Weaponization of Antisemitism vs. the Legacies of Black Scholarship
By Saswat Pattanayak
New York, December 12, 2023
Far-right MAGA conservative Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) who had voted to overturn election results in her support for Trump, and who had opposed affirmative action on college campuses, promulgated QAnon conspiracy theory of “pedo grifters” to depict Democrats as maintaining an international child sex trafficking ring, had become a featured guest of Steve Bannon’s War Room to denounce the “Biden crime family” and to declare that “President Trump is the only one who is going to be able to save this country and to clean out the rot in these federal agencies” has emerged as the warrior for the Zionist entity of Israel to remove the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT.
Not only does Stefanik routinely join Steve Bannon to peddle her conspiracy theories, she also had voted against holding Bannon in contempt of congress. She appealed for donation on Bannon’s show saying “the Cavalry is Coming for Republicans”. And of course predictably, she had voted against equal pay for women, against Equal Rights Amendment extension, against women veterans receiving free contraception from VA, voted to defund planned parenthood, voted against violence against women, against women’s access to routine healthcare etc.
But all of those neo-nazi hobnobbing and misogynistic agendas are so characteristic of Republicans that Stefanik could hardly have made a unique mark enacting just those disturbances - after all, almost 90% to 99% of Republicans have supported many of the above conservative moves.
What is now going to cement Stefanik’s position in history of bigotry - the biggest claim to fame in her political career would instead be the vitriolic “grilling” of three women presidents of the country’s top universities. She will be remembered as spearheading the movement of anti-intellectualism that had been struggling so far to defeat the leftist bent of academia.
The struggle had been for real. Top leading research universities around the country have embraced philosophy of diversity and inclusion as cornerstone of their values. The Offices of Diversity and Inclusion on campuses have been held with so much esteem that they usually report directly to the university presidents. This has not gone down well with the conservatives who have been highly critical of efforts at diversifying campuses with codified support for outreach programs and social justice education.
For instance, the largest college in Washington DC metro area (that includes Maryland and Virginia) happens to be the flagship public research university and the custodian of National Archives which holds all government records - University of Maryland College Park (UMD). Campuses like UMD were not always diverse. They were historically limited only to White students. Indeed, Maryland campus was hardly diverse until US President Jimmy Carter elevated one Black man, Dr. John Brooks Slaughter, to the very top of the prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) in 1980. Slaughter’s work at NSF despite budget cuts by subsequent Reagan administration was so remarkable that after two years, he became the first President (then called Chancellor) of UMD.
In the role of being the first Black president of the largest university in the DC metro area, Dr. Slaughter immediately started diversifying UMD’s faculty body, instituted diversity programs to recruit students of color, and taught the values of equity as excellence to the campus. The shift from being majorly white campus to a significantly diverse one, attracting students from 116 countries was made possible because of the pioneering works by its first Black president Dr. Slaughter.
Exactly two decades after Maryland embraced its first Black president, I was admitted to the same university’s graduate school of journalism. I started working for the very office responsible for diversifying the campus. When I joined as a graduate assistant in 2004, it used to be called Office of Human Relations Programs. Subsequently the name was changed to Office of Diversity and Inclusion. I represented student body in President’s Commission on Ethnic Minority Issues and my office worked closely with College of Education to offer an undergraduate one-credit course that soon became extremely popular on campus. It was called Intergroup Dialogue Program (IDP) where student participants were drawn from various social locations such as their race, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, and so on. I used to recruit students to attend the course and later became a facilitator for a course titled Gender & Sexuality where I moderated dialogues between people of different sexual identities and orientations.
Thousands of students who enrolled in the IDP and in Multiversity dialogue program (for which I got trained at University of Michigan Ann Arbor along with my office’s director Gloria Bouis, an extraordinary Filipino-American scholar activist) were benefited from the dialogue program, by the values of inclusiveness, the perseverance of dialogue (to understand perspectives as a means to celebrate differences) over debates (to defeat someone who holds a different view). As an openly Marxist thinker, I had my own internal struggle with this approach at reaching resolution at first, but the more I delved into critical pedagogy of Paulo Freire which, among many other seminal texts, guided our vision for the dialogue program (then headed by Prof. Christine Clarke), the more I became aware and sensitive to the beautiful landscape of intellectual horizon great American universities and their diverse student bodies had to offer. And more importantly, I learnt of the numerous ways Marxism has been used creatively as a tool of emancipatory knowledge dissemination. If Adam Smith were to be admired for his emphasis on quality, it is Marx whose emphasis on equality that has found a place in the university campuses across the country. In Dr. Slaughter’s own words during his inauguration speech at UMD, back in 1982 - “Quality and equality are inseparable, and diversity is synonymous with what is best in America.”
