, and yes, he freed the slaves, but that does not mean that he bears no responsibility for the racist jokes he made, and the comfort with which people heard them.
Thanks,
-V.
It’s hard for me to understand how anyone could believe (3), though I suppose it’s easier in an area without a large Hispanic population. But that belief is spreading, and I think the success of the English Only movement is a good example of it. The English Only movement seeks to deny education to Hispanics. It’s not based on pedagogical principles or economies of scale, though folks will pretend to that just like they’ll pretend to academic standards or state budget constraints in order to deny college entrance to lower SES groups.
The English Only movement does not say “We want to deny a public education to American citizens.” They talk about the problems of state services being stolen by illegal immigrants.
I’m not suggesting that you are excusing racism of any sort. I simply don’t buy the reduction in violent hate crimes (assaults down 28% in 10 years at the same time as a corresponding reduction in violent crime of all types, and a definite shift in hate crime assaults from (being charged as) aggravated assaults to (being charged as) simple assaults — more punching and kicking, fewer bricks and bats; these are improvements) as somehow indicative of a reduction in second-degree racism. I’m not suggesting that you excuse anti-Hispanic rhetoric, I’m suggesting that you’re miscategorizing it.
Ah. You see, I’m not talking about ten years. I don’t know that there is less second-degree racism in America than ten years ago, or thirty years ago. I know there is less than a hundred years ago, and a lot less than two hundred years ago. There may be more fifty years from now, too. But at the moment, we’re in one of those fortunate times when very few people are being assaulted in the US because they are Hispanic (or Jewish, or black, or Arabic or whatnot), and very few people suggesting that we create ghettos for minorities. Some are, yes, but it’s a small minority.
Now, the people at the top of the anti-Hispanic movements are likely, as you suggest, some of those second-stripe racists, but I think most of the followers are not, at the moment. They may well fall into it, given the right pushes, or they may fall out of it, when they see what it comes to (if it does come to that, which I optimistically don’t think it will).
To go back to what I was taking from the book, a general background of, say, non-genocidal anti-Hispanic feeling, certain kinds of jokes, certain kinds of unchallenged stereotypes, and certain restrictions of ‘special privileges’ provides ultimately for a situation where genocidal racism (even on a small scale) can flourish. Then, even if the fellow who voted for English-only is appalled by the carloads of migrant workers dumped in the desert to die, he’ll have a difficult time stopping it. On the other hand, there are loads of examples of people like him putting themselves on the line to stop things like that.
Thanks,
-V.
very few people suggesting that we create ghettos for minorities
We don’t need to create them — we already have them. They’re called Detroit, and New Orleans, and South Central LA, and Mexico, and Ossining. While they’re not as bad as sprawl, they’re not pleasant gated communities either.
We don’t fight wars the same way we did 100 years ago. But the families of the dead and maimed don’t care that we aren’t using bayonets, they don’t care that their sons and fathers are dying on land and almost never on ships, and they don’t care that the ratio of shrapnel deaths to disease deaths has radically changed.
And no, we don’t lynch people any longer, and we don’t burn crosses on their lawns, and we don’t have large-circulation newspapers advocating racial separation. We practice various broad forms of apartheid instead. When Katrina leaves a million people homeless, how many houses do we need to carry a torch to ourselves? When treatable diseases kill millions and we negotiate for stronger drug patent protections, how many outstretched hands do we have to trample on ourselves on our way to the theater? When we lock up a million people in our own country, how many ghettos do we need to usher people into? When we hire prison guards to beat them and humiliate them, how much blood do we need to rinse off our own shirts? And when we then congratulate our society on its progress, I’m unpersuaded. We make far fewer carriages by hand these days, but I’d swear the roads this past weekend were pretty clogged.
It’s hard to measure attitudes, and racist rhetoric changes just like other language use patterns change. The FBI crime data are incomplete. So let’s measure how many Caucasian people in this country in the past year were struck hard enough with a blunt object to leave a mark for more than a week, vs. how many non-Caucasian folks. Let’s measure how many suffered stab wounds, or lacerations, or broken bones. And let’s include prisoners in our population, since they do live in this country. My contention is that we have not seen a drastic reduction in violent racism if your skin color is a clear determinant of how often you get beaten.
I do recognize, by the by, that we agree that racism is bad, that there are degrees of racism, that violent racism is worse than conversational racism, and that those are intertwined in complicated ways. Our differing beliefs on the present extent of second-degree racism are in many ways separate from all of those important points of agreement.
This conversation reminds me of a bit from Margaret Cho’s first concert movie, “I’m the One that I Want”: she’s talking about driving through the US South and getting distinct “unwelcome” vibes but nothing overtly hostile, to which she observes that she prefers her Klan rabid and foaming at the mouth. The joke falls flat without her delivery, but it was pretty funny — as a joke. As an actual preference, well, I’m not so sure.
To me it seems that while eliminating racism (of either type 1 or 2) is a good goal, creating a cultural climate in which it has to hide its face isn’t a bad intermediate step. I had the beginnings of what would have been an involved argument with a friend of mine about this; her position was, if I’m remembering fairly, that covert racism is more insidious than aggressive racism in that it can put on an acceptable face and diffuse into the mainstream. Since she’s an Indian-American grad student in ethnic studies to my white latte liberal, I can’t really disregard that analysis — I wish she’d been willing to get more into the theory behind it.
On another note, I’m curious whether either of you would consider there to be a third degree of racism, or if it’s just an extension of the second: the majority member who doesn’t hold particularly essentialist beliefs about race but wants to ignore the actual harm still caused by racism. The anti-PC movement, for example, seems to draw on people of this degree in addition to the other two.
There could be an argument that type 3 racism is just the outward face of someone who is defensive about their inward type 2 racism, or (more cynically) a ploy by type 1 and 2 racists a la the Cho Argument above. I’m sure that in many cases this is true, but I do think there are people who sincerely reject the racist statements that define type 2 but still resent the accusing fact of racial inequality enough not to align themselves with anti-racists. Is this still racism, or is it something else?