I hope this doesn’t come across badly but I’m confused why people brush aside antisemitism so easily. It seems like nobody talks about it, yet they’ll make comparisons to the holocaust. Similarly but less so with anti-Mexican racism, which is huge in the US now. Yet, once I saw a post on it and the replies were just calling OP racist for appropriating the term from “anti black racism”. Like what? Anti black racism is the only thing consistently “allowed” to be talked about and I don’t understand
I am not Black, and I cannot comment on what it’s like to live with antiblackness; a non-Jewish Black person would not be able to comment on living with antisemitism. Both exist. Both are lethal. Both deserve attention, awareness, and active dismantling. But they are not comparable because people are not metrics with which you can measure disenfranchisement and pain.
ANY attempt to compare antisemitism and antiblackness is, itself, an act of both antisemitism and antiblackness. The only group who benefits from false comparisons of antisemitism and antiblackness is white supremacy.
That said, antisemitism is most frequently ignored in discussions about marginalization for two reasons:
1) America, by and large, still views marginalization, and race/ethnicity/culture as a whole, through the lens of the paper bag test. It sucks and it’s bad for everyone except white supremacists. Many Jews, especially in America, where 50% of the world’s living Jews reside, can pass for white – which my mother and I can, for example; the rest of my family cannot, to varying degrees – and America is really bad at understanding race, ethnicity, and culture outside of really simplistic (and racist) Black::white divide. In Europe, where Jews have never been seen as white, antisemitism expresses itself differently than in America, and it’s also different in southern and western Africa, and it’s also different in the MENA. That’s because:
2) Antisemitism has been a huge part of every Western culture’s mythmaking for 6,000 years. The effort that it takes to knowingly correct your assumptions about the basic workings of history and the current world, if you’re a non-Jew, is more effort than most people (even those who try to be really aware of inclusion!) think is worth the 1% of the global population that Jews make up. If you’re not Jewish, you have 100% grown up steeped in mythology and historiography that is antisemitic. Period. A lot of the things that non-Jews think just “are true” wrt history, government, media, philosophy, or religion are based on antisemitism. Some of it is actively malicious. Some of it is borne of negligence that was made possible because of someone else’s malice. It’s all antisemitic, and becoming aware of it and then unlearning it has to be your own personal journey.
And as for anti-Mexican racism in the US:
It’s been a huge problem for much longer than anyone will be willing to admit for at least another 100 years. The devaluation of Mexican and Latine lives in the United States has been an integral part of America’s modernization, especially post-Industrial Revolution, and admitting that Latine people, especially Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, were the driving force of America becoming a global powerhouse in the 20th century will take white supremacist America actively challenging its own jingoistic mythology. Because white supremacy is fragile af, that is not going to happen anytime soon. Whiteness cannot stand losing the appearance of power. I am not Mexican, and I cannot speak to what it’s like to live as a Mexican-American or Mexican in America.