The diversity initiative started with Dr. Slaughter continued at the much smaller Occidental College which he joined as its president. From being largely a white college, by the time Dr. Slaughter retired, it had 43 percent students of color, more than half of faculty of color and women. As a result of the diverse body that helped the college excel, his tenure witnessed record number of applicants and the college’s first Rhodes scholarship in nearly three decades.
Dr. Slaughter died just last week. If only our country were not so invested in anti-intellectual pursuits of warmongering and anti-“Woke” racism today, we would be celebrating the legacy of the first Black President of the largest campus in the Washington DC metro area who worked tirelessly to institutionalize diversity and inclusion at NSF, UMD and Occidental. Slaughter later helped increase the number of engineers of color in his position as CEO of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.
Its important to remember that the first 15 years of Dr. Slaughter’s career were spent at the U.S. Navy Electronics Laboratory developing military computer systems, following which he became director of the Applied Physics Laboratory at the University of Washington, and assistant director for Astronomics, Atmospherics, Earth, and Ocean Sciences at the NSF. Thereafter Slaughter became provost at Washington State University - only after that was he invited by President Carter to head NSF prior to his appointment as UMD’s president. He was awarded the Black Engineer of the Year in 1987 and was honored at the White House in 2015 with the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. The USC Viterbi School of Engineering has renamed its Center for Engineering Diversity after Slaughter, and so on.
The point I am trying to make here is that the journey for a Black academic in the US is enormously trying and fraught with challenges to several times prove to the world that they are not in the position because of their race, rather despite of it. When Dr. Slaughter graduated from high school in Kansas, it was then that the local Black families had filed the lawsuit that became Brown v. Board of Education. When he launched his engineering career at General Dynamics in 1956, he used to say that he was the first Black engineer he ever met. There was never an old boys network waiting for him to make useful phone calls and recommendations. No godfathers and legacy admission privileges. And on top of it, for Black academic, they have to constantly prove their mettle to ward off the racist allegations that they somehow are not inherently talented but rather recipients of affirmative action giveaways.
This is at the crux of what we are witnessing today in the context of anti-intellectualism targeting Black academicians and women in particular. Deep seated racism and misogyny are at play in the targeting of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn and MIT.
Elise Stefanik is a far-right trumpster whose disdain for women and minorities reflect in her voting records. She hangs around with politicians who endorse the white supremacists that chant in their rally “Jews will not replace us”. These are literally the antisemites who keep her company - the likes of Donald Trump and Steve Bannon.
The likes of Bannon and Trump and their fanboys form the group of people who have been at the forefront of anti-intellectualism in this country. They are against liberal education which is scholarly and has resulted in the US becoming the country with the most Nobel laureates in the world. Top American universities are the greatest of educational centers where free speech is held sacrosanct and hate speech gets denounced - precisely because the communities in those universities are learned enough to make that distinction. It is precisely to combat hate speech and racism that all the leading universities in the US have embraced values of diversity and inclusion. Not all of them have perfected it for sure and the struggle is ongoing, but admittedly, one of the major obstacles to effective progress in implementing diversity principles has been the lack of leadership from among the minorities themselves.
This is exactly why more women and more Black professors need to be in leadership roles as deans, provosts and presidents of major universities. The progress that has been seen needs to multiply with these efforts. The old racist segregated days of American universities where only white men used to dominate are slowly but steadfastly being reversed across academia. And that is threatening the racist mentality of those who want to use “merit” as an excuse to denounce affirmative action. And the same racist manipulators are today using “antisemitism” as an excuse to denounce progressive student-led initiatives to liberate Palestine - because the racist politicians are well aware that their days are numbered and if pro-Palestinian struggle succeeds, in being so, it would undo the last bastion of colonialism and an apartheid state which the US loves to call its strongest ally in its Middle East empire building project.
