Editor’s Note: The following is a response to Dr. Eric Cheyfitz’s letter to the editor published on March 22, 2022.
Dr. Eric Cheyfitz’s in his letter to the editor responding to my article, “Whoopi Felt It, But Could Not Tell It,” proves the points I was making. The holocausts and genocides experienced by Blacks and Indigenous peoples in the Americas is always relegated to a secondary position in the eyes of the white world. The experiences of Blacks in the Americas are analyzed, criticized, told how to interpret our own experiences, and are offered the “correct” way to see things by the white world. Preposterous! Dr. Cheyfitz attempts to set me straight in the use of words like holocaust and genocide. He basically says in his response, that Black people cannot use neither one, because what people of African descent experienced in the Americas is not a holocaust, because it doesn’t meet the definition. And, it is certainly not genocide, a term Cheyfitz offers only to Indigenous peoples in the Americas.
However, if we are going to have a meaningful discussion, we have to separate from the white world of definitions designed to relieve culpability, and to distant victimizers from the victims. The professor claims that the object of the European holocaust was to kill and exterminate Jews, and the aim in the Americas was to grow the slave labor population, which means to him that the Black experience in the Americas is not a holocaust, because the race did not shrink but grew. Talk about minimization and perverted logic! What then would you call 400 years of concentration camps in the Americas? What would you call Black bodies that were worked to death, broken, beaten, stripped of cultural identity, stripped of language, stripped of religion, and women and girls raped to increase free labor? The expendable nature of the enslaved is referenced by the numbers of deaths in the Middle Passage, or those hung from some tree, or beaten to death on a Plantation somewhere. What do you call that? What twisted logic, or misplaced compassion would think that Black bodies broken; or children torn from a mother’s arms, sold and never found again; or husbands and wives split apart and sold off and never reunited does not constitute a genocidal holocaust in the Americas? Please! The professor will admit, that it is a crime against humanity, but I am afraid it goes far beyond that! But, does it matter whether you are burned in the ovens of some European concentration camp, or maimed, scarred, and killed in the fields of the American concentration camps, the design in the end is the same, to annihilate a people! You can call it a genocide, and you can call it a holocaust, and yes both applies.
On March 30, 2022, an Anti-Lynching bill was just signed into law after more than a century of advocacy. Ida B. Wells, one of the most passionate anti-lynching campaigners spoke in 1909 to the National Negro Conference, the forerunner of the NAACP, where she said, in part,
“3,284 men, women and children have been put to death in this quarter of a century. During the last ten years from 1899 to 1908 inclusive the number lynched was 959. Of this number 102 were white, while the colored victims numbered 857. No other nation, civilized or savage, burns its criminals; only under that Stars and Stripes is the human holocaust possible. Twenty-eight human beings burned at the stake, one of them a woman and two of them children, is the awful indictment against American civilization—the gruesome tribute which the nation pays to the color line.”
It is obvious from her words that she understood the experience of Black people in the Americas to be a holocaust.
The professor does exactly what he claims that I was doing in my article: stating my pain and suffering is greater than yours. However, I did not say that in my article. I simply said that the experiences of Black and Indigenous peoples in the Americas is always relegated to a lesser place, and that the Black and Indigenous experiences of genocide and holocaust need to be raised to a place of equal importance as the European holocaust. Mr. Cheyfitz has demonstrated that I am right in my assessment, but still he will not admit to a Black holocaust in the Americas, but only one in Europe.
Furthermore, there is a hegemony that regards the European holocaust as more tragic and horrific than any other experience that people have had to endure. That is simply not true. It seems that no one can step outside of this hegemony. This requires Black people and other people who have experienced genocides and holocausts to see Jewish oppression, Jewish holocaust, and pogroms the way that Jewish and white hegemony demands, without deviation. To do anything less, or to offer an alternative perspective, while not denying the horrific nature of the European holocaust, is to be bent over and spanked like a child, such as Whoopi Goldberg was for seeing things through the lens of the Black experience in the Americas. Evidently there is only one way to speak about, view or discuss the European holocaust. It seems that this European horror cannot be analyzed, or seen from any other point of view without punishment. This is what I meant when I used the word “punitive” in my article, which Cheyfitz claims not to understand. Other people who have had the experience of oppression, genocide, and have historically experienced a holocaust are evidently not qualified to speak from their own experiences according to this hegemony.
Yet, on the other hand, the Black experience is questioned, interpreted, theorized, analyzed, minimized, and in effect Black people are told to get over it. At the very least, we are told to let our grievances go, because according to Cheyfitz, and I am sure others, we have been given the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and we have the whole of the shortest month of the year devoted to Black History. We have had books written about enslavement, and scores of documentaries presented on the subject. Cheyfitz thinks that these things are adequate expressions that recognize, as he may state it, the non-holocaust and non-genocide of Black people.
As I read Eric Cheyfitz’s response, I could not help but think of Robin DiAngelo’s book, White Fragility. There is a fragility that is apparent in his response that seeks to prove that I should not feel what I feel, or see what I see. It is a fragility that demands the conformity of my truth to accommodate white truth. In this case, Black historical pain and death is not as important or as real as Jewish pain and death. This fragility attempts to deny Whoopi’s experiences with race and white supremacy in the Americas, and it denies the experiences of other Black people. Yes, there is a rage that exist, muted but present in every Black person, and it will break forth whenever we are denied our authenticity as human beings who have also experienced both genocide and a holocaust in the Americas.
Interesting would be for Rev. Hagler to propose policy or legislative remedies.
