April 17, 2006 – 3:30 pm
People are always taking appalling historical events that one would hope are unparalleled and making absurd and immoral equations: the police raid the Stonewall Inn and instantly and forever it’s “Bull” Connor turning the fire hoses on the marchers in Birmingham; antiabortion maniacs throw fetuses at abortion-performing doctors and an absolutely unembarrassed analogy is made to a lynch mob. These things are categorically unrelated, as are most things. Things are very rarely exactly like other things. If they were, people would be less baffled in general, and perhaps less given to such statements as “This is like the Holocaust.” Nothing is like the Holocaust. Not that there haven’t been other tragedies, other genocides. But simply that they were peculiarly, specifically, intrinsically like themselves. Genocides are like snowflakes, each one unique, no two alike. You can’t go around making these horrendously invalid comparisons. It is disgraceful and annoying. If you were in Auschwitz, you undoubtedly feel that on top of having been in Auschwitz you shouldn’t also have to have your experience used to justify, say, gay marriage. (More here.)
theoretically related posts
One Response to “Fran Leibowitz on Race”
I’m not sure I could disagree more with Fran. She is right that whites still have most of the power. But her apparent assertion that we should ignore other forms of oppression in order to fix the oppression of blacks is, IMHO, simply wrong-headed. I believe that her single-minded focus on race equating to black/white is harmful not only to other ethnicities, but to the concept of race itself — indeed it propagates the very notion of race. Yes, race is still very much alive and is used to oppress, making it very real. But in point of fact, it does not exist in reality. We need to educate people about that reality, not ignore it.
As for her distaste for analogy, again, I think she’s wrong. Of *course* each human experience is unique. But to ignore the fact that people learn and assimilate facts by analogy limits a great opportunity to educate. The rate of new information becoming available each day is simply too overwhelming to try and learn each new fact as distinct from every other fact.
By Denise on Apr 18, 2006