Antisemitism is racism. It’s not a feeling or emotion. It is pure vile racism. Just as anti-Black racism is not a metaphor. Alongwith them, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, are all various forms of oppressions that are being recognized as such and the great universities in this country are leading the way in battling all of them. This is exactly why offices of diversity, inclusion and compliance have been welcomed on college campuses - to recognize forms of oppressions and to prevent them from happening.
This is why intersectionality arrived as a tool to recognize these oppressions as multi-layered. For instance, a male person may be white but he may be a disabled person - thereby his special needs must be recognized. Likewise a woman may be class privileged but she may be getting threats for being Muslim. A student may be educationally advanced but they may be targeted just because they happen to be a Jew. A faculty member may a straight female, but she might be attacked for being an immigrant. A president of the university may be world renowned, but they might be targeted because of their race or gender.
In case of Claudine Gay, she has been targeted for both her race and gender. As such, a Black woman in the US is routinely subjected to multiple levels of oppression. Little wonder then that this great gift of insight has been made available to us thanks to rigorously researched and peer reviewed works by the likes of Black female professors Patricia Hill Collins of UMD and Kimberle Crenshaw of UCLA.
Not only these Black women scholars have proved to be extremely dangerous to the far right white supremacists of the US because of the word “intersectionality” which has now become a widely used phrase in academia and activism alike - because of the dangers they pose with their use of intersectional feminism as a tool to liberal women of color - there is yet another phrase which has rattled and irritated the white supremacists of this country no end. That phrase is “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) which is used by both Crenshaw and Collins to theorize intersectionality.
White supremacists have been targeting schools, colleges, libraries or any conferences that allude to critical race theory since quite a few years now. The rightwing ideologues know very well that ordinary American households have no idea about what CRT entails. But they also know that it is wholeheartedly accepted inside sites of higher education. Dinesh D’Souza went to the extent of saying CRT has metastasized into the whole culture.
Of course CRT (devised by a Black legal Derrick Bell scholar) and intersectionality and Paulo Freire or Stuart Hall are all theorized by non-white scholars with radical political traditions posing grave threats to the white supremacists who want to raise their next generation of children with a mindset that seems to have almost disappeared in relevance. The sense of social justice and love for equality among the young generation of American white and non-white students are threatening the existential values of meritocratic racists who have always hurled patriarchal “might has right” and “survival of the fittest” narratives to justify their love for monopolistic concentration of wealth in the name of “free market” capitalism. Emancipatory knowledge on the other hand is so critical of the status quo that it doesn’t falter in recognizing the sources of oppression and that makes it impossible to convince students “indoctrinated” by top universities of the country from accepting to live under racist society.
In the ongoing genocide in Gaza, recently assassinated Palestinian professor of English literature Refaat Alareer had written that Israel wants to bomb universities because they are the “most important place in Gaza to develop students’ minds as indestructible weapons. Knowledge is Israel’s worst enemy. Awareness is Israel’s most hated and feared foe. That is why they bomb a university. They want to kill openness and determination to refuse living under injustice and racism.”
Israel’s IDF - the world’s most immoral army has managed to kill Alareer. But his words spring true and holds value for American universities just equally. Knowledge is white supremacists’ worst enemy. Awareness is their most hated and feared foe. Which is why they are against CRT and intersectionality and the application of social justice from classroom to community which results in Affirmative Action. With a conservative justice system they have succeeded in sabotaging affirmative action temporarily, and they now feel encouraged to go after anyone who they believe have benefited from Affirmative Action.
Racists like to believe that affirmative action does not benefit the entire society - they think it benefits only the Black and Hispanic people while it leaves out white and Asians, the so-called model minorities. But it is not because the white supremacists love Asians so much that they want affirmative action to end. It is because they would otherwise be exposed as vile racists if just a white guy would have to go after ending affirmative action - and so they literally used anti-Asian discrimination as an excuse to go after ending affirmative action.
And so before they came after the women presidents of top universities they came after affirmative action proponents. And so that the world takes notice they targeted the most famous of all universities - Harvard. Corporate media kept parroting to us their talking point - that Asians are getting hurt because of Harvard is favoring Black students. The guy who worked the script from the background and came to the limelight only after his victory is Edward Blum. He never mentioned it was about white students whose seats were now being taken up by Black students - he tried to project himself as a champion against anti-Asian discrimination instead.