1 of 2
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/holocaust-survivor-backs-war-crimes-case-against-israels-benny-gantz
“Holocaust survivor backs war crimes case against Israel’s Benny Gantz” Ali Abunimah Rights and Accountability 29 March 2022. Electronic Intifada, by Jacques Bude & Adri Nieuwhof
“Jacques Bude, a retired professor whose parents were murdered in the German government’s Auschwitz death camp because they were Jewish, is giving his support to a Palestinian family seeking justice for an Israeli war crime.
“’The Ziada family suffered a painful loss due to the decision of Israeli commanders to bomb civilian targets in Gaza in July 2014 & it is incomprehensible that the courts in The Hague granted functional immunity to the commanders,’ Bude said.
“Ismail Ziada, a Palestinian-Dutch citizen, has since 2018 been suing two senior commanders for a lethal bombing attack on his family’s home during Israel’s 2014 assault on Gaza.
“They are Israeli defense minister Benny Gantz & former air force chief Amir Eshel.
“Gantz was Israeli army chief during Israel’s summer 2014 assault on Gaza that killed more than 2,200 Palestinians, including more than 550 children.
“The attack on the Ziada home completely destroyed the three-floor building in al-Bureij refugee camp.
“It killed Ismail Ziada’s 70-year-old mother Muftia, his brothers Jamil, Yousif & Omar, sister-in-law Bayan, & 12-year-old nephew Shaban, as well as a seventh person visiting the family.
“Shortly after the deadly 2014 attack on the Ziada family home, 91-year-old Dutch citizen Henk Zanoli expressed his shock & pain by returning his Righteous Among the Nations medal to Israel.
“Zanoli & his mother were given the medal by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial for hiding a Jewish child from Nazi occupation forces from 1943 until the Netherlands was liberated in 1945. Ziada is seeking hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages from Gantz & Eshel.(cont’d)
.
2 of 2
“However Dutch courts rejected his lawsuit on the grounds that the pair have immunity from civil liability because they were carrying out official functions. In February, Ziada announced he is taking his case to the Dutch supreme court. The family is represented by noted Dutch human rights lawyer Liesbeth Zegveld. Costs for the lawsuit are being crowdfunded through public donations.
“’The Israeli government throws in large sums for the defense of the war criminals, whilst the family has to initiate a crowd funding campaign to be able to access justice,’ Bude said.
“Urging people to ‘make a donation, no matter how small,’ Bude added, ‘we can and must help the Ziada family in this groundbreaking legal fight for justice.’
“In 2017, Bude, who is from Belgium, told The Electronic Intifada that ‘my parents were deported when I was 8. They were murdered in Auschwitz.’
“’If I had remained with my parents I would be dead,’ Bude added. ‘Not one child of my age from Belgium came back from deportation.’ Bude survived the war because he was hidden by farmers.
“In 1949, the 16-year-old Bude was shipped by the Zionist movement against his will to Israel along with other Jewish orphans. But he hated it there.
“’I did not want to stay right from the start,’ Bude said. ‘They were real racist militarists,’ he recalled. ‘Don’t expect much nuance about Jewishness and Israel from me. For me, Israel is founded on ethnic cleansing. And if I identify with somebody, it is the Palestinian kid.’
“While Bude does not make a direct parallel between the Holocaust and Israel’s crimes, he does draw universal lessons from the European genocide.
“’The duty of memory is to say never more dehumanization,’ Bude said. ‘If we say ‘never again,’ we have to decide where we stand and condemn it.’
His solidarity with the Ziada family is a practical and moving application of that lesson.”
The following is the UN Definition of the Crime of Genocide
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
I have no issues with calling what happen to both Blacks and Indigenous peoples in the Americas as Genocides because it meet the above definition.
However I don’t think calling it a holocaust is correct because the word means a burnt offering to god. The word is also used as the name to Jewish genocide at the hands of the Nazis in the same way that the Stalin’s Ukranian Genocide is called the Holodomor.
I also agree that Holocaust and it’s victims are generally considered to be more tragic and horrific then any other. This probable because of racism and the desire not to pay reparations.
Many object to the term Holocaust out of revulsion for the idea of the victims as burned offerings (to God?). The words used for the Judeocide in Hebrew (Shoah = catastrophe) and Yiddish (Khurbn = destruction) have nothing to do with this idea.
Did the enslavement of Africans entail genocide? People on both sides of this argument make an error rooted in racial thinking: they view the enslaved as members of a single ethnic group, whereas they actually belonged to numerous ethnic groups (‘tribes’) with their own languages and cultures. Genetic analysis would probably show that some — perhaps many — present-day Afro-Americans are descended from groups that no longer exist in Africa, having suffered cultural genocide as a result of the slave trade. And there may have been small groups that left behind no survivors, having undergone physical genocide.
Rev. Hagler clearly feels that refusing to call some event a holocaust or genocide means to regard it as somehow less horrific than events that are so called. If Group A has 200 million members and ‘only’ half of them — 100 million — are killed then that does not strictly speaking count as a genocide if the group as such survives. In fact, even the ‘Holocaust’ can be considered only an attempted genocide. Compare this with Group B, a small community of just 200 members. If they are all killed then that does count as genocide because the group perishes, even though the number of victims is much smaller than in the first case.
The emotional stance of Rev. Hagler can be understood as a natural response to those Jews who insist on the ‘uniqueness’ of the ‘Holocaust’, meaning that they do regard it as more terrible than any other event in history. Such Jews are numerous, though not among the readers of Mondoweiss. They reveal their attitude, for instance, by refusing to acknowledge Roma as fellow victims of the Nazis. Their attitude is irrational from a scientific point of view and is rooted in the religious view of Jews as a people specially chosen by God and spiritually superior to non-Jews, so that the same crime is more atrocious when committed against Jews.