Hate speech and hate crime have nothing to do with hate. So since words no longer have to mean what they intuitively do, let’s take a look at white supremacy.

Does a white supremacist have to believe that whites are superior to other races? He does not. He may simply believe that his country – be it the UK, the US, Denmark, or what have you – should be the preserve of whites. So sure, he might think, Chinese people could be smarter – or at least no dumber than – whites. But whites shouldn’t have to compete with them for college admissions. And yet, notwithstanding this clarification, my guess is that they’d still be counted as white supremacists.

And yet, you might counter, it would be odd to say that Israel-for-Jews-only Zionists are Jewish supremacists. That is, Israeli Jews tend not to think that Palestinians are less intelligent. What white supremacists and Zionists have in common, then, is the insistence on their respective privileged status. Whiteness should trump grades for college admission, and Jewishness should trump longevity of possession of the land for current and future possession of it.

In short, I don’t think anyone honestly thinks that ethnicity and merit are co-variants. On the contrary, Zionism and white supremacy are both affirmative action programs. Jews needed a leg up after the Holocaust, and now whites need a leg up after the influx of unfair competition. Unfair because people from elsewhere have a right to compete with us only if we invite them to, and, it’s to be noted, we haven’t. Looked at this way, don’t these otherwise vile movements take on a very different moral complexion?

What one can say, of course, is that two wrongful genocides don’t make a right, or that two wrongful patterns of discrimination don’t make a right. But that’s just to misunderstand the nature of affirmative action. Affirmative correction of a wrong necessitates another wrong. So in the case of the Jews, the real question is, Is the current pretty much wholesale ethnic cleansing of Palestine really necessary? The vast majority of Israeli Jews apparently think it is. And in the case of the white supremacists, is the historical privilege of whites truly under serious threat? Apparently these white supremacists think it is.

Are you and I entitled to second guess them? Of course we are! And we do. But in our second guessing, are we entitled to feel morally superior to them? Of that I’m less certain.

Categories: Everything You Wanted to Know About What's Going On in the World But Were Afraid to Ask, Social and Political Philosophy

Tags: affirmative action, discriminiation, genocide, Israel, Palestine, white supremacy, Zionism