In an interview with New York Times Blum said, “In 2014, the year we sued Harvard, the Asian admissions rate was, I think, around 18, maybe 19 percent. During the last eight years, the admissions rates at Harvard for Asians have grown from about 18 percent now up to 30 percent. Yet if you look back from 2014, all the way back to about 1999, it was flatlined for 20 years. But then when Harvard gets sued, all of a sudden the number of Asians go up by 60 percent.”
Blum was not always hiding in the background. His crusade against affirmative action had started long ago and in 2012 he - a liberal Jewish stockbroker - aided by conservative donors saw him as the face of the movement. Since 1990, he had filed over a dozen lawsuits attacking affirmative action in college admissions, but to very little success.
He had finally change his gameplan where instead of going against affirmative action using Black students as an especially advantaged group, this time he claimed its the Asian Americans who are the victims who were suffering because of white students getting preferential treatment from Harvard. And he let a group he funded and named “Students for Fair Admissions” to wage his longstanding war on his behalf, to end affirmative action on campus. And he succeeded this time in portraying Harvard as a racist institution!
The fact that Blum’s efforts to end affirmative action in Harvard and during all previous lawsuits were funded by prominent conservative funders such as Searle Freedom Trust, the Bradley Foundation, and DonorsTrust mattered little after that.
This manipulative politics by reactionaries pretending to be liberals or using pretexts of combating anti-asian discrimination or antisemitism has a long and rich history, too sordid to over in greater details here. But suffice it to say, people like Edward Blum do not carry the best interests of the Asian students (who are actually going to suffer more after the end of affirmative action) just as people like Elise Stefanik do not have the best interests of Jewish students - who are victims of antisemitism because of the white supremacists that are Stefanik’s buddies - the very people who are disappointed to see Harvard being led by an accomplished Black woman.
A day after Stefanik’s grilling of the women presidents, Elon Musk - billionaire friend of the white supremacists promoted Stefanik’s cause. He shared a tweet that accused Dr. Claudine Gay of having plagiarized her Ph.D. dissertation. That tweet reached millions of views immediately and the anti-intellectual MAGA crowd instantly started abusing Dr. Gay as incompetent. The tweet which was promoted by Musk was written by a conservative Christopher Rufo and the “research” into attempting to discredit Dr. Gay was co-authored with Rufo by editor of American Conservative, Chris Brunet.
All three - Musk, Rufo and Brunet tried to poke fun at Dr. Claudine Gay by dissecting her Ph.D. dissertation which had literally won the Toppan Prize for the best dissertation in political science at Harvard. Of course these three anti-intellectual, anti-woke Internet personalities with racist agendas which has now allowed for loose canons to spout venoms at Dr. Gay characterizing her as someone who got “hired by Harvard because of her skin color”, etc.
The pathetic research of these guys doesn’t need an analysis. Suffice it to say the portions they have highlighted are all duly cited by Dr. Gay. It’s just preposterous that one even needs to defend Dr. Gay’s dissertation because of these conspiracy theorists.
In summary this is what’s going on. There is a collusion between white supremacists and Zionists - Steve Bannon has also featured as speaker for Zionist Organization of America. “Steve is fervently pro-Israel, and it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that he is anti-Semitic,” David Goldman, a conservative columnist has opined as quoted by Politico’s article titled, “Pro-Israel groups avoid denouncing Bannon”.
According to NBC, the left had been “trying to break AIPAC's stranglehold on Israel policy discussions for years. The liberal group MoveOn's members are overwhelmingly opposed to AIPAC; 74 percent believe that Democratic presidential contenders should not attend (2019’s) AIPAC policy conference.”
And yet now Democrats have no problem with supporting AIPAC - many of them receive funding from the group and there is a collusion between liberals and the Zionists too. This is not an imaginary predicament. Biden and the Democrats - including the likes of Sanders, AOC, etc - have all overwhelmingly rejected any call for a ceasefire to the ongoing genocide.
To enable their narrative, they are hiding behind antisemitism, just the way Blum was hiding behind the anti-asian hate, or Stefanik is masquerading as an anti-racist all of a sudden while depicting Harvard’s first Black president as the problem.
The progressive students and professors of the universities who have all their lives dedicated to fighting antisemitism, anti-black racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, islamophobia, transphobia, ageism, sexism and so on precisely by calling out each of the oppressions suddenly are being portrayed as sympathizers of terrorism. And warmongering politicians and their racist donors whose entire careers have been spent spreading hatred and division among the people and who are today supporting indiscriminate bombing of civilians and children in Palestine - are posing as fighters against racism.
