On the surface, the wave of anti-Israel protests washing over college campuses across the country looks a lot like left-wing student activism dating back to at least the Vietnam War. Protesters chant radical, often rhyming, slogans accusing American and other Western governments of crimes against humanity with little to no scrutiny of the other side’s record on human rights.
Thinly connected, if not wholly unrelated, social causes are championed as part of the Rainbow Coalition model of progressive politics. (One placard that went viral on social media lists eliminating tuition at New York’s public universities among its demands alongside a ceasefire in Gaza.) Classroom activity and other parts of campus life are frequently disrupted as overwhelmingly liberal administrators and faculty look on in horror, often unsure of what to do.
A closer look reveals some important differences, however. While the demonstrations are more anti-Israeli than they are pro-Palestinian, often virulently so, many of the targets of its hostility are here at home. Jewish students report harassment and feeling unsafe on campuses where the loudest of these protests have taken hold. At Columbia University, ground zero for the latest conflagration, students have said invective and even liquids were hurled at them for the simple act of wearing a Jewish star. Colleges are creating antisemitism task forces and are under pressure from national political leaders to do more to protect their Jewish students.
Since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas last year, much has been written and said about what Israel should or should not do in Gaza. There has been at least as much commentary on what U.S. foreign policy in this area should be. Since the college protests have become widespread and police have begun to disperse the most disruptive among them, a great deal of ink and pixels have been devoted to questions of free speech and public order.
Considerably less attention has been focused on the question of why college campuses should need so many antisemitism task forces in the first place or why top university presidents so carefully parsed their denunciations — when their responses could even be so described — of textbook antisemitic statements. These institutions are awash in anti-racism, sensitivity training, hate speech codes, diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and calls for tolerance and mutual understanding. Their students are marinated in readings, lectures, and group sessions teaching them to banish impure thoughts about race and ethnicity, yet many of these activists are quick to resort to the basest barroom racial, ethnic, and religious taunts.
These are not small “right-wing” Bible colleges where Jewish students report feeling it is not safe to attend class or where antisemitic incidents and speech are being alleged. The encampments are not found at Bob Jones University, with its recent history of prohibitions on interracial dating. They are instead some of the most influential and most progressive institutions of higher learning in the country.
Shouldn’t these academic institutions and their young students have acquired antibodies against antisemitism or racially, religiously, and ethnically charged speech or conduct of any kind? Instead, reported antisemitic incidents are not only on the rise but are too often given the benefit of the doubt, explained away, or even defended outright in ways that would be unthinkable in other contexts. People who might be inclined to believe Jussie Smollett are deeply skeptical of Jewish students’ claims of mistreatment by the anti-Israel protesters.
The bigotry masquerading as equity has exposed major defects in the type of anti-racism being taught at elite universities and increasingly worming its way through corporate human resource departments and other institutions both public and private, with applications far removed from Israel and Hamas.
Treating people more as members of groups than individuals (White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo specifically presents “the precious ideology of individualism, the idea that every one of us is unique and special” as an obstacle to fighting, or even talking about, racism), generalizing broadly, neatly separating the world into victims and oppressors, and teaching a secularized version of original sin without hope of redemption, the popularized versions of anti-racism can often sound quite racist.
Racism itself has been redefined. In common usage, it is a term for racial hatred and prejudice. But the progressive definition favored in academia says that true racism must be prejudice plus power. This means that anyone categorized as powerless or who purports to speak for them can hold or express illiberal, even vicious, racial views without qualifying as racist. And by that standard, crude racial stereotyping by or on behalf of the oppressed isn’t racism. It can actually be anti-racism. Expressions of racial prejudice may not be racist not because the person expressing them isn’t being hateful enough but because he or she is not powerful enough.
There are a few obvious problems with this conception of racism. To begin with, the use of racial and ethnic slurs, race-based harassment, burning crosses on a lawn, spray-painting swastikas on buildings, lynchings, and most of what might be considered hate speech or hate crimes do not necessarily require political or institutional power to commit. It takes physical, not systemic, power to throw a brick through a window.
