The Anti-Defamation League last week reversed course on its beliefs about what constitutes “racism.” Previously defining the word as “the belief that a particular race is superior or inferior to another,” the ADL now considers racism “the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
The ADL’s reductive conception of hate no longer includes various forms of racism at play around the world. When I interned with the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations (currently the Human Rights and Special Prosecution Section), my colleagues examined genocides in Rwanda, the Balkans, Guatemala, and other countries. Not caused by hierarchies that privilege white people, these genocides resulted from long-standing prejudices against ethnic and religious minorities. Similarly, in today’s Afghanistan, Uzbek, Tajik, Panjshiri, and Hazara Afghans are fearful of the Pashtun Taliban not because they wield “white privilege,” but because the Taliban act on their intolerance of ethnic minorities.
I often turned to the ADL in my career because we shared the goal of fighting antisemitism, a hatred far more nuanced than the ADL’s current definition of racism allows. For example, a Muslim boycott, divestment, and sanctions activist directed a dangerous campaign of antisemitism against Muslim businessman Sam Zahr in Dearborn, Michigan, when Zahr attempted to open a restaurant franchise with alleged ties to Israel in 2018. I was one of many residents to point Zahr to the local ADL office, which supported him against an onslaught of hatred.
When I prepared to speak about uniting against antisemitism in January 2020, I reached out to my local ADL office for advice about ensuring the event was safe from violent protests or other activities. Local staff provided advice for shoring up security, ostensibly agreeing that my whiteness and Catholicism would not be a shield against the unhinged.
During the George Floyd protests in May 2020, the country was also experiencing a new spike in antisemitism driven by coronavirus conspiracy theories. Shortly after expressing my dismay for the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Floyd, I asked my social media contacts whether they also shared my concerns about rising hatred targeting Jews. One college classmate informed me, a writer who had recently published multiple articles about rising antisemitism in the Washington Examiner, that the media does not have the bandwidth to cover both anti-black racism and antisemitism simultaneously. A liberal activist schoolmate accused me of trying to create a hierarchy of racism. He then unironically informed me that antisemitism was not as problematic as anti-black racism because Jews are white and can blend in.
I asked the misled-but-self-assured activist whether he thought Orthodox Jews might like to blend in since their distinctive style of dress made them the victims of a spate of heinous antisemitic attacks in late 2019. I asked whether he was aware that many American Jews are actually people of color (12%-15%, according to recent calculations) or that 850,000 Jews of Middle Eastern descent had been forced to flee their homelands because of antisemitism over the last century. I also asked whether he would appreciate the distinction Jews have of comprising about 2.4% of the U.S. population but being on the receiving end of about 54.9% of religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. My one-time friend never responded.
I hear the whispers of my contemporarys’ misinformed, hierarchical leftist agenda in the ADL’s befuddling redefinition of racism. If the ADL truly supports such a myopic view of prejudice, I cannot consider it an ally in the worldwide fight against all forms of hatred.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance writer from the Detroit area.
