When we think of “Newspeak,” the fictional language invented by George Orwell for his dystopian novel 1984, we typically think of powerful authoritarian governments manipulating language for the advancement of power and ideology. In such a case, the language substitutes for reality itself to protect the perceived infallibility of totalitarian leadership and its totalist ideology.
In the Third Reich, anti-Semitism infected every aspect of German society, even the domain of science. This was most memorable in the anti-Semitism that corrupted the discipline of physics. In accord with the Nazi authorities, the work of Jewish scientists was delegitimized by declaration.
The Nazis dismissed the theories of Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr as “Jewish Physics,” “Jewish Science,” “Jewish World-Bluff,” and the product of “Jewish Spirit.” Something called Aryan Physics was erected as the authentic alternative.
The major characteristic of such a primitive patois is that it attracts and works for only two types of people—those stupid enough to actually believe it (the storm-trooper class) and those who don’t believe it but see it as a useful tool to achieve their vision (vanguard puppeteers).
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“White Privilege” and its variants constitute the “Jew Physics” of the 21st century.
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Duke University professor Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is one of the most shameless proponents of the 21st-century version of the “Jew Physics” trope. Together with Tukufu Zuberi, he assembled a collection of essays for the 2008 book White Logic, White Methods, a formulation that was sure to win the applause of other leftist sociologists.
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Another practitioner is Derald Wing Sue of the Teachers College of Columbia University. […] Sue dismisses all criticism of his construct of “racial microaggressions” with some variant of the contrived epithet “white privilege.” For example, he answers one critic by repeating his own article’s fallacy:
As a privileged White male, [Kenneth] Thomas failed to understand how European Americans have historically had the power to impose their own reality and define the reality of those with lesser power. That is perhaps one of the reasons why Thomas tried to impose his own reality so freely in his response.
One suspects that Derald Wing Sue is oblivious to his own use of the “Jew Physics” technique, so ingrained has it become in the racial microaggression lexicon. Yet Sue’s critics are guilty of practicing “white privilege” in the same way that Albert Einstein was guilty of practicing “Jew Physics.”
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The “Jew Physics” pejorative has currency in the popular media, as well, and the tacit acceptance of this racist trope is troubling. For example, Monnica Williams, a clinical psychologist at the University of Connecticut, wields the “Jew Physics” trope in her own mainstream work.
Williams, who subscribes to the pseudoscience of extreme microaggression theory, tries to dismiss the criticism of more senior and accomplished psychology academics such as Jonathan Haidt and Scott Lilienfeld, as well as sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, by noting that they are “all white males” and asserting that this is the reason they “came to the wrong conclusions about the causes and impact of microaggressions.” In other words, “Jew Physics”:
Microaggressions, which tend to be covert and subtle, may be more likely to escape the notice of those without such lived experiences and consequently be misinterpreted as oversensitivity on the part of the victim. This may explain why researchers such as Lilienfeld, Haidt, Campbell, and Manning, who are all white males, came to the wrong conclusions about the causes and impact of microaggressions. It’s also worth noting that none of these scholars conduct much, if any, diversity research, and so their their [sic] ideas should be seen as opinions and not expert consensus.
These are only a few of the examples that demonstrate the ritual use of the “Jew Physics” trope, but the technique appears literally thousands of times in the critical-racialist and social-justice literature, along with the tautological bombast of “I’m correct and you are not.”
This bigoted logical fallacy invites speculation as to why reputable publications such as Psychology Today give it credence. It is as if these journals have been overtaken by the ideologies of a Stalin, a Hitler, a Mao, or a Torquemada.
