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“The original target of systematic racism wasn’t black people. Racism started out aimed at Jews,” writes Max Cossack. The attorney and novelist compares “systemic racism” to “phlogiston,” an invisible substance allegedly lurking inside anything flammable, a concept from 1700s chemistry.
“Like phlogiston, systemic racism cannot be seen, tasted, smelled or even located anywhere specific,” Cossack explains. “It is ‘embedded’ in institutions. Its operations are ‘not personal’ but “structural”; that is, it operates regardless of any individual’s lack of intent to be racist. It is self-reinforcing and self-sustaining.” The author finds an example in colonial Spain.
In 1492, the year Ferdinand and Isabella dispatched Columbus on his famous voyage. That same year they issued the Alhambra Decree, which expelled all Jews from Spain. To remain, Jews had to convert to Christianity. For the next two centuries:
Spain discriminated among its Christians by Limpieza de Sangre, which means “purity of blood.” Christians who descended from previous Christian generations carried “pure” blood; Spaniards descended from Jews or Muslims did not. Over the following centuries of empire, it was an easy transition for Spain and other Europeans to extend its notions of hereditary superiority beyond Jews to Africans, American Indians and other supposed inferiors they conquered and bought and sold.
Cossack alludes to the hereditary “Casta” system of colonial Mexico, racial classification based on “blood mending.” The categories included mestizos, children of Spanish and indigenous parents, and mulatos, children of Spanish and African parents. Zambos were children of indigenous and African parents, while mestizo and Spanish parents produced castizos.
Mulato and Spanish parents birthed moriscos, who with Spanish parents produced tresalvos. Other combinations included zambaigos, torna atrases, albinos and cambujos, all playing a role in determining social status. A similar system prevailed in colonial Jamaica.
A negro and “white” parent produced a mulatto, while a person of one negro parent and a mulatto delivered a sambo. A quadroon was the child of a white person and a mulatto, one quarter black, with one grandparent of African origin. Octoroons, mestees or mustees were persons one-eighth black. Mesteefeena, on the other hand, refers to the child of a white parent and a mestee.
Cossack regards these classifications as “the sort of caste system the CRT [critical race theory] advocates seek to impose in the U.S.” He cites POC, people of color; BIPOC, black and indigenous people of color; BAME, black, Asian and minority ethnic; WOC, women of color; QTBIPOC; Queer and Trans Black, Indigenous, and People of Color; NBPOC, non-black people of color and ALAANA, “an arts and culture-focused umbrella term for non-white groups praised for including Arabs.” Similar categories show up in government agencies.
As part of its dedication to “diversity and inclusion,” the CIA deploys ANGLE the Agency Network for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Officers and Allies. According to John Gentry, author of Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences, the CIA and NSA include employee “resource groups” such as AA, African American; AAPI, Asian American Pacific Islander; AIAN American Indian Alaska Native; HLAT Hispanic-Latino; IC, Islamic Culture; NG, Next Gen; and PRIDE – Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and allies. In this caustic mix, Cossack finds another major player.
The socialist Marx framed the driving force in history as the struggle among classes. The socialist Hitler came along and reframed it as the struggle between races. After the western working class refused to perform its “historically inevitable” role of overthrowing capitalism, contemporary revolutionaries gave up on the Marx view and switched to the Hitler view that there’s an ongoing struggle among races. Hence all the competing identity groups, and hence the keffiyeh-clad thugs assailing Jews on campus and in the streets.
The Jews aren’t assailed for supporting some particular cause or politician. They are attacked simply for being Jews, so Cossack is not indulging a rhetorical flourish. In similar style, he notes, “it’s difficult to distinguish race-based Nazism from race-based CRT.” His analysis recalls the experience David Horowitz charted in Radical Son.
Jews were prominent in the civil rights movement, but after 1967 black radicals like Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture) claimed they had no place. After leaving the left in the 1980s, Horowitz and Peter Collier launched Heterodoxy, to fight the campus radicals and the politically correct squads now called “woke.” In recent years, and particularly after the 10/7 massacre, the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been taking on the “keffiyeh-clad thugs assailing Jews on campus and in the streets.”
Those thugs, hard to distinguish from Nazis of old, enjoy full support from the left, which also supports colonial-style racial divisions in government and society. Max Cossack is on to them.
“Every new leftist word or phrase is a crime against the mind,” he explains. “One must view it with the same suspicion he would view a vial of cyanide. Don’t put it in your mouth. If someone else happens to put it there, spit it out, and whatever else you do, don’t bite.”
