I just watched the movie “The Help.” I know. I’m late to the party. But for me the story is a picture guide to deconstructing racism and anti-semitism. There’s a dissonance that came out of the movie. How is it that white children, raised in the south by loving black nannies, nannies who often spent more time with them that their own mothers, how did they grow up to be racist? They loved their nannies. Yet, they grew up to demand of other black nannies that they use different toilets, different water fountains, different shops, theatres, a regular apartheid style of life.
How do you grow up loving your black nannie and then treating all black people as unequal people?
I think we can get that answer from Oxford University biologist, Richard Dawkins, who described two types of information that are intertwined and passed through the generations. There are the genes that pass on our DNA and there are “memes” which he refers to as “units of deep cultural information.” These cultural memes become as much a part of us as our DNA. Growing up in a family, a community, a society, that taught separation of the races, dehumanized the black population, it is only natural after centuries of these lessons that one would automatically think this way-unless something happened to change your perspective.
What is most astonishing, to me, is the speed with which one of these memes can enter the collective unconscious of a society. Slavery, the treatment of black people as something other than human, came to North America about 400 years, ago. Although legally banned in 1865 the repercussions of this practice remain, today.
The question that still must be asked is “Why do you do this?”
That question also needs to be asked about anti-semitism. It has been a cultural meme for more than 2000 years. From accusations of killing Christ to the Jew-hatred spewed by Islam from its inception, anti-Semitism is in the collective unconscious of far too many.
For more than two centuries there has been “The Jewish Question.” What shall we do with the Jews? Napoleon asked that in 1805. I don’t recall ever hearing about the “Catholic Question” or the “French Question” or the “Muslim Question.” Can you imagine, today, someone questioning the gay population: “What will we do with the gays?”
Just the “Jewish Question” which I find so ridiculous because the Jews are such a tiny minority in the world: 14 million in a world of 7 billion. 0.2% of the world’s population comes with a question mark.
There have been many answers: pogroms, persecutions, inquisitions, conversions, Crusades, and the implementation of the Final Solution in World War Two. At the Evian Conference, countries came together to discuss the Jewish Question and left it unanswered. Hitler had an answer. If Mahatma Gandhi’s advice to Britain in 190 to lay down arms, welcome “Heir Hitler” and allow the Nazis to slaughter all had been taken in 1940, all the Jews would be dead and we’d all be living a different life.
Why was it so easy for the nations of the world to turn their backs on the Jews? The same reason that the white population was able to treat the black population as less than human: Years of teaching that some people are “lesser than.”
But the difference is that hate for the Jews comes from millennia of being accused of killing Christ, then refusing to accept Mohamed. It is in the cultural soup of every country. Jews are hated in countries where there are no Jews. Or there are so few that the vast majority of the population never met a Jew. And yet, when Jews are accused as individuals or as part of the Nation of Israel, of horrible crimes, the vast majority of people believe them to be true. A default position. Like white children raised by loving black nannies turning into racists. It’s “natural.”
That three Popes have decried the treatment of the Jew; that Pope Francis I has declared anti-Semitism as un-Christian doesn’t make anti-Semitism go away. It is so entrenched, so systemic in our world, so endemic in so many of us that we don’t realize that our distaste for the Jews is in our cultural DNA. We need to stand outside ourselves to see it.
Israel rushed aid to Haiti and articles appeared that Israeli’s hadn’t gone to assist the Haitians. Rather they were stealing organs. Perhaps you believed it or questioned its possibility because for centuries the Jewish people were accused of killing a Christian child for his blood to make matza for Passover. Your ancestors believed this well into the 20th century. Today, Israeli’s are taking in Syrian refugees to treat their wounds. But that is not on the front pages. I have no doubt there will be a negative connotation to this too. Jews are accused of behaving like Nazis. Of causing the floods in Gaza during the huge storm that swept through the Middle East in early December.
The media has its eye on Israel, blinded to the crises in the Congo and the Sudan, avoiding the horror of North Korea, and the killing of Christians throughout the Middle East.
Why is the eye of the world on Israel, a Jewish state, the only democracy on the Middle East, the only country where men and women have equal rights, all religions are welcome, colour is not a measure of one’s worth, and the LGBT community thrives?
Is it that cultural meme? Like the cultural meme of racism in the United States, are the memes so strong that facts on the ground will not demolish them?
