By Yvette Hacks
As we pass through further rounds of campus leader hearing theatre in the US, I want to reflect on an argument that has increasingly been trotted out, linking free speech, antisemitism and DEI (and/or Critical Race Theory) on college campuses, which seems to generate a general lack of trust in university administrations to manage antisemitism. Some arguments are explicit while others tacitly accept the connection between these issues to make further arguments related to free speech and academic freedom but the seeds of this argument date well before this current rehashing.[1] The arguments follow a few different threads, many of which are outlined well by Diane Kemker, but for the purposes of this post, I want to focus on the specific path from the claim that CRT and/or DEI is antisemitic to the current anxieties about campus speech. (Note that while Kemker specifically focuses on CRT and rightfully distinguishes it from DEI, I lump them unceremoniously together here in mirror of current discourse amongst their critics.)
Much of the current discussion rests heavily on what Kemker calls “comparative subordination”, essentially the process of drawing parallels between antisemitic discrimination and (for example) anti-Black discrimination to argue that they are equivalent. The argument follows from a few overlapping prongs: (1) One is historical. It equates past antisemitism to other forms of systemic racism (especially slavery) and then “innocently” asks why Jews are so successful now while other groups (especially Black communities) are so unsuccessful. This argument uses their history of oppression to deny that Jews are a part of dominant white society today, while also pointing to “cultural” differences that have allowed that success to occur in spite of continued oppression (an argument painfully analogous to those of white supremacists). (2) The second points to critical race theory and DEI initiatives as evidence that combatting anti-Blackness has been given a privileged position in the fight against racism. At the same time, Jews have been neglected by these initiatives because their history of discrimination has been forgotten or ignored and their relative success has obscured their continued oppression. (3) The third shifts attention to new sources of alleged antisemitism from within DEI initiatives. This argument suggests that DEI initiatives are directly to blame for a rise in antisemitism because they mistakenly place Jews at the heart of white supremacy and thus as targets for harassment and abuse. This argument also tends to rest heavily on the assumption that anti-Zionism and criticism of Israel is equivalent to antisemitism, particularly in the wake of the December campus leaders hearing. This step then suggests the equivalence of anti-Zionism with anti-Blackness in that anti-Zionism equals antisemitism and all forms of “anti” discrimination are equivalent. There are plenty of rebuttals to the “anti-Zionism = antisemitism” claim so I won’t dwell here, but it is into this line of reasoning that current protests against Israel and Zionism are dropped.
All of these threads seem to come to a head in the statement, “if [Claudine Gay was] asked the same question about calls for genocide of any other minority [her] answer would have been different – an immediate ‘yes’.” In fact, she was asked about “the mass murder of African Americans” and tried to reply in similar “free speech” terms before being quickly cut off by Stephanik! Essentially, the claim is that Jews have been (1) historically discriminated against like Black people but (2) that history has been forgotten and as a result (3) antisemitism is not taken seriously by universities. But this claim, as outlined above, rests on corresponding false equivalences – the claims that (1) Black and Jewish historical discrimination is equivalent, (2) that current antisemitism and anti-Blackness are equivalent, and (3) that anti-Zionism and anti-Israeli speech is equivalent to antisemitism.
What emerges from this discussion now is an argument that DEI itself is somehow the origin of the current tense campus climate. This argument, presented by Jeannie Suk Gersen, rests on a false two sides equivalence, in which “the two sides had effectively flipped: activist students, whose politics overlapped with principles of D.E.I., were engaged in speech that some faculty members, who were supportive of academic freedom, now wanted the university to treat as harmful.” While Gersen maintains concern for student protester well-being and distances herself from the anti-Zionism/antisemitism equation, she nevertheless falls into the trap of tacitly accepting many of the problematic foundations of the arguments against DEI laid out above. She claims that
it is the pervasive influence of D.E.I. sensibilities that makes plausible the claim that universities should always treat anti-Zionist or anti-Israeli speech as antisemitism, much in the way that some have claimed that criticizing aspects of the Black Lives Matter movement—or even D.E.I. itself—is always discrimination.
Gersen argues that it is under a kind of DEI mindset that we can be misled into thinking that criticism of X is always equal to discrimination against believers in X. But here again we see the false equivalence of speech – anti-Zionist speech and anti-DEI speech. (Note also the slippage between “criticizing aspects of” DEI and the much more ambiguous “DEI sensibilities”.) Belief in Israeli policies and/or settlement practices and belief in some form of DEI are not equivalent and nor is speech criticising them. The former carries with it the oppressive force of an Israeli apartheid state and the latter is an attempt to rectify social inequalities. Anti-Israeli speech is a criticism of the abuse of power while anti-DEI speech is often a denial of power abuse. These are not the same kinds of speech and they do not carry the same kind of potential harm. Claims that “DEI sensibilities” have led to “a culture of censoriousness” that in turn allow for the suppression of anti-Zionist speech miss terribly the history that is behind these two forms of speech and their current real-world practice. It is essential that this history is foregrounded when trying to understand what kind of speech does what kind of harm to avoid disingenuously positioning all harmful speech claims as equivalent.
[1] Though interestingly, white nationalist conspiracy theories also link CRT to imagined global Jewish agenda