Name: White People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatred
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White People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatred

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SubscribeSign inShare this postWhite People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatredwww.commonsense.newsCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailMar 23, 2021Share this postWhite People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatredwww.commonsense.newsCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailToday’s guest writer, Zaid Jilani, first came on my radar in late 2011. When I first heard his name it was an attached to an epithet: antisemitic.Zaid was then working at a think tank called the Center for American Progress and he’d used the phrase “Israel Firster” in a number of online arguments. He was echoing others who had used the term, having little idea that it invoked the old and insidious notion of Jews having dual loyalty. Ultimately, he resigned from the organization. Those are among the themes that Zaid tackles in today’s powerful essay, which I am proud to publish: Middle school is terrible for everyone, but you’re going to have to trust me that it was rougher on me than many. Ninth grade was my opportunity for a new identity. In attending a magnet school that was outside of my normal district, I had the chance, at last, to make new friends. But I often found myself being misinterpreted or misunderstood.There was a student in one of my classes with whom I got into arguments over trivial things. He was friends with one group of people, and I was trying, desperately, to be friends with another, rival group. In retrospect it was utterly normal high school cliquishness, but I interpreted it as something else.&nbsp;We were all asked to keep diaries to describe our experiences in class. I mentioned in that diary that I thought I didn’t get along with this other student because he was Jewish. A teacher read the diary and asked me to speak to a school administrator.That administrator was a calm, soft-spoken man who used the conversation to learn more about me. He quickly realized that I had anxiety issues and was struggling to fit in. He pointed to the comments I had written about my classmate and suggested to me that they were antisemitic. I was judging him on the basis of stereotypes I had about Jewish people, not based on who he was.Here is a good moment to reflect on the fact that I am a Pakistani-American Muslim. Our community is warm and generous, hardworking and inventive. My parents came to this country in the 1970s because they knew it was welcoming to people like us. Unlike life on the Indian subcontinent, here you aren’t instantly judged by your ethnic group, sect or caste. In America, we were free to be whoever we wanted to be.&nbsp;In political conversations and at social gatherings, it was all too common to hear ordinary Jewish people get conflated with extreme actors, like far-right Israeli politicians, or to hear about complicated conspiracies involving Jews that, if nothing else, are far too elaborate to ever reflect reality. (How can they possibly control the banks, the borders and, at the same time, be the actual founders of ISIS?)What saved me from the same fate — of holding ignorant beliefs about an entire people — was that extraordinary administrator. The most important thing he impressed on me, calmly and without shaming me, was that my classmate, like me, was an individual. He wasn’t an avatar of some kind of monolithic group. And neither was I.The primacy of the individual — that we judge people not by their lineage but by their deeds — is at the very foundation of a free society and of the American experiment. This wisdom has come under sustained assault by an ideology that insists that we are, in fact, avatars of various demographic markers — race, gender, sexuality — rather than complex human beings.&nbsp;Even after yesterday’s tragic shooting in a Boulder grocery store, this racist illogic reared its head. “It’s always an angry white man. always,” tweeted a “race and inclusion editor” at USA Today. A senior editor at Deadspin tweeted: “Extremely tired of people's lives depending on whether a white man with an AR-15 is having a good day or not.” Kamala Harris’s niece, Meena, offered: “violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.”Perhaps the most disturbing, sustained example of the way this ideology distorts the truth is the coverage of ongoing violence against Asian-Americans, most recently last week’s Atlanta-area murders, in which six of the eight victims were Asian.This narrative is pervasive, but it bears no relationship to the evidence before us. Not only are none of the high-profile attackers over the past few months white supremacists, many of them aren’t even white.&nbsp;Although there is no comprehensive database that lays out the details of all of the attacks over the past year — we will likely have to wait until the FBI’s annual Uniform Crime Report is released — there is data showing what victimization of Asian-Americans generally looks like in the United States.Those are just hate crimes — crimes in which the suspect explicitly declares a racial motivation. If you look at all violent crimes, you’ll see a picture that diverges even more sharply from the white supremacy narrative.&nbsp;So why are so many self-described liberals embracing an ideology that seems to insist that white racism is the only kind of racism?I suspect that many white liberals — ridden with guilt over American history and biases that still exist among the white majority — believe they are doing minorities like me a favor by denying us the responsibility of addressing our own prejudices. Critical race theorists often argue that the true definition of racism should be prejudice plus power, implying that only whites can be racist But hidden within that construction is the assumption that minorities can never be powerful.My high school administrator disagreed. He looked at me and saw a young man full of potential. I wasn’t some domino set in motion by centuries of white supremacy. I was a human being with critical thinking skills and agency. And because he forced me to take responsibility for my own prejudices, I was able to become the person I am today — a journalist whose words carry the weight of social influence and power. You cannot have power without responsibility. Denying minorities responsibility for their own actions, both good and bad, will only deny us the power we rightly deserve.If you haven’t yet subscribed to Common Sense, please consider it. Your support allows me to publish writers like Zaid:Like this postShare this postWhite People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatredwww.commonsense.newsCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmail73 CommentsFor your security, we need to re-authenticate you.Click the link we sent to , or .Expand full commentExpand full commentNo posts© 2022 Bari Weiss ∙ ∙ &nbsp;is the home for great writingThis site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please or unblock scripts

SubscribeSign inShare this postWhite People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatredwww.commonsense.newsCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailMar 23, 2021Share this postWhite People Don't Have a Monopoly on Hatredwww.commonsense.newsCopy linkTwitterFacebookEmailToday’s guest writer, Zaid Jilani, first came on my radar in late 2011. When I first heard his name it was an attached to an epithet: antisemitic.Zaid was then working at a think tank called the Center for American Progress and he’d used the phrase “Israel Firster” in a number of online arguments. He was echoing others who had used the term, having...

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