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Racism
What Daniel says
By Les Brown
Racial superiority in surprising places
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My daughter was dating her high school sweetheart, Daniel (not his real name). There is much to like about Daniel and I’m still very fond of him. We had many great times together and, while he was with my daughter, I thought of him and treated him as though he were my own. He and my daughter are no longer together.
At the time in question, Daniel was 18 or so and I was forty something. As I stood at the kitchen counter, preparing food, he sidled up to me as though to tell me something private and, in a voice just above a whisper, he confided that “Jews are best.” For a moment, I didn’t quite know what to make of his words. Best for what? Then it dawned on me; Daniel didn’t differentiate between the superlative “best” and the comparative “better.” What he meant was “Jews are better.”
Up went my antenna and one eyebrow. “Oh” I said, “what are the rest of us then, chopped liver”? So began a long conversation about the myth of superiority and inferiority among religious, cultural and ethnic groups. There are so many flavours to choose from: Catholic and Protestant, Sunni and Shia, Jew and Arab, Black and white, Hutu and Tutsi, Francophone and Anglophone, Aryan and non-Aryan, and so on.
The list is virtually endless and it’s all the same old stuff.
What surprised me about Daniel’s opinion was that it came from a Jewish source. It seems to me that the widespread and longstanding history of discrimination against Jewry ought to have engendered not a perpetuation of prejudice and division but an understanding and sensitivity that would preclude such a view. Sadly, I’m forced to the conclusion that Daniel’s opinion was not learned in the public arena, school or synagogue but from friends and family.
It is widely held in our society that six million people perished in the Nazi Holocaust. But my cursory research suggests that this number relates only to Jewish victims. When one adds to this sum political opponents of the Nazis, Roma, Soviets, Poles, prisoners of war, Slavs, the disabled, the mentally ill, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Free-masons and others, the estimated count swells to a much higher figure, possibly 20 million or more. There can be no certainty about the precise number of deaths in total, but we can be reasonably sure that Jewish deaths represent a minority of the total. In my experience, the disclosure of this fact invariably comes as something of a surprise to those who believe the Jews were the Nazis’ only victims. I’m left with an uneasy feeling about why the number of murders committed in the Holocaust is often underestimated. If one takes the view that one group is “chosen,” then the others, by definition, are not “chosen.” If one takes the view that one group is superior, then all other groups are inferior. Do some Holocaust deaths count and others not? My position is that all victims of the Holocaust are of equal value.
Given the long history of persecution suffered by the Jews at the hands of those who thought themselves to be superior, I am deeply troubled by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Could it be that Israel’s actions are driven by the belief that the rights of Israelis are superior to those of the Palestinians?
Recently I met an obviously intelligent and cordial Jewish woman at what I guessed to be her early middle age. When I engaged her on the subject of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, I was shocked and distressed by her reaction. “It’s not our turn any more, it’s their turn now,” she said.
We would all do well to remember that the National Geographic’s Genographic Project reveals that we are all descended from common African ancestors. All notions of superiority and inferiority in human beings are based on unfounded and artificial ethnic, cultural, national, linguistic and religious divisions.
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