Ignorance begets hate — a friend of mine wrote about the vice president of the Islamic center in her college town. He was a Marine vet and was formerly anti-Muslim after getting back, to the point he said he wanted to blow up a mosque. After taking the chance to learn about the culture, he changed his tune entirely and went on to be director of the student Muslim group on that campus. I can send a link if you want to read more about it.
And familiarity begets comfort.
I should probably start off by saying that I'm not 'caping' for anyone. I don't approve of, condone, enjoy, or have anything remotely close to a positive association with what these kids did. I'm just speaking as someone who went to a ~40% Jewish high school less than an hour away, whose last name is Silverman, who grew up in a neighborhood that was literally jokingly called 'Little Israel'. In the suburbs.
Neighborhoods don't have names in the suburbs outside of what the developer named it.
Comparing modern attitudes towards Jews in an area like this (an upper-middle class, liberal college area with a significant Jewish population) to the national scrutiny that Muslims suffer from right-wing extremists is inherently inaccurate. Being Jewish in a place like that is almost always like being Irish, or Italian, or of some other sort of ancestry that's identifiable, but virtually never subject to the kind of prejudice that people of color and Muslims suffer from regardless of location.
Jew jokes happen in these places. And where you have Jew jokes, you have Nazi jokes, and Hitler jokes. And it's fine among friends, because you're friends and in high school and stupid. It's incredibly hard to believe that what we're looking at here, whether it's borne out of ignorance or familiarity, is or ever will be anything close to the sort of hate that VP had for Muslims.
That said, we can't know someone's intent. When it comes to assessing/condemning actions themselves outside a court of law, intent has no true consequence. An accidental killing still has the same result as a purposeful one — since we're not sentencing the persons responsible in this thread, it is entirely fair to call out an action for what it is. People are free to make further personal judgments of the ones responsible.
I completely agree that people are free to make whatever judgment they want. All I'm saying is that people who are immediately assuming the worst and advocating proportional consequences are almost certainly misjudging the situation. If anything, my basic point is that jumping to the worst possible scenario without any context is something that should be avoided. Context can at least enable us to open the door to less harmful possibilities and better understand what the action 'is', instead of what you assume it to be.
In this thread, people are taking umbrage with others saying this shouldn't be written off as "kids will be kids," just because these students are (maybe) not "racist/antisemitic/prejudiced to the core."
Whether they intend to hurt others or perpetuate antisemitism doesn't make it more or less damaging. Saying "that's a really fucked up thing to do," doesn't sentence them to life in prison. You can only conclude it's less harmful if you think the only way racism/antisemitism hurts other people is if the victims know they're purposefully being othered/subjugated/discriminated.
If I responded to the wheelchair user I was talking with by saying "well, I didn't mean it in a bad way," it wouldn't change that I was perpetuating the notion that people who use wheelchairs are defined by that use, or that they can't get out of the chair. It wouldn't change that what I said was ignorant — I'm sure they'd feel better knowing I didn't intend to belittle them, but it wouldn't change that what I said was pretty much wrong.
When it comes to assessing an individual action (which, in this thread, is all we have to go on with these students) and the effects of said action, it's irrelevant.
I'd argue that it absolutely makes it far less damaging. What if, instead of being taken in a high schooler's basement, this picture was taken at the newly founded Princeton chapter of the American Association of National Socialists? Hell, even if this was just a bunch of loosely associated skinheads American History X style, that'd scare the shit out of me. But it doesn't seem to be. It seems to be a bunch of regular ass high schoolers playing beer pong in someone's basement. The 'effects of said action' are dictated by its context, not divorced from it.
Which, in this case, seems to be a bunch of friends, some of whom are Jewish. Is it alright to say what you said to that stranger? Hell no. Props for putting it out there by the way, I think of stuff I've done like that and it's still like... paralyzing. But what if it was a close friend of yours and you two were comfortable poking fun at the wheelchair? That's great, but it'd still look like shit if someone recorded a joke you made about it and played it over the speakers at work.
As a jew, the game seems fun, and I doubt many jews would be offended, but as usual GAF's response is slightly unnerving.
If this game was about TS, there would be massive outrage here. If Highschool kids were playing a game that marginalized TS students, there would be no comments about how, "they're just kids, they do many offensive things."
Absolutely, because trans students still suffer an incredible amount of discrimination, particularly through high school, that most Jews in New Jersey and the rest of the northeast have generally become exempted from.
