Today’s Boston Globe Op Ed entitled “America's forgotten genocide” and written by Timothy M. Gay, is deeply offensive, even by Boston Globe standards. The article finds the subjugation of American blacks during Reconstruction and Jim Crow era analogous to the genocidal Nazi Holocaust. Mr. Gay asks: Too harsh an analogy? Well, consider this: in all its depravity, the Third Reich lasted little more than a decade. America's subjugation of black people lasted many times longer. Indeed, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of freed slaves still lived in fear of being lynched if they failed to observe a code of racial etiquette that forced them to bow and scrape at every turn. During the despicable reign of Jim Crow, most blacks were not only denied their inalienable rights but prevented from receiving a meaningful education or earning a decent living…We'll never know how many black lives perished in racial violence. A University of Illinois study suggests that, between 1882 and 1930, white mobs murdered a black man, woman or child somewhere in America nearly once a week, every week.
Yes, Mr. Gay, it is an analogy far too harsh and so inappropriate that only a deluded or unsubtle mind could make it, let alone approve it for publication in a major newspaper.
Not to excuse the Jim Crow era, which fundamentally was a system to disenfranchise blacks, strip them of civil rights, and keep them economically dependent on whites. It was enforced through a corrupted legal system and vigilante terrorism, and left blacks with no realistic avenues of redress.
By contrast, the Third Reich sought the complete extermination, not merely the subjugation, of those it judged inferior. These included Jews, people with birth defects, the mentally handicapped, the mentally ill, the mentally retarded, homosexuals, gypsies, and anyone who actively tried to interfere with this process of the Nazi state.
By the way, Mr. Gay, the Nazi Holocaust lasted roughly 6 years, and murdered roughly 20,000 people per week. In other words, the Nazi Holocaust killed more people in an average 2 days than Jim Crow terrorism murdered in the entire 48 year period Mr. Gay mentions.
Yes, I would say such an analogy is not only “too harsh”, but plainly foolish and inappropriate. Why was it published in the Globe?
1 comment:
Harry, I could not agree more. At first I just thought the piece was idiotic, but upon further reflection I came to realize it is much more than that. I can certainly appreciate authors writing about the horrors of Jim Crow era laws, the shameful, despicable, immoral way black Americans were treated but those authors should steer very clear of comparisons to the Holocaust. This is the type of piece that engenders questions about Anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial, etc.
How this ever got by the editorial page editor is beyond me. The Globe should be ashamed.
Post a Comment