Yes, I agree. Perhaps what I should have written is something like: the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't at all comprehensible if "racism" is defined as "skin color." But if it's a Jew/Arab (um, and Persian) conflict, then it's not about "race" at all in the modern American usage.
What was particularly weird about the Whoopi Goldberg episo…
Yes, I agree. Perhaps what I should have written is something like: the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't at all comprehensible if "racism" is defined as "skin color." But if it's a Jew/Arab (um, and Persian) conflict, then it's not about "race" at all in the modern American usage.
What was particularly weird about the Whoopi Goldberg episode was that for the Nazis, exterminating my relatives in Germany and Ukraine was precisely about <race> as they understood the term.
I don't mean to hijack this thread to make it about something else, so let me validate your comment about plagiarism by noting that earlier this year I finished a professional (not academic) doctoral thesis and I am 100 percent confident that there's no plagiarism in it. Maybe I put a footnote (there were hundreds) in the wrong place, but on no page will you find blocks of text that somebody else wrote. This makes me entirely unsympathetic to the "everybody does it" argument. Had I done what Gay did, the school (which I doubt you've ever heard of) would have tossed me out on my ass.
"I don't mean to hijack this thread to make it about something else"
No, not a hijack at all, I think it's an interesting point. And yes, while we could all debate the specifics of the word "racism," I think you're right that Anita brings Israel Palestine into the conversation because she is only able to look at the world through a single ideological framework. I wrote an article about that actually😄
Yes, I agree. Perhaps what I should have written is something like: the Israel-Palestine conflict isn't at all comprehensible if "racism" is defined as "skin color." But if it's a Jew/Arab (um, and Persian) conflict, then it's not about "race" at all in the modern American usage.
What was particularly weird about the Whoopi Goldberg episode was that for the Nazis, exterminating my relatives in Germany and Ukraine was precisely about <race> as they understood the term.
I don't mean to hijack this thread to make it about something else, so let me validate your comment about plagiarism by noting that earlier this year I finished a professional (not academic) doctoral thesis and I am 100 percent confident that there's no plagiarism in it. Maybe I put a footnote (there were hundreds) in the wrong place, but on no page will you find blocks of text that somebody else wrote. This makes me entirely unsympathetic to the "everybody does it" argument. Had I done what Gay did, the school (which I doubt you've ever heard of) would have tossed me out on my ass.
"I don't mean to hijack this thread to make it about something else"
No, not a hijack at all, I think it's an interesting point. And yes, while we could all debate the specifics of the word "racism," I think you're right that Anita brings Israel Palestine into the conversation because she is only able to look at the world through a single ideological framework. I wrote an article about that actually😄