By Seth Mandel
Wednesday, February 14, 2024
When
it comes to DEI programs and other race-focused bureaucracies, it can be easy
to forget the underlying ideology and focus on the diversity offices and
officers themselves. But in Maryland, we just got a chilling reminder that the
worldview that nourishes such fads—whether DEI or intersectionality or race
theory or “privilege” discourse—has spread far and wide and holds up the Jew as
the ultimate public enemy.
At
issue is a Maryland House bill that would establish a grant program for
Holocaust education in schools throughout the state. The grant money would go
to fund teacher training and class materials.
State
education grant programs aren’t terribly oppressive. But they do cost money.
And that is money poorly spent, according to opponents of the bill who spoke at
a recent committee hearing. One parent objecting to the legislation is worth
quoting at length, as an example of the raw anti-Semitism at the heart of the
competitive victimhood that governs progressive-minded institutions.
He
started off addressing “the black members of this board,” and launched into a
tirade we have all heard before and will hear again, though we’re hearing it a
bit more often these days. “It would be absolute treason, after 250 years of
the Holocaust, of what we went through in chattel slavery, to allow people to
come and take our suffering, put a few shekels on it, and benefit off of what
we went through,” said the man, himself African-American. “This is the United
States of America. We were the ones who went through the Holocaust. There was
no Jewish suffering in this place—in fact, they helped to bring us over here,
to the native Americans and the Hispanics.… It is treason to your ancestors to
let someone take your suffering, and to do this to benefit them to tell a story
that is ahistorical.”
He
then turned “to the white people in the room” and addressed them: “Yes, you
participated in both of those, but guess what? The truth is, you built this
country, and we built this country. We may not have wanted to do it, but we did
it. When the time came to save Jews in Germany, you were the ones with the
power. And guess what you did? You gave blood, sweat, and tears and resources
and went and saved them.… You don’t owe them anything. They owe us, America.
And I’ve not yet in fifty years heard one of them say thank you. So I ask every
member of every group that I just spoke of: If they want this, let them go to
Germany and get it from the Germans. American citizens owe nothing in this
regard and it is treason to take our suffering as African people and use it and
monopolize it and take it and let somebody else benefit from it.”
American
politics has turned into a kind of racial spoils system. And this is its end
state: “They” are the Jews; “We” are everyone else. We used to worry that kids
would learn this at home and our educational institutions would struggle to
keep students from acting out the parts they were taught to play. Now we reckon
with the fact that schools have gone so far as to require this racial
fanaticism to be dissolved into the bloodstream of students before they
graduate. America has been very good to the Jews. And for that, apparently, the
Jews will be punished.
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