The Psychology of Anti-Semitism

[Blue_Tires]

Link to tweet

After the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, in which a white supremacist shot to death 11 people while screaming, “All Jews must die,” a Jewish girl in New York sent an anguished note to her mother. “I know I shouldn’t feel like I don’t have an answer to this question,” she wrote in a text message that was later shared on social media. “But why do people hate us?”

Her bafflement was understandable. Many people, of course, favor the groups they belong to and dislike groups they don’t belong to; that is the regrettable foundation of prejudice. But not all groups are disliked the same way: Why are some groups (such as homeless people) dismissed or neglected in a relatively steady stream of scorn, while other groups (such as Jewish people) are subjected to sudden waves of virulent, even exterminatory attacks?

For many decades psychologists conceived of prejudice as a one-dimensional antipathy: People love their “in-groups” and hate “out-groups.” But this us-versus-them approach failed to account for prejudice’s real-world complexities.

To better understand the various ways in which bigotry manifests, the psychologists Susan Fiske, Peter Glick and I developed a new theory of prejudice, one that focuses on the content of stereotypes of out-groups. We have found that how an out-group is stereotyped predicts how the prejudice against it gets expressed. This theory — tested over more than 20 years by us and others in hundreds of studies, with tens of thousands of participants, across many cultures — helps explain why anti-Semitism often erupts in such violent bursts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/03/opinion/sunday/psychology-anti-semitism.html

[Kind of Blue]

1. Poor kid doesn't understand how the Jews became white

and how they didn't have to face here for too long WEB Du Boise's double consciousness like the rest of PoC.

"In the wake of World War II, the horrors of Nazism were becoming public and publicly repudiated. Eugenics and political forms of institutional anti-Semitism lost much of their hold. A good economy and a progressive political climate enabled America to dismantle some aspects of legal discrimination and segregation. One result was that Ashkenazi Jews became white; for a while, in the ’50s, we even became a best-selling flavor of American popular culture. Those benefits weren’t extended to African Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans. Racism itself didn’t take a hit. The category of white just expanded to include Southern and Eastern Europeans. I figured it was permanent.

One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is that you don’t have to spend all your time and energy defending your collective right to exist. When I first encountered anti-Semitism, on a pleasant day in Montana in the summer of 1959, I was secure in that privilege. As a bunch of us tossed around softballs, one guy reached out and snagged a ball being thrown to me. 'I jewed you!' he shouted joyfully. When I asked what he meant by that, he told me it meant that he was acting like a Jew — grabbing what wasn’t his. I asked him if he’d ever met a Jew. He hadn’t, so I told him that I was Jewish. He was amazed because I didn’t have horns (really). I didn’t experience him as hostile, just dumb. I didn’t have to defend Jews; we were white.

Twenty years later, in North Carolina, a friend told me that many white Southerners still didn’t see Jews as white. Again, this didn’t really bother me. These folks, I thought, just didn’t know any better.

Read more: https://forward.com/opinion/356166/how-jews-became-white-folks-and-may-become-nonwhite-under-trump/

[Kind of Blue]

2. The only exception I take to the article is that of the Tutsis

and Hutus who lived in harmony, for I think for about 1,000 years, were infected by white supremacy.

During the Belgium rule, the Tutsis were favored over the Hutu. As the Tutsis were a minority, they were not opposed to this reaction. The Belgium rule created more division between the Tutsi and Hutu by labeling the Tutsi as more intelligent than the Hutu. Scientists were brought in to measure the head size of the two groups. The heads of the Tutsis were found to be larger than that of the Hutu and so the belief was that their brains were larger and therefore the Tutsi must be smarter. The Tutsi also tended to be taller and had lighter skin. This was seen to imply that the Tutsi might have some Caucasian ancestry. Because of these findings, the Tutsi were seen as superior and were given better access to education and jobs. To further cause division between the two groups, racial identification cards were issued stating whether a person was Tutsi or Hutu.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-13431486
http://thetutsivsthehutu.blogspot.com

[Blue_Tires]

3. Yeah, that was THE textbook example of how to completely subjugate a population...

And we've seen it time and time again.

Elevate a minority class to favored status and you have an instant buffer against the majority...

[Kind of Blue]

4. Yeah, you said it, the old divide and conquer.

And what gets me is the two groups had been intermarrying for centuries so Hutus could look like Tutsis and vice versa. Just a matter of imposing status on how close to whiteness one could be.