The normalization of anti-Semitism has reached a critical juncture by any measure you choose to use.
This is me raising the alarm.
Last week former President Donald Trump welcomed both Kanye West, the troubled mogul now openly trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes, and Nick Fuentes, an outspoken anti-Semite and Holocaust denier, to his Mar-a-Lago estate. For, you know, a friendly meal. The news, finally, created some grudging shockwaves in political circles.
But this is not a political story. This is history repeating itself.
Fuentes is the founder of the America First Political Action Conference, the white-supremacist organization which held its first annual in-person event this past February. Among the guests were Georgia lawmaker Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and a white supremacist YouTuber named Vincent James, who relied heavily on the “Great Replacement” theory and other racist tropes in his remarks. “We will no longer be hypnotized by talks of slavery or genocides that happened 100 years ago...Just because [POC] are arrested & imprisoned at higher rates...doesn’t mean the criminal justice system is racist...[POC may just] commit the majority of crime."
And now, it’s acceptable for elected officials and other titans of industry to break bread and share stages with anti-Semitic extremists. Once again. And again. And again.
Earlier this month, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee released a report detailing how advanced the threat has become. "National security agencies now identify domestic terrorism as the most persistent and lethal terrorist threat to the homeland,” an increase attributable to “white supremacist and anti-government extremist individuals and groups.”
With the dangerous addition of a newly under-moderated Twitter—now embracing disinformation and right-wing propaganda—the threat is amplified.
The report concludes federal law enforcement has not devoted the proper resources to address the threat. “The difficulty with addressing violent domestic terror has all too often been that the ‘bad guys’ look too much like the rest of us,” former prosecutor Joyce White Vance tells Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin, clearly meaning white people. (They may even be law enforcement.) A systemic bias against classifying white supremacist rhetoric as dangerous means that groups tend to be considered low-level threats. “We are paying the price for that failure now,” Vance says.
And by we, she doesn’t mean the people who actually see themselves as “the rest of us.”
That brings me back to the alarm. What is to be done now, before it’s too late?
This is the question facing officials at Boston University, which has a student body that’s 25% Jewish and has seen an alarming uptick in anti-Semitic speech and incidents. “The more the rhetoric gets normalized, then behaviors do as well,” says Ingrid Anderson, a lecturer and associate director of Boston University’s Elie Wiesel Center for Jewish Studies. “There’s rhetoric that has become more acceptable and rhetoric that people slowly begin to act on. This is where we get nervous.” Anderson is creating a for-credit class to help excavate the history and dangers of anti-Semitism but acknowledges that this is a difficult time. “I think a lot of us are at a loss as to what the [BU] administration can do, other than condemn anti-Semitism, which they have done,” she says. “I can respond with what my tools are—to develop a class and make sure it fulfills Hub credits, so people who might not otherwise take it will take it and learn something."
So, what should corporate America be doing with the many tools it has at its disposal?
"There has been a rising tide of hatred," Andrea Lucas, a commissioner on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission tells the Society for Human Resource Management. "Too often, instances of antisemitism in the workplace go ignored, unreported or unaddressed."
But now, it's no longer just a workplace equity issue. It's a rising tide of hatred that inevitably leads to violence.
Let us know how you’re feeling and what you’re seeing. Is your organization addressing the rise in anti-Semitism directly? Do you feel prepared to intervene if you see something? Do you feel unsafe at work or in other public spaces? What do you need? Let us know what’s on your mind, subject line: Anti-Semitism, and we’ll compare notes in a future column.
This is only going to get worse.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ashley Sylla
