The Bigotry Threshold

Not too long ago, my school made national news as part of an altercation at a basketball game which culminated in anti-Semitic chants. The other team began chanting “You killed Jesus” in response to my school’s yelling “Sausage fest” and “Where are your girls?” (That school is Catholic and all-boys; mine is largely Jewish.) Since then, there has been an outbreak of graffiti, mainly swastikas, in our school bathrooms, that has the administration up in arms. Although I’ve heard that fans and players at the game did not take this particularly seriously, the news media has seized upon it and the students here (and at the other high school) are receiving daily lectures and entreaties to crack down on this behavior. Some people judge it not as big a deal as it has been made out to be, while others insist that the Catholic school “crossed a line” when its fans threw an anti-Semitic insult.

The interesting thing about lines and who crosses them and how dastardly that is is that it’s entirely subjective, of course--but not only do lines mean different things for different people, the lines drawn by different people garner different amounts of credibility and respect. People insist that “sausage fest” was not meant to have homophobic connotations, but even if that’s so, my school has a troubling record of shouting highly problematic chants at sports games, usually racist. At matches against schools with mostly students of color, my school reportedly began chanting “Build a wall” at one game and “Go back to Africa” at another. How many lines do those chants cross? We can’t suppose that the schools victimized by our bigotry were not drawing lines that we crossed blithely. But our racist transgressions warranted no PSA announcements, no special meetings or  class discussions. Sports games aside, there were viciously sexist and violent graffiti and online responses to projects run by the feminism club at my school, and racist comments appeared online in relation both to yet another sports game and also to the Black Culture Day my school hosts. There is also a seething undercurrent of Islamophobia, and earlier this year some students made enormously offensive posts online about a girl who wears full Islamic face and head coverings.

None of this made national media. It didn’t even result in soul-searching or lectures on our behavior and the strength and tolerance levels of our school community. But when anti-Semitism joins the fray, it’s a five-alarm fire. It’s unacceptable bigotry all of a sudden. Perhaps it’s good that we are (purportedly) tackling our prejudice issues openly, but that it took this long raises uncomfortable questions about whose right to feel safe and valued is most prized, and about whether this upsurge of discussion about our Problems will yield any permanent or institutional change. My experience with the public school system here is that cosmetic reforms are usually considered adequate, if that. By state law we are mandated to talk about and supposedly address bullying, but certainly I have not noticed that either the students or school administration actually respond particularly well to incidents of bullying. And racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, Islamophobia, homophobia, etc.--are these not just bullying on a massive, systemic scale, both internalized and externalized?

There's also the possibility that steps are being taken now (if they truly are) to address this mostly because our reputation suddenly seems marred, as we at once rise to prominence as the victims and perpetrators of anti-Semitism. When the spotlight turns towards us and finds we might look bad--and, clearly,  when white people fall under fire--then and only then does the school open up a conversation about bigotry.

A student in my Italian class--the only class where we had a comprehensive (and very interesting) conversation about these recent going-ons--suggested that the anti-Semitism raises such an uproar because for many students here, it is literally the only identity they possess that could fall under attack, and they are unused to feeling in the minority. As one classmate said, “They aren’t exactly going to yell ‘your school cost $200 million’ or ‘you all drive Mercedes.’” Our wealth and privilege insulate many of us from ever experiencing discrimination or hatred, and also provide a buffer between us and the consequences of our actions when it is we who are shouting obscenities and giving offense.

The lines we draw, because we have the privilege and the power to sound alarms when they are crossed, stand out starkly while the lines other schools must draw when my school shouts “build a wall” are not granted any visibility or respect. The power to judge wrongdoing--though rarely our own--is yet another privilege restricted to certain social strata. We reserve the right both to cross lines with impunity and to scream when ours are crossed.

Of course, one final component that ought not to  be left out of this conversation is the uncomfortable reality that anti-Semitism, above all other forms of bigotry, has the potential to strike up far more fervor and outrage in my community because defensiveness runs so very high around any issues that pertain to criticisms of Judaism. Pro-Israel Zionists have largely hijacked the concept of anti-Semitism to mean any possible slight towards not just Jews but Israel as well, rendering the word so highly charged that any accusations of it strike a different and much more responsive nerve than accusations of racism or sexism or homophobia or Islamophobia. This has less to do with the gravity of the hatred that people experience due to any of these “ism”--since I am not making the argument that one form of oppression or prejudice hurts worse than another--than with the conditioned responses that are embedded in my community when it comes to issues that could possibly invoke the specter of Israel. It is an alarming phenomenon that the entrenched bigotry in our schools is brought to light only when the seethe of prejudice coincides both with white privilege and one of our political hair-trigger issues. If we have to wait for wealthy and white people to feel threatened or hurt before they acknowledge that the bigotry thresholds have long been crossed, before we can hope to see any institutional soul-searching or change, then we won’t likely be seeing a great deal of either.