This article fails to appreciate the lessons of slavery and oppression in this country, just as too many Jews fail to appreciate the lessons of the Holocaust. It asks the wrong questions, which will only contribute to the continuation of oppression.
Framing the question as whether one horrible example of oppression “supersedes” another just emphasizes the divisions which are at the root of all oppression. The lesson is not who oppressed who, or who suffered the most. The lesson is to never let anything like this happen again, by anyone, towards anyone, ever.
This lesson was appreciated by the generation after the Holocaust, which they used to jump-start the Civil Rights Movement. American soldiers of Japanese descent helped liberate Jews from concentration camps, while their own families were being held in concentration camps in America. African-American soldiers fought against the racism of Nazism in Europe, only to return home to face racism here. Some were even lynched in their uniforms, fresh from that war. Soldiers on leave in Los Angeles attacked Mexican-American youth in the infamous Zoot Suit riots, while this nation was supposedly fighting that type of racism abroad. All this laid bare the disconnect between what America claimed to be, and what it was. With the new medium of television, this hypocrisy was broadcast around the world, and could not be ignored. The atrocities committed in Europe gave us here the vision and the courage to confront our own atrocities.
In Black Reconstruction in America, W.E.B. Du Bois described how “artificial lines of division” such as those advocated in this article, tore apart what “should have been . . . a union between the champions of universal suffrage and the rights of the freedmen, together with leaders of labor, the small landholders of the West, and logically, the poor whites of the South.” These divisions are what, DuBois explained, led to the failure of Reconstruction, and what I would argue still poisons our society today.
What will the artificial lines of division this article posits between different oppressed lead to? Look at the current regime in Israel. This same narrative of “ownership” of oppression, focusing on the group oppressed, rather than oppression itself, has been used as the justification for removing people from the land they called home for generations, and the deportation of refugees from Africa on explicitly racist grounds, not to mention the blood spilled. This is what comes of framing the question as which oppression “supersedes” another.
Instead of arguing which oppression should “supersede” another, we should learn from all to see how to end oppression itself. As Du Bois said:
My rise does not involve your fall. No superior has interest in inferiority. Humanity is one and its vast variety is its glory and not its condemnation. If all men make the best of themselves, if all men have the chance to meet and know each other, the result is the love born of knowledge and not the hate based on ignorance.
