The Changing of the Guard

With the passage from liberalism to progressivism of the democratic left in America, the ethnic whites are phased out in favor of people of color. Reading the price list backwards to inform us of the elementary form of value in the commodity, a critique of Western European bourgeois economics from the underside, yields place to imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. The new immigrants of the early twentieth century are ushered out by the newer ones who came in under the 1965 law which the former helped to fashion in memory of the 1924 restrictions that left people behind. The bad conscience of Western Europe after Hitlerism led it to own its debt to the Jews, but this has penetrated shallowly into the global South and those who take themselves to be its representatives in America. The very success of the Jews in America, owing entirely to a sense of contrition that ceased to be aware of itself as the Jews came to be celebrated, is then taken as evidence by black and brown people that the Jews have never suffered. They are treated as a disloyal element, middlemen for the white power structure that is the legacy of colonialism, just as the European peasantry saw the Jews as middlemen for the nobility when they came to collect the taxes. The notion we have of ourselves as integrated is passing with the years, as the American exception has come to be unexceptional in seeing authoritarian figures as legitimate politicians. The Jews, too, are freed slaves. This history is stamped on us by a circumcision that came to be regular practice among white Americans generally, but has likewise penetrated shallowly into communities of color, who see us as different on that account, as we were seen as different by Europeans. The sign of difference is worn on our noses, as Freud taught us, and we should not be surprised if the stigma attached to them by prewar Europe should soon find its place here. It is a kind of white supremacy for black and brown people.