Sowing Dragons' Teeth - Part The Second
You must attend to the commencement of this story, for when we get to the end we shall know more than we do now about a very wicked hobgoblin; he was one of the very worst, for he was a real demon.
One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread over the whole of the nose and mouth.
The demon said this was very amusing. When a good or pious thought passed through the mind of any one it was misrepresented in the glass; and then how the demon laughed at his cunning invention.
All who went to the demon’s school-for he kept a school-talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. They carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through this distorted mirror. They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces.
But now the looking-glass caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were not so large as a grain of sand, and they flew about the world into every country. When one of these tiny atoms flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there unknown to him, and from that moment he saw everything through a distorted medium, or could see only the worst side of what he looked at, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had belonged to the whole mirror. Some few persons even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice.
A few of the pieces were so large that they could be used as window-panes; it would have been a sad thing to look at our friends through them. Other pieces were made into spectacles; this was dreadful for those who wore them, for they could see nothing either rightly or justly. At all this the wicked demon laughed till his sides shook-it tickled him so to see the mischief he had done. There were still a number of these little fragments of glass floating about in the air, and now you shall hear what happened with one of them.
"The Snow Queen," by Hans Christian Andersen (1844)
(Be advised that I hold one of these pieces, although most of them are currently employed in TV cameras these days; it is by a most curious coincidence snapped into precisely the shape and size of a single contact lens; which means that I can see only a little more than half the world this way, at a time, ever, and that I can take it out or put it in at will - more or less easily, because that's how those things are. --And that I can make other people look through it, if I choose. You'll see.)
--I am no historian; I took no history classes in college except those that were of other disciplines: literature, art, music, philosophy, theology; all my studying of it has been erratic and self-governed, like a wild pony on the Fells running hither and yon. And yet, I have of my own amateur interest read more material in any number of eras than most people I know IRL, including some who are actually degreed in the discipline of history - and most of all in the area of timespace comprising Western Europe and the United States from about 1790 to the Second World War, with greatest emphasis on the French Revolution/Napoleonic Era and the Gilded Age up to the Interbellum period, most particularly with regard to pop culture, often of a fairly "low" sort, particularly that available in English language versions.
It's amazing, how much context you pick up that way, without even realizing it. Stuff that isn't available to those who have limited themselves to "respectable" and "mainstream" sources, which are both second-hand and heavily-edited, in all sorts of ways.
One of those things gleaned along the way, dowsing through the stacks of tawdry and trashy and just disposable that didn't get disposed, is how not nice our Edwardian, Victorian and Enlightenment ancestors were. And, by corrolary, just how much of that unacceptable behavior has been edited out of the record, and the collective contemporary memory. If I were to try to explore them all, the mythmaking and the lies of ommission and the rhetorical uses of them, not to mention the cognitive dissonance that must be maintained to hold onto the myths, it would be a lifetime's work of research over many volumes.
I've touched on the surface of the Yellow Peril meme, and its consequences, and how it is used today, and how far the myths of chivalric respect for Womanhood were from the real treatment of flesh-and-blood women, and nicked a chip off the glacier of racism towards Africans and African-Americans, and the icebergs of the same towards Spanish- and Native Americans, as well. And in "A Bloody Mess" I did my damnedest to show that trying to sort out neatly what was "religious" anti-Jewish prejudice from what was "genetic" pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish prejudice was impossible - but that was drawing on medieval and Renaissance influences primarily, and mostly through a religious prism, because of the target of the piece.
Today, dredging more recent skeletons out of the collective Western Cultural closet, a little more recent and secular in nature.
You often hear the [untrue] allegation made that "nobody knew" outside Germany about the Holocaust until after it was over. Even students of history are shocked to find it false - although the BBC is hardly an arcane source in an inaccessible language, then or now, and the truth is out there plain, as I have demonstrated in the past. Anyone who "didn't know" chose to disbelieve the reports, for whatever reason. But why the denials? The conviction that our grandparents must not have known? I suspect that there is shame involved, conscious or not: the conviction (even now, even despite Rwanda and Darfur) that had they known, they would have done something, could not have stood idly by; but they did not do anything, and thus they must not have known. Our collective self-respect as Americans/Britons/Christians/"civilized" Westerners will not allow the alternative. --Despite all our history.
Because that's the bigger question, the kraken raised by the fishhook of yes but they did know, the grownups at least, or chose to put fingers in ears and hum - in Poland and in France and in Italy and in the Ukraine and in Hungary and in Holland and Belgium no less than Germany proper and Austria, how did it "just happen", how did a minority of invaders manage to carry off their lethal scapegoating with no significant resistance by the French and others to the hauling away of their neighbors and coworkers and supposed friends of a lifetime--?
