#WTH: Critical Race Theory, antisemitism, Marxism & colonizers vs the colonized
With Prof. David Bernstein
Here at WTH, we’re still shaking our heads at the insanity of U.S. university campuses. This week it was the mass demo at Harvard shouting to “globalize the intifada.”
You want to just navigate back to reels of cats and forget these idiots. But we can’t. We need to understand how they got here; why Jew hatred and Hamas love are the new cause for the CRT/BLM crowd. Why anyone thinks Jews are white colonizers. So we asked David Bernstein, a lawyer, professor at the Scalia Law School, and expert on race classification, what the hell is going on.
Three things we wanted to understand:
For the Nazis, Jews were racially impure brown people. For Harvard (and others), Jews are white oppressors. How did this happen?
What is the provenance of this weird Palestine/Hamas fervor?
What is the role of Marxist thought in the wave of insanity in academia?
Critical Race Theory, or CRT, at its heart, is about the oppressed and their oppressors. But there are no real criteria for what makes up the oppressed class. In a sense, they self-define because they are the underclass. So, they are brown. They are poor. Or they are rich, but brown. Whites are the entitled class, and therefore, despite the existence of a large and growing white underclass, definitionally, being white renders you an oppressor.
For Jews, entry into the oppressor class has been something of a surprise. For the Germans, Jews were racially inferior non-Aryans; when Jews got to America, it was critical to be white, for obvious reasons. Then Jews paid a price for supporting — nominally — Communism. But for others, they paid a price for being uber-capitalists. Success itself was the sin. In essence, whoever was wrong, that was the Jew party. And now, Jews are the oppressors, the colonizers… whatever the word de jour is.
As Professor Bernstein notes, CRT’s evolution from Marxist thought, and adoption of Russian antisemitic tropes such as those found in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, means the world is similarly divided between two classes. But unlike the advocates of a workers’ utopia, the CRT/Hamas crowd is not interested in a positive outcome. It’s interested in the wholesale elimination of the oppressor class. Period.
In that context, “from the river to the sea” takes on a whole new meaning. Ditto the denial of Hamas’ culpability in the October 7 attacks. Not that they didn’t perpetrate the massacre, but because they are the colonized, the oppressed, they can simply do no wrong.
It’s not clear how we overcome this moment, how we defeat this Neo-Marxist Manichean social construct. At the very least, however, we must seek to understand it before we can devise a plan to rip this fundamentally anti-American idea from our soil.
HIGHLIGHTS
What is the link between Critical Race Theory and antisemitism?
DB: The most basic connection really is judging people by their origins rather than their actions. And then the question is, well, how do you judge people by their origins? Well, you're basically dividing society, really the world, into victims and oppressors. And there's no really logical way of doing this except to decide, for political reasons, who do we want to include in the oppressor class and who we want to include in the victim class. With regard to CRT in particular, they have an underlying implicit ideology, not every single CRT person, but in general, that success in society for any given group is dependent on how much they're oppressing other groups or being oppressed. So the most oppressed groups should be the poorest and least successful on average. And the most successful groups should be the opposite. And Jews being a successful minority group with higher education and income attainments are obviously going to be a target for being considered part of the oppressor class given the underlying ideology.
The broader international version of CRT is this anti-colonial theory, which even more crudely I'd say than CRT, divides the world into oppressors and the oppressed. And Jews again, are put in the oppressor category. They're said to be white, they're said to be colonialists. I've had interactions on social media with a lot of, well, I wouldn't call them serious academics, but academics who are taken seriously by others. And I say, "Well, you say that Jews are colonialists, but to be a colonial, you have to be sent somewhere by the home country to set up a colony. How does that apply to Jews?" And they're like, "Oh no, we sort of have a special theory for Jews that it could be colonialists without a home country." I said, "Well, that doesn't make any sense. You're just trying to shoehorn something that's completely illogical into an ideological framework you have." But it's like talking to religious fanatics. It doesn't make any impression of them whatsoever.
