If you ever needed a reminder that we can’t turn a blind eye to hate, then new data from the Anti-Defamation League should more than do the trick.
As the Pennsylvania Capital-Star reported Tuesday, white supremacist propaganda hit an all-time high across the country in 2022, even as antisemitic propaganda more than doubled from the year before.
The civil rights group tallied 6,751 incidents in 2022, up from the 4,876 incidents nationwide in 2021. That’s a 38% year-over-year increase nationwide, according to the ADL.
So you’d think that there’d be pretty widespread agreement that this kind of stuff is repugnant and has no place in a civil society, right? Didn’t we fight an entire war to vanquish the forces of extremism and hate?
Think again.
“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.