The answer is, that enough of the majority of non-Jewish Europeans either believed or suspected that really, deep-down, no matter what appearances might be to the contrary, no matter what anyone said or proclaimed or denied, really, Jews were dangerous to "Western" society and harmful to the majority "ethnic-Christian" population and thus deserved to be persecuted and dispossessed and even killed - even if they chose not to think about it. Not only was it no skin off their noses, it made them feel safer, society purified of dangerous elements and made more "authentically" European by this reduction. And Americans were not too far behind, although the minorities our ancestors had more pressing concerns about were different here.
And why shouldn't they? Their popular culture and media had been telling them so, for generations, in so many different ways. And usually contradictory ones, too, just as we saw with the anti-Chinese and Japanese xenophobic memeage.
Thus, the negative stereotypes of "typical" Jewishness in European pop culture (which meant, very shortly after appearing there, American pop culture, since we imported it wholesale as fast as packet ships could go) held both the image of "dirty", criminal, poor and cowardly - and too-smooth, too-clean and respectable, too-prosperous and law-abiding to be up to any good, brazenly thinking themselves as good as "proper" Englishmen. Mostly, despicable because weak (so unlike bluff honest macho Britons!) but equally contemptable if strong, with the added element of fear of their power, just like the alternately cringing and violent assassins in the Fu Manchu novels.
Thus we have this typical interjection into a "humorous" 1870 London guidebook, by an anonymous British lawyer:
... the dirty, cunning-looking, hook-nosed, unsavoury little Jews, with thick gold rings on their stubby fingers, and crisp black hair curling down their backs, the rule. They are the embodiment of meat, drink, washing, and professional reputation to the needy barristers whom they employ, and, as such, their intimacy is, of course, much courted and in great request. Of course many Old Bailey barristers are utterly independent of this ill-favoured race; but there are, unfortunately, too many men to be found whose only road to professional success lies in the good-will of these gentry. There are, among the thieves' lawyers, men of acute intelligence and honourable repute, and who do their work extremely well; but the majority of them are sneaking, underhand, grovelling practitioners, who are utterly unrecognized by men of good standing.
Thus too the famous magazine Punch:
In 1875, the year The Way We Live Now appeared in print, Punch confirmed the prvalence of fashionable anti-semitism by publishing an article mocking Jews. Punch, the magazine's fictional representative or voice, describes the Jews he encountered at a furniture sale, who he believes tried to swindle him. Filling his article with harsh stereotypes of Jews, he depicts them as greedy, money-hungry, filthy individuals who all possess hooked noses: "I am aware that many eyes are on me, that noses are tending towards me, that beaks will swoop down upon me, as a hawk on a lamb, without waiting for the mint sauce. They are one and all of the Hebrew persuasion. Shall I escape without being inveigled into laying out money on a lot of things I don't want?" Punch even implies that all Jews have poor educations and as a result speak broken English. He succeeds in illustrating this by mimicking the speech of a Jewish broker he encounters: "Bootiful thing that! Bootiful! Couldn't find a pair of 'em anywhere. Bootiful! Quite a little gem" ("On View at a Furniture Sale - All among the Noses - An Escape," Punch, June 5, 1875).
On the one hand, this sort of sneering mockery is slightly less harmful than some stereotypes: after all, if you think someone is feeble and contemptible, no matter how repulsive, you are [theoretically] less likely to be so afraid of him that you feel compelled to destroy him.
"It's strange that they don't seem to mind you, Otto," he said, calming down a little.
"Vell, I'm not official," said Otto. "I do not haf zer sword und zer badge. I do not threaten. I am just a vorking stiff. And I make zem laff."
Vimes stared at the man. He'd never thought about that before. But yes...Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all of his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on whom he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people. Make them laugh, and they're not afraid.
Thud, Terry Pratchett, 2005
But again, there is no logic to bigotry, as noted already. The apparent-harmlessness itself can be seen by the paranoid as a covering for still-deeper threat, a sinister camouflage hiding the true villainous nature, and thus make the paranoid xenophobe even more fearful, angry and threatened - just as happened to Japanese-Americans, in fact. All the depictions of Asians as ugly inarticulate and grovelling did nothing to prevent the fear-enabling-greed of 1942, no more than did the old Step'n'Fetchit game stop lynchings and pogroms. You cannot grovel low enough to avoid threatening the insecure - and besides, who would live that way, even given the risk? It is amazing, the hypocrisy and blindness of supposed champions of rebellion and liberty, insisting that strangers be utterly supine and self-effacing even in the face of insults, in order to be barely-tolerated, or else - and still hold themselves champions of liberty and rebellion.
A lot has been written and said about the problem of the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, much of it scholarly, much of it naive and obtuse, missing the point because the context of it is gone. No, Dickens wasn't out to start pogroms when he wrote a Jewish crimelord in a London slum as a villain; and yes, there certainly were crooks who were also Jews in metropolis - it's statistically unlikely, to say the least, that out of 20,000 people there would be none who were not totally law-abiding and/or virtuous.