So this sounds like a version of Marxist capitalists vs the proletariat?
DB: So I think you've hit the nail on the head that it's at least a successor ideology of Marxism. The whole class struggle thing didn't really work out and people abandoned it, but they weren't willing to abandon their desire to tear down Western society one way or the other. So they came up with replacing the working class versus capitalists with the oppressed racial groups versus the oppressors. But I have to say it's cruder than Marxism and worse in some ways than Marxism.
I don't think we ever went as far, at least in theory, as to say, but we should hold workers unaccountable no matter what horrible things they do because after all, the workers are inherently innocent. But this post-colonial or anti-colonial ideology says basically, if you are on the wrong side of the anti-colonial paradigm, if you are Israel and we decide that you're the colonialists, nothing you do is fair or right or just. And on the other hand, if you are a group that we deemed to be victims of colonialism, like Palestinians, raping, murdering, beheading, torturing, kidnapping, we don't put any moral blame on you
But why does this idea have such purchase?
DB: I shouldn't minimize the role that antisemitism as such plays here. It's not a coincidence that even though Israel doesn't really fit into the paradigm in any kind of logical way, again, there's no colony that Israel established of another country. So there's no colonialism. Danielle mentioned before that most Jews are of Middle Eastern origin, but Jews in general are genetically culturally, we had this brief period in Europe where we tried to integrate, but Jews spoke Yiddish, their own language that they wrote in Hebrew characters. They pray in Hebrew, they study the law in Aramaic and Hebrew, they face Jerusalem when they pray
And the idea that somehow going to the Middle East where they're from is Western colonialism or white people colonialism is absurd. But one of the reasons, or maybe the main reason that Israel fell to this paradigm was that the Soviets were trying to get play in the Arab world in the 1960s against the United States. And they saw this post-colonial Franz Fanon ideology operating, and they hired a bunch of actual former Gulag, right-wing reactionary Russians to take the old Protocols of Zion kind of antisemitism and superimpose it on this anti-colonial ideology. They spent a lot of money promoting this idea among the Western left that Zionism is racism, Jews are colonialists, Arabs are the indigenous people, and Jews are not, and so forth and so on.
And how did Jews end up being “white” in America?
DB: So for most of American history, there were no official racial classifications at the national level other than on the census. At first you would check off if you were Black or white, and then they eventually added different Asian groups as well. Latinos, except for one census in which Mexican was a separate classification, were always also white. But starting in the 1950s with the civil rights era, American authorities say, "Well, if we're going to enforce civil rights laws as discrimination laws, we need to figure out who we're talking about and be able to keep statistics and so on." So they gradually started classifying everybody into different groups. The black/white one was obvious, but it wasn't at all obvious what to do about various groups from Asia, the Middle East, which is also Asia of course, Italian Americans, Jewish American, groups that had suffered a lot of discrimination, but were Caucasian.
All we're doing is kind helping civil rights authorities and other government agencies that are collecting data to make their data uniform. They said when they published the formal rule in the federal register, when there is a formal rule, that these are not supposed to be used for affirmative action purposes. They said for any eligibility for any government program and not scientific and not anthropological. But of course these things always have unintended consequences. And if you were a university or a government agency or a big corporation and you wanted to engage in affirmative action or any other policy, medical research, scientific research, you weren't sure how to classify people say, "Oh, we have a handy dandy classification scheme here, so let's just use that. And we have a lot of reporting requirements. We have to collect the data anyway."
So long story short, again, we wound up with white, Black, Hispanic, which is not a racial category, but an ethnic one, at least for now, Native American, American Indian, and Asian American slash Pacific Islander. That latter category is the only one that's changed substantially since the '70s. Pacific Islander or native Hawaiian is now a separate classification from Asian because people in Hawaii who are Pacific Islanders and native Hawaiians complained that when they applied to colleges in California, instead of getting affirmative action for being an oppressed group, they were put it with the Asians and were facing discrimination.
