WE WILL RESIST
WE WILL RESIST
I will never understand why red blooded Americans choose to get their news from only one foreign source rather than the myriad of American media outlets? They seem to have come to believe that an alleged bigoted tyrant from Australia (Rupert Murdoch) will tell them the truth rather than brainwashing them into believing what he wants them to believe, similar to Russia, China, Iran, N. Korea, et al. Would these same people listen only to Hitler had they lived in 1930s Germany?
As an aside, I also read and listen to Canadian and British news sources, among others, for a more worldly view.
I’ve said this before, that those who should read this won’t, and that I post not for them, but for that one person who will relish in the fact that there is someone who thinks and believes as they do. The rest can scroll on by.
There is one thing missing from the following treatise. It does a wonderful job equating how American and European whites treated blacks and Jews. What is missing is the inclusion of how Native Americans and First Nations were similarly treated. For that matter, all the non-white indigenous people on Spaceship Earth.
Therefore, is it any wonder that bigots and racists embrace fascism over democracy? Call them out for what they are, unAmerican traitors, and treat them accordingly. They fly Nazi, Confederate, Trump and Brandon flags and banners over the Stars and Stripes. The only question that remains is will our legal system treat them as the danger they pose or do our legal beagles fear political backlash from the MAGA cult?
Soraya McDonald said it best:
Don't let the misinformed nattering of a few famously intransigent bigots fool you.
Historically, Black people and American Jews have been ride-or-dies in the fight for human and civil rights. We know from white supremacy.
Two new movies, ‘Till’ and ‘U.S. and the Holocaust,’ help us connect the dots between Jim Crow and fascism. With Kanye and Kyrie Irving dominating the news, the connections between victims of white supremacy are more relevant than ever.
Langston Hughes knew it. Abel Meeropol knew it. The Black press knew it. The Yiddish press knew it.
There's a difference between "doing research" (ingesting misinformation that merely reinforces your own biases and bigotry) and actual reporting and scholarship.
So no, Hitler sympathizer Kanyo does not get to credibly claim he has anything in common with Emmett Till.
You know who actually has more in common with a child kidnapped, tortured, and murdered by white supremacists?
Anne Frank.
Anyway, this is one of those essays that comes with a reading list at the end for those of you who would like to learn more about how Jim Crow and fascism are basically the same damn thing, because I refuse to have us out here being ahistorical and dumb.
"it was the Black press that connected Adolf Hitler’s campaign of genocide against Jews with white supremacy long before their mainstream white counterparts were willing to articulate the same in print."
“As with the epidemic of lynching, rape and kidnapping of Black women, it was the Black press that connected Adolf Hitler's campaign of genocide against Jews with white supremacy long before their mainstream white counterparts were willing to articulate the same in print.”
“…for the most part, white southern newspaper editorials condemned Nazi racism but refused to acknowledge the obvious similarities between the German racial system and
that of the South in the 1930s," Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins wrote in The Journal of Southern History. “On the other hand, to the chagrin of liberal southern editors, black newspapers made comparisons between German and southern racism as early as 1933 and continued to do so consistently thereafter. Understandably, the black press often referred to the hypocrisy inherent in the anti- Nazi rhetoric of the region and its practices toward blacks.”
This understanding was documented not just during the second World War, but immediately after the first as well, as in this example from The Chicago Defender in 1919:
If Kanyo and Elno and Kywrong and Dave and BHI want to be handmaidens of white supremacy, that's their problem.
But know the truth. Few non-Black people in the South had our backs like Jews. Serious ride-or-dies. Don't let them destroy a powerful coalition against violent hate.
American Yiddish newspapers of the time also recognized that antisemitism and anti-Black racism were two sides of the same white supremacist coin. When the Yiddish press
covered the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, it contextualized the attack as a pogrom. “The Yiddish press routinely reacted to race riots with editorial outrage and passionate headlines, “Wrote Uri Schreter for the Jewish Studies journal In geveb. "Moreover, Yiddish journalists often described anti-Black violence with metaphors and idioms borrowed from Eastern European Jewish life. Using terms like
pogroms,' 'blood libels,' and 'Cossacks,' they articulated a special kinship between Jews and Black people that hinged on a belief in shared suffering."
During the Freedom Summer of 1964, two Jewish civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman, 20, and Mickey Schwerner, 24, were murdered, along with Congress of Racial Equality worker James Chaney, 21, for attempting to register Black voters in Mississippi. They were the children of American Jews who witnessed the violent bigotry toward Jews during the Holocaust, people who learned never to feel
too safe, even in countries they thought of as their homes. They knew that the world took far too long to stop an attack on an entire people that wiped out two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe.
Schwerner was about the same age as Emmett when Bryant, Milam and the men who helped them kidnapped the boy from his uncle's home in Mississippi and defiled his body before tossing him in the Tallahatchie River. Goodman was 10.
Thank you for your compliments on the thread. But please read the essay, not just the screencaps. No paywall, because this is information that should be freely available to all.
(Also, I worked real hard on it for weeks and I had terrible nightmares)
LINER NOTES
Further reading
The Ephemeral Langston Hughes, University of Delaware exhibition
How American Racism Influenced Hitler by Alex Ross
The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror Image? by Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins
Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law by James Whitman
Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad by Matthew F. Delmont
The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter
Langston Hughes papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University
Reporting on the Holocaust: the view from Jim Crow Alabama by Dan J. Puckett
In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 by Hasia R. Diner
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