Those Who Do Not Learn From Oppression Are Doomed To Inflict It

In April 1967, James Baldwin wrote an article for the New York Times entitled, Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They're Anti-White, which he begins with a comprehensive list of grievances against Jewish New Yorkers:

When we were growing up in Harlem our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish, and we hated them. We hated them because they were terrible landlords, and did not take care of the building […]

The grocer was a Jew, and being in debt to him was very much like being in debt to the company store. The butcher was a Jew and, yes, we certainly paid more for bad cuts of meat than other New York citizens, and we very often carried insults home, along with the meat. We bought our clothes from a Jew and, sometimes, our secondhand shoes and the pawnbroker was a Jew--perhaps we hated him most of all…

As Kanye West so ably demonstrated black skin is not a barrier to antisemitism. Just as Jewishness is not a vaccine against racism. There’s no such thing as a people who are immune to bigotry.

But some people—myself included—think black people should know better. 

After all, if you know how it feels to be attacked for the actions of others, if you know how frustrating it is to be treated as a collective instead of as an individual, if your ancestors have been dehumanised because they were seen as inferior, surely you understand why it’s wrong to do the same to others. 

But the source of Baldwin's resentment was exactly this sense that these people who’d experienced so much oppression throughout their history, were willing to oppress him once they got to be landlords and grocers and pawnbrokers. Their oppression, as he put it, did not “ennoble” them. Although, as he admits, oppression didn’t ennoble him either:

[the Jew] is singled out by Negroes not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't […] One can be disappointed in the Jew if one is romantic enough--for not having learned from history; but if people did learn from history, history would be very different.

As the death toll in Gaza continues to rise, I can’t help but wonder how different the present would be if we learned from history. Although the most frustrating aspect of this mess is that we don’t seem to have learned much at all, either from oppression or from history. 

For instance, in 1938, we saw representatives from thirty-two countries meet in Évian-les-Bains, France, to discuss taking Jewish immigrants from Germany in the face of rising antisemitism. As former U.S. vice-president Walter Mondale noted, “If each nation at Évian had agreed on that day to take in 17,000 Jews at once, every Jew in the Reich could have been saved.” 

But they didn’t. And so, it took a World War, five long years, and six million dead Jews, before the killing stopped.