But that still doesn’t explain the weird whiteness issue?
DB: Let's just start with the fact that it's been well settled since 1910 or so that people of Middle Eastern origin are officially white and that Jews are officially white. And this was again, not something that had to happen. Jews were very cautious or concerned about the possibility that they would be separately racially classified and they lobbied against it when there were attempts to do so in the early 20th century. And if you see how it happened to Jews in Europe when they were considered a separate race, you could very well understand why they were hesitant. And Arab Americans also preferred to be white. It was only an advantage to be white until the 1950s. More recently, various left-wing Arab American and Iranian American groups have been lobbying to have their official classification switched to MENA, middle Eastern and North African.
The Biden administration has a proposal allowed to do that, it hasn't been accomplished yet. But in the world of the left-wing imagination, really what changed was that we had for the first time large scale Arab Muslim immigration as opposed to Arab Christian immigration. And not they in general, but the organizations that purport to represent them threw in their lot with the left. And the way they did so is they said, "We are oppressed people of color, especially after 9/11. Everyone's suspicious of us. We tend to be darker complexion than other Americans. We face discrimination. We are one with other people of color."
This is the eternal problem Jews face, and it doesn't seem to make much sense, but it seems to be a pretty persistent thing, that the communists attacked them for being capitalists. The capitalists attacked them for being communists. The cultural leftists attacked them for being reactionaries because some of them are Orthodox and Christianity, they don't like the fact that Christianity descended from Judaism. And the right-wing Christian antisemites will say that they're atheists trying to undermine Christian civilization and so forth and so on. And they're cosmopolitan, internationalist globalists on the one side and evil reactionary nationalist colonialists on the other.
What’s the difference between left-wing antisemitism and right-wing?
DB: Well, I think one of the big differences is that left-wingers, no matter how antisemitic they are, never admit they're antisemitic because it's part of their ideology they're not supposed to hate any particular group. A colonialist in general, maybe white people in general, but no subgroups. That would be, gauche at best. So they might use the exact same language and rhetoric as right-wing antisemites, particularly with regard to Israel. They may even borrow phrases from the right and make them part of the left because oh yeah, there is some interaction there. So for example, there was for a while it became popular in some left-wing circles to talk about Americans who are Jewish and pro-Israel as Israel-firsters and that language comes right from the far right. And they didn't seem on. They eventually did get a little embarrassed. Some of them did, at least, but not all of them.
And some of them, like Glenn Greenwald kept promoting it. In any event, so that's one issue that the leftists, they try to have plausible deniability, "Oh, we don't hate Jewish people." And in some sense they don't hate them on an individual level as a rule. So they're happy to have far left Jews who agree with them in their movement and also denouncing other Jews and all that. Whereas a neo-Nazi is not going to want a Jew around regardless. So it's really this abstract ideological hatred. It's not that we hate you as a Jewish person, we wouldn't have dinner with you or won't want you to marry our daughter as long as you're ideologically okay. But we are okay with the worst sorts of reactionary, barbaric terrorists murdering all your relatives to establish a Islamic theocracy, even though we don't like Islamic theocracy. But they're the colonialists, so it's okay.
But doesn’t the left understand that being, for example gay, or feminist, is anathema to Hamas, punishable by death?
DB: Actually glad you mentioned that because another reason why this anti-colonialist the post-colonialist ideology though descended in many ways from Marxism is actually much worse than traditional communism. I defer to no one in my hatred of communism. But the one thing you could say for communists is that the ones who are true believers at least believed that by supporting communism, they would bring into effect, once the communists took over, a worker state where it'd be like a paradise for everybody. There'd be no more class conflict, everyone would have enough to eat and sort of be, was a utopian vision. The vision of the anti-colonialist is not utopian at all.
