David Christopher Kaufman
Commentary Magazine, March 2025
“Jews today are inadvertently upending the notion that whites are immune from racism. Jews may still be considered “white” by the federal government’s census counters. But when it comes to the dynamics behind race and racism, Jews are emerging as a new kind of oppressed minority.”
Few progressive maxims are more sacrosanct than the idea that African Americans are “incapable of racism.” Racism is a specific evil directed at black people; it is particularist, not universal. This philosophy is a by-product of the effort to understand the violent racial unrest that coursed through American cities in the mid-1960s.
In 1968, Lyndon Johnson tasked the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (better known as the Kerner Commission) with identifying the underlying causes of this urban chaos. The conclusion: Foundational white prejudice paired with the might of government institutions such as the military and police forces was responsible for the mayhem. Racism wasn’t merely prejudice, a means for certain groups of people to show and act on their bias against certain groups of people different from them. No, racism was the power to transform that prejudice in ways that “affect someone’s life physically, economically, educationally, politically or otherwise,” as Clyde W. Ford put it in the Los Angeles Times last year.
Aided and emboldened by private and public institutions, white people possess this power. And because they do, they could be racist. Black people, who had been long denied the safeguards of favorable police patrols or housing authorities or education departments, could not. ….Source