Racism, Jews And Artificial Blindness

Whenever a Jewish person does something wrong, someone jumps in to say that Jews are bad.

By that standard Americans are bad because Ted Bundy was an American.

Are there Jewish people who are bad? Of course there are. But that does not mean either that all Jews are bad or that all bad people are Jews. I am not Harvey Weinstein any more than you are Ted Bundy. I refuse to be blamed for actions of someone whom I don’t know and over whom I had no influence.

Now to be fair we see wrong things from the other side as well. There is a claim for example that saying anything about social groups is racism. That is completely wrong. Racism is discrimination based on race. I don’t discriminate based on race; I discriminate based on culture. People are not in control of their race. They are in control of cultures that they develop.

Are there differences in individuals within cultures? Of course there are. But there are also differences between cultures. The culture of San Francisco is very different from the culture of Saudi Arabia. Failing to see such things is not enlightenment. It is blindness.

Indeed in these people we see what very much appears to be an artificial blindness. And artificial blindness and bigotry feed into each other. A bigoted person will notice a social phenomenon and propose for it a wrong, bigoted reason; the academic would say “no that is a stereotype” or “no that is a generalization,” the bigoted person will look again and say “no this is definitely going on,” so he will decide that the academic is full of crap and will go on with his wrong, bigoted explanation. The only way to actually defeat bigotry is to find correct reasons for social phenomena, that beget correct stereotypes but not correct explanations. Neither bigotry nor artificial blindness are right. What is right is finding actual reasons for such things.

Among the Jews themselves, there are different cultures. The Orthodox act like Muslims; the Conservatives act like mainstream Americans; and the Reform act like the French. Neither is responsible for the actions of the other. Nor are they responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. That was 2000 years ago, and the people who were a part of it have long been dead. If the claim is that the sins of fathers are visited on the sons, that would mean that Americans should suffer because they had the slave trade and that the Germans should suffer because there was Nazism. And if these people are to be exonerated over the sins of their ancestors, then so must be the Jews.

So we have bigotry on one side and artificial blindness on the other. Both are wrong. And the correct solution is finding real reasons for social phenomena, and in so doing conclusively defeating bigotry.