All they care about, literally all they care about is the people they consider the brown and black people should be in charge. It doesn't matter what kind of government they have. It doesn't matter if they're going to kill. The phenomenon of queers for Palestine or worst queers for Hamas is so bizarre until you realize that their ideology is that the good outcome is that the people we consider to be the non-white, non-oppressor class is in charge. It's as if the communist ideology was, we just want some worker, the Politburo to be in charge or Workers' Politburo and we don't care if it's animal farm or utopia. It doesn't matter at all. It's just to have the right people in charge, which is just a completely much worse than communism, I think, because no utopia at the end to make up for all the suffering and the violence.
How does the DEI agenda exacerbate this problem?
DB: DEI stands for diversity, equity inclusion. Every big bureaucracy now has a DEI office, corporations, universities, government and so forth. And what it comes down to is that it's not really about what laypeople would call diversity, equity, and inclusion at all. It's basically about the whole idea is instead of just enforcing civil rights laws by having a civil rights office, we're going to have an internal constituency at every place in the United States with any number of employees or students that is dedicated to empowering left-wing identitarian members of certain groups that we think politically we want to promote.
There are DEI people who are just sincere in trying to make their environment more welcoming to everybody. But the underlying basic ideology that plays out in elite institutions is that it's not to make Jews feel comfortable or Christians, evangelical Christians or other people that might be minorities within their social context comfortable. It's about having an internal constituency to ensure the affirmative action policies are applied vigorously to ensure that if there are educational programs on race or civil rights or diversity that they have a left-wing ideological bent to give support within the bureaucracy for initiatives within the institutions that promote this sort of ideology.
Is this a PR disaster for the woke movement?
DB: I don't claim to have my finger on the pulse of the American public more generally, but I do know something about what goes on at universities, and I see these donors, for example, to Penn who've now said they're not going to donate to Penn because it's been complicit in antisemitism saying, "We're not going to give any money to Penn until they get rid of their current president." That's not going to solve the problem. Yes, they could have had a president who exhibited better leadership in a variety of ways, but you have the entrenchment of these radical leftist ideologues who believe in this horrible identitarian, really racist, reverse racist you might say, ideology that targets Jews. And merely changing horses midstream is not going to do anything. There has to be some sort of fundamental reform. Fundamental reform is the type that some of the red states are trying to engage in getting rid of the DEI bureaucracies interfering more.
Full transcript here.
SHOWNOTES
The cult of “antizionism” (Table Magazine, Izabella Tabarovsky, September 19 2023)
"Anti Zionists" Show Their Genocidal Colors (reason, October 10, 2023)
Understanding Pro-Hamas Sentiment on the Far Left (reason, October 22, 2023)
How American Jews (stayed) white (The Times of Israel, July 11, 2022)
Israel is not committing genocide (Bernstein on Twitter)
Snowflakes for Hamas (Tablet Magazine, Oliver Traldi, November 8 2023)
Critical Race Theory and the “hyper-White Jew” (Sapir, Pamela Paresky, Spring 2021)
When ‘Critical Social Justice’ Rules on Campus (WSJ, Tabia Lee, October 22 2023)
The Marxian Roots of Campus Antisemitism (WSJ, Barton Swain, October 13 2023)
And take a look at Prof. Bernstein’s twitter here.
I grew up as a Communist and I remember the shift against Israel, (although at the time I saw it as Israel rejecting the Soviet Union.) I remember in an issue of Sputnik magazine that we had a subscription to showed a Palestinian freedom fighter with his boot on an IDF helmet. I remember telling a Jewish friend that Zionists we're Nazis. There was also an infantilizing of workers because they needed the Communist Party to lead them otherwise they could be fooled. I left supporting Communism long ago but I didn't know how rotten it was till recently. And the woke left reminds me of the Party's way of thinking and I see the effects of their dogmatism on the polarization in our politics.
Unfortunately the propaganda machine of the Soviet Union is alive and well in Putin's Russia. And he has been able to influence the radical Right as well as the Left.