Shocking new data shows we can’t stop fighting hate

“Black Lives Matter is now dragged into controversies it has nothing to do with, shoehorned into debates it never started, blamed for moves it never demanded,” Malik wrote at the height of the civil rights protests that were sparked by the death of George Floyd, but have continued to find voice in fights over critical race theory, book bans, and other skirmishes over ‘wokeism,’ some three years later.

“Our collective appetite to justify criticizing Black organizations speaks to how deeply embedded anti-Blackness is within the cultural pallet of the United States,” Brookings scholar Rashawn Ray wrote last October in his evaluation of Black Lives Matters’ effectiveness as a movement.

Through that prism, then, the resurgence of antisemitism isn’t that much of a surprise. Silence in the face of one form of hate simply legitimizes silence in the face of other forms of hate.

“Silence and inaction have helped mainstream [antisemitism]. The majority of Americans who embrace tolerance and reject hate deserve a voice as well, and it is time to give them one,” Jack Rosen, of the American Jewish Congress, wrote in the pages of the New York Daily News, last December.

Rosen also astutely noted that the “taboo on Jew-hating statements and actions has steadily eroded, as the memory of the Holocaust has begun to fade.”

And that’s the key: As the survivors of both the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement ever more swiftly transition from living memory to the history books, it’s on those of us who remain to stand even more strongly and steadfastly against those who’d use cheap conflation and lazy whataboutism to try to turn back the clock on years of hard-won progress.

The ADL data, as profoundly disturbing as it is, also is a reminder that retreat is never an option. And that it’s going to take all of us standing together to defeat hate.

An award-winning political journalist, John L. Micek is Editor-in-Chief of The Pennsylvania Capital-Star in Harrisburg, Pa. Email him at jmicek@penncapital-star.com and follow him on Twitter @ByJohnLMicek.