In another thread, several people have either implied or outright claimed that prejudice against and oppression of Jews is analogous to prejudice against and oppression of African Americans.
I think that’s a terrible analogy, and I want to confront it here.
A preface: I am not saying that the experience of black people is worse than the experience of Jews. Certainly the Holocaust is a unique event for several specific reasons. Instead I’m claiming that the specifics of the different forms of oppression have had different effects.
First, the early forms of oppression. Jews in Europe faced pogroms and were confined to ghettos that suffered periodic massacres. That’s terrible. They were forbidden to practice their religion. That’s awful. Through those experiences, though, Jews were able to maintain a coherent society in those ghettos (with exceptions such as fifteenth century Spain) and were able to continue practicing their religion in secret. They were able to maintain a written tradition and history. They were able to pass property down to their children.
Africans were enslaved, stripped of all wealth (literally all wealth, including their own clothes), and sold as property. Laws were written that legalized dismembering slaves. Communication among slaves was discouraged. Their religion and language were forbidden. Learning to read or write was forbidden. Ownership of significant property was forbidden. Members of families and tribes were routinely separated from one another. The previously existing social order was destroyed in a way that it was never destroyed for Jews–with, again, the possible exception of fifteenth century Spain.
In the twentieth century in the United States, Jews faced routine discrimination. The best jobs were not available to them. Some communities threatened to kill Jews who moved there. Clubs were closed to them. In Europe, they were massacred in one of the worst massacres in human history. But again, there were enclaves of Jewish culture that survived, due in large part to the ability in some societies to participate fully as equal members. Many Jewish people were able to obtain positions of power (not at the highest levels–no Jewish president–but at levels such as federal office or advisors to the presidency, or heads of major corporations).
In the twentieth century in the United States, black people faced routine violence, disenfrachisement, and discrimination. Major public policies that fundamentally changed culture for white gentiles and Jews, such as the Fair Labor Standards Act and the GI Bill, effectively excluded black Americans. Racist violence against black people was far more common in the United States than against Jews in the United States. Black people were forbidden from attending the best public school, up to and into the twenty-first century, in a way that rarely happened to Jewish people. The accumulation of wealth was sharply curtailed for black families through means both legal (redlining by banks) and illegal (lynchings of blacks who gained too much power, illegal hiring discrimination). The justice system regularly punished, and continues to punish, black people for crimes much more harshly than white gentiles and Jews are punished for the same crimes.
Some people make the claim that Jews have overcome oppression, so why can’t black people? I would say that in the United States, the systematic oppression of black people has been far more thorough, violent, and pervasive than the oppression of Jewish people, and so the analogy fails.
