WASHINGTON, DC
Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig: The Progressive Racist: An All Too Real Oxymoron
Is it possible to be a “progressive” and a racist at one and the same time? Unfortunately, yes.
Three questions should be asked when someone protests against war and humanitarian crises: 1) Is their goal to alleviate suffering or to vilify those responsible for the calamity? 2) Should the skin color of the victims and their “persecutors” influence the nature and even existence of the protest? 3) Assuming that one can’t protest against every humanitarian disaster in the world, should the number of victims be a determining factor in deciding which to demonstrate against (or offering a solution)?
For a “humanitarian progressive” the answer to the first question should be the alleviation of suffering as the primary goal of such protest. The second question should be easier to answer (especially for “progressives”): a person is a person, whether white, black, or any shade in between. The third question is the most straightforward of all: the number of fatalities and those suffering from other forms of serious suffering has to be an important factor.
The vast majority of Westerners protesting against Israel’s war in Gaza today fail these three cardinal tests. In short, they are not really progressive but rather what I would call “selective progressive racists.” “Racist” because skin color does count for them (big time!); “Selective” in that they ignore the number of victims, focusing almost exclusively on the perpetrators to the detriment of most any constructive suggestions for alleviating or ending the conflict.
Palestinians who protest against Israel (even if their case is tendentiously one-sided) can be understood from their narrow standpoint. But non-Palestinians supporting their cause are precisely the “selective progressive racists” noted above. Here’s why, based on a mere three examples around the world these days (unfortunately, one could add several more, e.g., Yemen, but these will suffice).
Sudan is undergoing a humanitarian crisis of monumental proportions, starting a year ago. Airstrikes have hit civilian centers on an ongoing basis; vigilantes (militiamen too) loot neighborhoods. In many regions, hospitals and health services hardly function. Worst of all, thousands of civilians have been killed, including massacres that are clear war crimes. And they might be the lucky ones; there are numerous eyewitness accounts of rape and other forms of sexual violence. Children are suffering no less: the U.N. reports that approximately 19,000,000 (million!) Sudanese children are out of school, and 3,000,000 among them are malnourished.
Why isn’t food aid arriving? As The Economist recently reported: “Within Sudan, WFP trucks have been blocked, hijacked, attacked, looted and detained. Outside Sudan, makeshift camps are swollen with hungry and sick arrivals — but there’s no money to feed them.”
All this sounds like what protesters are accusing Israel of – but in staggeringly higher numbers of dead and starving. Have we heard even a peep from the world’s “progressives”? Seemingly, Black lives matter – but only if the Blacks live in America.
Next stop, across the world – to Myanmar, the most violent war in the world today, with an estimated 50,000 dead since the military coup in 2021, and over 2,000,000 displaced. Most of this is due to the military junta’s blanket use of air strikes and shelling of mostly civilian targets. Here too one would be hard-pressed to find any “progressive” protests against the illegitimate and ruthless Myanmar military government. If overseas black lives don’t matter, then brown lives to them matter even less.
Finally, back to Africa and the worst of all. This time we’re dealing with past and present. Since the turn of the millennium, the Ethiopian conflict has led to more than 500,000 dead soldiers and around 350,000 civilian fatalities – probably the deadliest conflict in decades anywhere in the world. Here too the fighters took part in numerous atrocities in general and sexual violence specifically. That war “ended” a year and a half ago, but has now started up again (somewhat different combatants). According to the U.N., close to 30,000,000 people now require emergency food aid – and if that doesn’t arrive soon, many will be starving in the near future.
Have you seen any protests at Harvard or Columbia (et al) regarding such mind-boggling suffering? Of course not – here too we’re talking about Blacks without American citizenship. Moreover, it isn’t clear which group is the perpetrator and which is the victim. So without a clear “evil (colonialist?) persecutor” to go after, why bother helping the victims?
When one realizes the disparity between the number of Gazan fatalities (a bit over 30,000 if the Hamas-based numbers can be believed – of which at least 10,000 of these are the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists) – and the humongous numbers in Africa and Asia noted above, it becomes clear that even if anti-Semitism is not driving most of the pro-Palestinian protesters, subtle “progressive racism” is certainly a factor in singling out Israel when the devastation and humanitarian crises are far worse elsewhere.
Israelis are racist? The protesters should look in the mirror. The real racists here are those who ignore the greatest political-human tragedies in the world today. Even if they call themselves “progressive.”