The real question which should have been asked to the presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn is “Why have you not officially stood in support of the students who are calling for an end to an actual genocide that is taking place right?” Not some call for imaginary or futuristic or river to sea misinterpretation of a genocide. But an actual genocide that has already taken lives of more than 8,000 children within past two months.
Universities in the US of America used to be institutions for not just free speech, but revolutionary political speech. From the student movement that ended Vietnam War to the radical uprising (“Intifada” to use the translated term that is frightening militarist warmongers who are “grilling” university presidents today while their funded military is grilling children in Gaza) of civil rights movement across the country, to Black Panthers and freeing political prisoners movements to anti-nuclear war peacenik movements - American students have always been at the front of the struggle calling for end to militarist occupation and interventions into any and every country that the US imperialism has tried to harm. And the situation with Palestine will be no different.
Like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn did during their college years as part of their “responsibility of the intellectual”, today’s “woke” students and their professors will also fight occupation and militarism. When US government was officially supporting Apartheid South Africa, it was the students who were supporting Nelson Mandela and ANC. And today when the US government is officially supporting Apartheid Israel, it will be the students who will remind rest of the country where and how they should be focused on in order to free Palestine - from the river to the sea.
There is nothing antisemitic about calling for an end to genocide. In fact it is precisely what every jewish person of conscience should be demanding for. The bloodthirsty Netanyahu regime whose best friends are Neo nazis of American white supremacist structure are not the representatives of Jewish people anywhere in the world. Jewish people are fighters against social injustice - more than two-thirds of communists in the US have been Jewish. They are the anti-imperialists and they recognize a fascist when they see one. They see Netanyahu as a fascist, not the Palestinians who are being kept as refugees in their own lands.
Today, among the most prominent voices against Zionism are the Jewish intellectuals. From Norman Finkelstein to Gabor Maté, from Noam Chomsky to Amy Goodman - the list is endless. Organizations such as Jewish Voice of Peace and If Not Now are waging battles against Israeli zionist entity on an everyday basis.
Ignorant reactionaries Stefanik and Bannon and Biden’s own officials do not need nor do they have the intellectual capacity or honesty or lifetime of dedication for social justice in order to gaslight anyone about what Judaism is - it is not rightwing Zionism expanding on settler colonialism by forcibly evicting people from their own houses and then crying victim under an absolutely false cry of antisemitism when they are told what they are upto is an absolute disgrace.
Every Jewish person with a conscience should join the Palestinians like rest of the world does - in calling for freedom of the people from the river to the sea - freedom of all people - Muslims, Jewish, Christians, atheists alike of that land by demanding for an end to the apartheid state, its ugly checkpoints, its violent annexations of homes, its IOF with blood on their hands, its prisons with administrative detention of tens of thousands of innocent civilians, its sadistic political class - they should join in the call for Intifada - an uprising that shakes off the oppressive world order.
Both the phrases “From the River to the Sea” and “Intifada” are liberating phrases which have long existed in Palestine and they are inclusive and beautiful and empowering phrases that are enriched with hope for liberation and freedom of all people - they are not narrow and racist like the very people who are getting emotionally discomforted by just because of their anti-intellectual lineages or because of their refusal to understand the very people’s rich cultural heritage they are funding to rob them of.
Therefore what is urgent is to realize that the Congressional hearing on antisemitism was not about antisemitism to begin with. It had everything to do with shutting down opportunities for Black scholarship in higher education that might threaten the existing order of ethnocentric MAGA state and that warning will be heard loud and clear if the ruling class can start by punishing the topmost academicians.
As the Palestinian revolution has been teaching the world now, the academia needs its own Intifada and the time is now. Not to listen to reactionary colonizers and their big neo-Nazi donors with divisive distractions of their own making, but rather to stand in absolute solidarity with progressive faculty and students alike who can’t rest until this genocide is ended and Palestine is free. Entire world needs to center the struggle to end this genocide and not let a bunch of opportunistic politicians who are more interested in appealing to their lynch mob voters so they can get re-elected next year.
While children are being killed by American taxpayer money, no business as usual.
Long live Intifada! Long Live Palestine!