The Ku Klux Klan has held political and institutional power in the United States within the lifetimes of some who are still living today. But the white supremacist hate group has not wielded such influence in decades. This does not make, and has in fact not made, it any less racist. Nor is institutional and political power static: Other groups espousing racial or ethnic hatreds may have more of it in 2024 than the klan does.
When a wave of hate crimes against Asian Americans occurred during the pandemic, much of the press covered it as largely a white supremacist phenomenon. “Asian Americans did not face distinct peril but were targeted by the same forces of hate endured by Black Americans and that were evident in the insurrection against the US Capitol on January 6,” a CNN analysis of an Atlanta spa shooting paraphrased one activist as arguing at the time. The activist was later quoted directly: “While the focus is on anti-Asian hate, it all stems from white supremacy, and anyone can be a scapegoat at any moment. This is something that we need to face together and stand in solidarity.”
But in other high-profile incidents, the assailants were black. An oft-cited report that found most hate crimes against Asian Americans were committed by white people also concluded that “hate crimes against Asian Americans are more likely than hate crimes against either African Americans or Hispanics to be committed by non-White offenders.”
Policy analyst Diane Yap argued in City Journal that “news stories covering black-on-Asian violence should not be attributed to disinformation or media bias.” She wrote, “Most violent attacks against individuals of a particular racial group are committed by other members of that group — except for Asians, where a plurality is committed by blacks.”
Violent attacks are no less contemptible based on the race of the perpetrator. That characteristic certainly does not make these incidents qualitatively better for the victim. The issue is that the prevailing narrative about racism in the academy cannot adequately account for conflicts involving multiple protected racial minority groups and has limited explanatory power for current examples of racist violence in our society.
Or examples from recent history, for that matter. Actress Whoopi Goldberg stirred controversy on The View in 2022 when she denied the racism component of the Holocaust, suggesting the mass slaughter of Jews by the Nazis was a form of white-on-white violence. “Let’s be truthful about it because Holocaust isn’t about race,” she said. “It’s not about race. It’s about man’s inhumanity to man.”
“But these are two white groups of people!” Goldberg continued when pressed by a co-host. “The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. It doesn’t matter if you’re black or white, Jews — it’s each other.”
Goldberg apologized, but she didn’t seem fully persuaded by her critics’ reaction. “I don’t want to fake-apologize. … You can’t call this racism,” Goldberg said on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. “I think of race as being something that I can see. How can you say it’s about race when you’re fighting each other?”
“Being Jewish means watching white nationalists call for your death because you’re ‘not white’ while ladies on national TV say the Holocaust was ‘white people killing white people … y’all go fight amongst yourselves,’” Israeli writer Hen Mazzig posted.
The View co-host was at least not disputing that what happened to Jews under Adolf Hitler was an atrocity. But if your definition of racism doesn’t readily include the Holocaust or Nazi Germany, it has some serious flaws. The Third Reich would also clearly qualify as structural and systemic racism.
Denying evident facts about individual manifestations of bigotry is necessary to redefine racism as an exclusively societal ill. “In the DiAngelo doctrine, the issue was not individual racists doing singular bad acts,” writes Nellie Bowles in the forthcoming book Morning after the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, as excerpted by the Atlantic. “All white people are racist, because racism is structural.”
One could accept the classical definition of racism as an ideology of racial bias and bigotry without denying racism can and often does have major societal ramifications. This definition does, however, become difficult to square with unqualified pronouncements about how “all white people are.”
Much like progressive exhortations against confusing climate and weather, which are inevitably followed by citations of specific weather events in support of progressive climate policy objectives, individual acts that might fit the classical definition of racism are primarily to be viewed as illustrations of the larger structural problem, if committed by the correct people or groups.
