In recent years, critical race theory has made its way out of the academy and into America’s public discourse, especially with such successful books as Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist; it even was mentioned in a presidential debate. Among the many disturbing aspects of this set of ideas is that it tends, as James Lindsay puts it, to “shoehorn Jews into its broken analytical framework.” Worse, Lindsay adds, “it both hides and misunderstands anti-Semitism, which allows for a particular, pernicious variant of it to come into existence under a full-throated denial that it’s anti-Semitism at all.” He explains:
The uniquely Jewish combination of a long history of terrible oppression of a people that isn’t just (at least partly) fair-skinned but also highly successful in what the critical race theorists would deem a “white” milieu is, in fact, completely intolerable to critical race theory. The theory distrusts Jewish success as such and, as with everything it analyzes, believes it must have something to do with having been granted access to the privileges of “whiteness”—illegitimately, by betrayal, and at the expense of blacks.
It would then, in due course, demand that “white” Jews accept and atone for their whiteness by the familiar process: recognize it in themselves, acknowledge their de-facto complicity in “white supremacy,” critique their own unwitting participation therein, and then submit to and promote the critical race theory in both ideology and deed, which takes the form of their brand of “anti-racist” social activism. . . . This [demand implicitly] requires asking Jews to deny both their history and what makes them Jews in the first place.
This point is not a small one. Critical race theory is able to pretend to acknowledge the oppression of the Jews, misunderstand its fundamental nature, [and] deny that anti-Semitism counts as a form of group oppression at all. . . . Through this completely avoidable superhighway of racist confusion, critical race theory is able to maintain a complete denial of anti-Semitism, including its own, while reproducing anti-Semitism by [deeming] Jews . . . illegitimately privileged and in unjust control of society. As a consequence, denial of Jewish oppression—however real it was historically—and viewing Jews as usurpers of cultural privilege are mainstream beliefs within critical race theory.
Combined with the hostility to Israel that pervades left-wing circles, critical race theory can easily bleed into outright anti-Semitism.
Read more on New Discourses: https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/critical-race-theorys-jewish-problem/