We don’t need the term “Nazi” to describe American racism
There’s a middle-aged White guy who stands in the center of UC Berkeley’s campus yelling things. He is indefatigable. One day, several years ago, this came booming over the plaza: “THE FOUNDING FATHERS WERE NAZIS. NAZIS! THEY WERE NAZIS, THE FOUNDING FATHERS. NAZIS.” While I appreciate the sentiment, I don’t agree. The Founding Fathers were Enlightenment era elites who knew it was wrong to enslave human beings but many of them did so anyways. They built a country on the back of slave labor, a country that has never stopped exploiting and erasing the very people that prop it up.
Stuttgart, Germany 6.6.2020
I’m an American PhD student studying German history. Right now, I’m in Berlin working on my dissertation, which is not about Nazis. Though my own research does not involve racial trauma and violence, such things are hard to ignore in Germany. I’m also perceived as Black or mixed in the USA and as Jewish in Germany (my mother is Black and my father is Ashkenazi Jewish). From my sample size of one, I can tell you which is less stressful.
In contexts ranging from the academic to the personal, I often hear expressed that being Jewish in Germany (regardless of when) and that of being Black in the USA are somehow comparable. I’d like to propose that these experiences are not analogous – not to mention that no one wins in the Oppression Olympics. Comparison should not be employed to “prove” the validity of human suffering. American racism, the centuries of hatred and devaluation of Black life so fundamental to our nation’s development, deserves to be addressed alone, in dialogue with nothing but its own depravity.
Comparing the two silences the uniqueness of their horrors. Outright extermination (built as it was on millennia of disenfranchisement and violence) is different from exploiting and erasing an entire population in a way so deep-rooted that it continues, barely changed, even today. Germany’s “Erinnerungskultur” (memory culture) is problematic and cannot atone for crimes committed – particularly concerning non-Jewish victims of the Shoah – but perhaps, with the idea of national shame, they’re onto something. The United States on the other hand seems to only have pride, pride with asterisks, but how about some shame or at least public, visible admission of wrongdoing? How about some monuments to the humanity we’ve robbed Black Americans of for four hundred years and counting? How about continual acknowledgement of what we owe? Yes, this has begun, but it has a long, long way to go. Start with reparations.
Anti-Black racism permeates all aspects of American culture. Black maternal mortality rates are about three times that of Whites. Look at George Washington’s English language Wikipedia entry which praises him for being kind to his slaves and having conflicted feelings about the whole enterprise that he nonetheless voluntarily participated in. Read Native Son. Yes, as my White high school classmates complained, Bigger Thomas is not the most sympathetic character, but the entire point is that it wouldn’t matter if he was. If you truly need more (warning: extremely graphic) evidence, go read up on fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. That was in 1955, and if we need to see a video of a police officer kneeling on a man’s neck in 2020, it means that somehow Till’s open coffin wasn’t enough.
None of this absolves Germany but it does underline the gravity of America’s sickness. Did Adolf Hitler snub Jesse Owens or did Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Probably both, but does it even matter, considering that the racism Owens faced in his homeland is an established fact and persisted after his Olympic victories? Stephen Colbert joked that solidarity demos in Berlin protesting George Floyd’s death showed that even the Germans find us to be too racist. But why do we need this comparison at all? Why do we need to reach outside ourselves? Germany has its history and its shame; we have ours and we own it.
Why is all of this happening? Because America is built upon hatred of Black people. Do you believe Black Lives Matter? If so, you should be outraged. There isn’t much to analyze here. No need for historical analogies or rationales for why things are the way they are and what we should do about them. Nothing to question, nothing to compare, nothing to find out, no insights to be won.
from Sara Friedman