There is an inherent risk of trivializing genuine expressions and acts of racial hatred when the term “racism” is used in the service of a political ideology not shared by a majority of people. It cannot escape notice that under the progressive definition, non-progressive things are generally racist and progressive things are generally not. This might seem to a great many people to be self-serving in an era of extreme political polarization, an observation that might not lead them to “anti-racist” conclusions.
If the word “racist” is simply a cudgel to help Democrats win elections, certain academics secure tenure, and DiAngelo, who is white, and Ibram X. Kendi receive money from Coca-Cola and other huge companies with cash to spare, it may start to seem absurd. But the entire point of the “woke” exercise is supposedly to raise awareness of one’s daily contributions to bigotry and injustice. Instead, it is obscuring these things for some and mainstreaming them for others. If you have the right politics or belong to the right group, you’re off the hook.
This is what leads us back to the present situation of viewing the tragic and intractable problems of the Middle East through the fun-house mirror of American progressive racial politics. Neither the history of the Jewish people nor the Jewish state fits comfortably within the intersectionality framework. When faced with a conflict between two groups with plausible claims of victimhood, both minorities in the U.S., the whole system short-circuits and malfunctions badly.
If David Duke told New York-born Jews attending American universities to “go back to Poland,” it would be instantly recognized for what it is. That’s a relatively easy call. If the encampments were teeming with tiki torch-wielding white nationalists, most progressives would pick up on anti-Jewish sentiment even if it were scantily clad in language about Zionism. Yet a “black queer” at Columbia can, unlike a certified Charlottesville thug, disguise himself at least for a while as a Palestinian ally while ranting about killing “Zionists” before the obvious course correction is made.
An ostensibly anti-racist ideology is blinding people to the similarities between the slogans they shout and “the Jews will not replace us” while letting those who do appreciate the resemblance hide in plain sight. I have no doubt that there are students who hear “from the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab” and its more popular variant “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” through secular Western liberal ears as a call for a one-state multicultural paradise. If they envision Hamas-controlled territory as a place where Queers for Palestine and drag queens can flourish, or at least no worse than a U.S. state with a Republican governor, then they are primed to believe anything.
Hamas’s intentions toward Jews are not so benign, which is why the rhetoric of genocidal organizations has no place in the messaging of a putatively anti-genocide campaign. Rejecting Hamas talking points does not require indifference to Palestinian suffering. Yet the problem is not just the naivete of youth or the historical illiteracy of daytime television loudmouths. Some of the most sophisticated progressives teaching on these subjects see Israel, indeed virtually the entire Western experience, as a settler-colonizer dynamic.
“Although the expression of this worldview isn’t limited to college campuses, those campuses are the main reason we are now witnessing three Charlottesvilles a day,” wrote Seth Mandel, my predecessor at this magazine, in Commentary. “After all, it means students are paying attention in class.”
The writer Najma Sharif put it another way in a social media post shared by a Washington Post foreign affairs columnist, among thousands of others: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.” Note: “Decolonization” advocates don’t want to stop with Israel.
It is not even clear that this approach to anti-racism has succeeded on its own terms: curbing white racism. While the hardcore alt-right retreated after Charlottesville, its growth coincided with critical race theory’s escape from the faculty lounge. Workshops in which people struggle with their “whiteness” provide, however unintentionally, perfect fodder. Sentiments about communities of color that were becoming increasingly marginal in the decades following the civil rights movement are now fairly common on mainstream social media websites.
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To note that a certain flavor of racial progressivism has been counterproductive or fanned the flames of extremism isn’t to say that these collegiate critiques of racism are wrong in every particular. But we are witnessing a departure from the arguments that carried the day for civil rights a generation ago, forming a more perfect union consistent with the country’s founding principles and highest ideals.
The sharp illiberal turn in the discourse over Israel should be a bright, flashing warning signal that people who claim to oppose tribalism in principle are not always immune to its excesses in practice. Let’s hope we pay attention.
W. James Antle III is executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine.