And there is a huge problem with the DEI presentations which have drawn deeply from the Kendi/DiAngelo well. You can see this in the recent FAIR win against the UPenn and on my side of the Atlantic with the FSU win over Lloyds Bank (they had to pay out over £800 k to the employee they fired for asking a question in a training session).
The analogy is of course anti-Semitic and more over wrong. A better comparison would be the feudal system in Scotland or indeed the great landed estates across all of Europe pre 1848. Equally, they could look at what happened when St Bathilde closed the Christian slave markets in 7th century France and Germany (the Merovingian empire). St Bathilde was a slave who became queen and then the defacto ruler of the empire. Within a generation, the feudal system (could be seen as being owned by the land instead of a person -- it came to me when I read about the 3 types of slavery in Nigeria -- owned by the land, owned by the person and owned by the temple/gods -- slavery was abolished in Nigeria in 1950) developed and the Merovingian empire became the Holy Roman Empire. The fall out from that class based system remains and the real thing which did for it was the Industrial Revolution. You could see sharecropping as an attempt to impose a feudal system , but the point is -- that it failed for a number of reasons including the Civil Rights movement, a movement which the Jewish people to their great credit supported.
Shifting baselines has resulted in people not remembering what it is like and the coalition which was needed to ensure the change did happen.
One of the big problems with the current DEI movement is indeed the antisemitism which is woven in its DNA -- it springs from a number of sources. Isrealophobia touches on some of them including the Zionologists of the Soviet Union. Angela Davis was of course hugely inspired by the Palestinian camps she visited in the early 1970s.
All good points, thank you, Michelle. I'm working on a piece about black antisemitism and how it manifests in DEI with its oppressor/oppressed core narrative. Not to give away the essentials of my post to come, but I found James Baldwin's essay on the subject very thoughtful and illuminating. Much of the hostility comes from a resentment over the Jews' perceived ease of assimilation in America; an ability to "pass" and thus, although Baldwin wouldn't have used the term, Jews seem to benefit from "white privilege." This was not always the case, nor is it entirely today. And we've seen in recent months just how Jew-hatred stigmatizes and marginalizes Jews--on college campuses, where DEI enforcement, bias response units, etc are in place for other minority groups, there are none for Jewish students--Jews make up only 2% of the population in the US and there are only 15 million Jews worldwide. Yes, there is a lack of education about just how Jews are NOT white, and historically have never been, but there's also good old fashioned antisemitism at play--within a movement claiming to be "antiracist."
I look forward to it with interest. I thought Thomas Sowell's essay 'Are Jews Generic?' (horrible title btw) in Black Rednecks and White Liberals was interesting on the role of ethnic minority middleman within societies. It is also worth reading Jake Wallis Simons Israelophobia (it was the Telegraph book of the year for 2023) where he does detail some of this. He does point out that some of the terminology used by the 'anti-racist' movement was first coined by the Kremlin Zionlogists who did attempt to undermine Israel. As always with 'anti-racism' it is worth looking at Nation of Islam's influence and what its leaders have said. Louis Farrakhan is a notorious anti-Semite for example. Just in case any of these spark ideas or thoughts.
Well, Farrakhan is a rabid Jew-hater and lunatic who has suggested that the Jews began and perpetrated the transatlantic slave trade, and completely made up the Holocaust. The more common and garden antisemitism comes from either ignorance (see: Whoopi Goldberg's rant about the Holocaust for which she apologized, upon being educated on the RACIAL identity of the Jews) or good old fashioned resentment (see: Ye and his almost cartoonish diatribes about the Jews owning the media etc). It's a pity that we educate our young people with old stereotypes and vicious, hateful tropes but spend no time immersing them in the complexities and FACTS of history. Which is why it is repeating all around us.
It sounds like it was a very distressing, bigoted, horrifying presentation, but she chose to leave. She wasn't fired. She chose not to continue to speak up or try and make a change. She is definitely not the victim in this story, unless there's more to it than was described here. She could have attended the follow up meaning and made her case.
To be clear: my friend did speak up during the presentation:
"She was nowhere to be found when I myself spoke up; and, of course, the people giving the talk took no responsibility for their words. When they were called to account, they did not rise to the occasion." Also to clarify: my friend did not resign because of this event; they had already put in their notice , but as they wrote, "Had I not already planned to resign, that day would’ve been the day I quit." And listen--EVERYONE subjected to this kind of bullying and nastiness in the name of "antiracism" is the victim. Speaking out, as I learned myself in a similar situation at work, can elicit incredible backlash from these DEI bullies. Speaking out is not that easy. Also, my friend was very seriously triggered by the presentation; to sit and take more of it would have been emotionally distressing. It still is, 2 years later.
A powerful piece.
And there is a huge problem with the DEI presentations which have drawn deeply from the Kendi/DiAngelo well. You can see this in the recent FAIR win against the UPenn and on my side of the Atlantic with the FSU win over Lloyds Bank (they had to pay out over £800 k to the employee they fired for asking a question in a training session).
The analogy is of course anti-Semitic and more over wrong. A better comparison would be the feudal system in Scotland or indeed the great landed estates across all of Europe pre 1848. Equally, they could look at what happened when St Bathilde closed the Christian slave markets in 7th century France and Germany (the Merovingian empire). St Bathilde was a slave who became queen and then the defacto ruler of the empire. Within a generation, the feudal system (could be seen as being owned by the land instead of a person -- it came to me when I read about the 3 types of slavery in Nigeria -- owned by the land, owned by the person and owned by the temple/gods -- slavery was abolished in Nigeria in 1950) developed and the Merovingian empire became the Holy Roman Empire. The fall out from that class based system remains and the real thing which did for it was the Industrial Revolution. You could see sharecropping as an attempt to impose a feudal system , but the point is -- that it failed for a number of reasons including the Civil Rights movement, a movement which the Jewish people to their great credit supported.
Shifting baselines has resulted in people not remembering what it is like and the coalition which was needed to ensure the change did happen.
One of the big problems with the current DEI movement is indeed the antisemitism which is woven in its DNA -- it springs from a number of sources. Isrealophobia touches on some of them including the Zionologists of the Soviet Union. Angela Davis was of course hugely inspired by the Palestinian camps she visited in the early 1970s.
All good points, thank you, Michelle. I'm working on a piece about black antisemitism and how it manifests in DEI with its oppressor/oppressed core narrative. Not to give away the essentials of my post to come, but I found James Baldwin's essay on the subject very thoughtful and illuminating. Much of the hostility comes from a resentment over the Jews' perceived ease of assimilation in America; an ability to "pass" and thus, although Baldwin wouldn't have used the term, Jews seem to benefit from "white privilege." This was not always the case, nor is it entirely today. And we've seen in recent months just how Jew-hatred stigmatizes and marginalizes Jews--on college campuses, where DEI enforcement, bias response units, etc are in place for other minority groups, there are none for Jewish students--Jews make up only 2% of the population in the US and there are only 15 million Jews worldwide. Yes, there is a lack of education about just how Jews are NOT white, and historically have never been, but there's also good old fashioned antisemitism at play--within a movement claiming to be "antiracist."
I look forward to it with interest. I thought Thomas Sowell's essay 'Are Jews Generic?' (horrible title btw) in Black Rednecks and White Liberals was interesting on the role of ethnic minority middleman within societies. It is also worth reading Jake Wallis Simons Israelophobia (it was the Telegraph book of the year for 2023) where he does detail some of this. He does point out that some of the terminology used by the 'anti-racist' movement was first coined by the Kremlin Zionlogists who did attempt to undermine Israel. As always with 'anti-racism' it is worth looking at Nation of Islam's influence and what its leaders have said. Louis Farrakhan is a notorious anti-Semite for example. Just in case any of these spark ideas or thoughts.
Well, Farrakhan is a rabid Jew-hater and lunatic who has suggested that the Jews began and perpetrated the transatlantic slave trade, and completely made up the Holocaust. The more common and garden antisemitism comes from either ignorance (see: Whoopi Goldberg's rant about the Holocaust for which she apologized, upon being educated on the RACIAL identity of the Jews) or good old fashioned resentment (see: Ye and his almost cartoonish diatribes about the Jews owning the media etc). It's a pity that we educate our young people with old stereotypes and vicious, hateful tropes but spend no time immersing them in the complexities and FACTS of history. Which is why it is repeating all around us.
It sounds like it was a very distressing, bigoted, horrifying presentation, but she chose to leave. She wasn't fired. She chose not to continue to speak up or try and make a change. She is definitely not the victim in this story, unless there's more to it than was described here. She could have attended the follow up meaning and made her case.
To be clear: my friend did speak up during the presentation:
"She was nowhere to be found when I myself spoke up; and, of course, the people giving the talk took no responsibility for their words. When they were called to account, they did not rise to the occasion." Also to clarify: my friend did not resign because of this event; they had already put in their notice , but as they wrote, "Had I not already planned to resign, that day would’ve been the day I quit." And listen--EVERYONE subjected to this kind of bullying and nastiness in the name of "antiracism" is the victim. Speaking out, as I learned myself in a similar situation at work, can elicit incredible backlash from these DEI bullies. Speaking out is not that easy. Also, my friend was very seriously triggered by the presentation; to sit and take more of it would have been emotionally distressing. It still is, 2 years later.