But to say that therefore there is nothing in the least wrong with the picture, and that any looking-askance at it is unjustified, oversensitive on the part of Jewish or [ahem!] "PC" gentile readers and reading-back into it unwarranted negativity retrofitted from the Holocaust.
No, Dickens wasn't trying to push prejudice - he was just mindlessly falling into the patterns of repeating conventional prejudice, the way an American humorist of the time would of course get laughs over how stupid and funny-sounding those Irish and blacks were - and the way even today TV producers and writers scarcely think anything of casting blacks and Latinos and Asians as thugs, servants, or not at all. And the fact - the point of this essay in fact, ultimately, tho' I have not gotten all the way there yet - is that this is relevant to subsequent atrocities and outrage: the Holocaust and the apathy that enabled it in Europe, did not come out of nowhere. It matters that this was part of the pop culture, as is the portrayal of Shylock in Shakespeare - leading to the use of "Shylocks" as a generic noun for "Jews" in pre-WWII England, even.
There ought to be discomfort when we encounter this stuff, but confrontation, not sweeping under the rug, just like when we hit routine sexism and anti-gay stereotypes. We need to be aware of the climate of the times, and what real obstacles there were to full equality, even legal ones. There were 2.3 million people in London in 1850, most of them WASPs: why single out that less than 1% minority to supply one of the most memorable and repellant villains of English fiction, lacking any redeeming qualities and exonerating circumstances such as we find in Nancy (let alone Mme. Defage) or even the at-least-clean and respectable, not wholly grody figure of Oliver's wicked half-brother or the physically-fit and "manly" Bill Sikes.
The thing about Dickens, however, is that when in after years he made some Jewish friends, and one of them called him on the damaging nature of the stereotype he had indulged in with Fagin, he eventually saw her point, and rather than being defensive and digging in and writing another and worse Fagin, set about making amends in his last finished book before his death, Our Mutual Friend (one of my personal favorites, btw, for many reasons.) In it, he both plays off and subverts the stereotypes, for Mr. Riah it turns out is the victim of Christian financier-parasites, and in a strong reversal of the "Protect Our Womenfolk From The Alien!" meme, is the one who looks after two lower-class girls from terminally-disfunctional families, protecting them from the "nice" good British young men who are so full of their own privilege that they consider themselves entitled to rape if turned down.
But while they remain famous today in the flattering way of memory-editing, books like Daniel Deronda and Our Mutual Friend were slender reeds to stem the flood-tide of ugly and brutal stereotyping. Even Ivanhoe which is among the earliest popular fiction that tries to show positive Jewish characters is awesomely offensive in its stereotypically-cowardly and greedy merchant - no matter how brutal the Crusaders are, they are still filled with manly bravery, even the wicked Templars, and that is what we are supposed to admire most in the book. But all kinds of stuff which has not endured in the collective consciousness, but was popular in its day, was much worse. Thus, the popular Raffles novels, about the eponymous archetypal dashing gentleman jewel thief and loveable Robin Hood-style rogue, as here, not to be excused as in this critique by "that was then and they didn't know better" as if adults should be judged like four-year-olds; thus the casual acceptance of all manner of ugly stereotypes and bigoted behavior, in the bestselling dime novels, such as this one, where even the good guys find hate crimes committed by the outlaws amusing enough to be distracted from doing their duty, and yet the James Gang are still described as somehow worthy of admiration for their manly Anglo-Saxon courage, even as they bully a "Jewish peddlar" (the detective hero in disguise) after killing unarmed bystanders and bank tellers; the casual contempt and stereotyping of the landlord in H.G. Well's Invisible Man--
And this is the ur-culture which destroyed Captain Dreyfus, (which case I have mentioned before) and which produced and popularized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1905, and in between indulged in no end of coded, subtle, and quite-overt bigotry: religion based for the devout, genetics-based for the secular, or political-economic, for both.
--A popular bit of NRA-gun-nut memeage in this country is to say that the rise of the Third Reich proves the rightness of their view that any restrictions on gun ownership are not only wrong by the Constitution but also self-destructive foolishness. If only the Jews of Europe had had guns, they say, they could have fought back and defended themselves effectively! Considering both the recent racist patterns in Europe and US history in re slave rebellions and fear of the same, we can say with certainty, au contraire. It would have meant only earlier demands for and acquiescence to "ethnic cleansing" out of a xenophobic terror gone from passive to active, if the screeches for the same today against Muslims are any guide to European politics.
For another meme, not entirely pernicious or ill-intentioned, but no less destructive as all such myths and deep untruths are, is that The Jews™ were all helpless, pitiable, unresisting victims. The virtue, such as there is, in this myth is that it is a polar reaction, the antithesis of the racist memes embraced and expounded by Streicher and other propagandists of the era, in which the active evil of The Jews™ forced the Good People of Brutopia to defend themselves, and that was all that was going on in the Holocaust - an act of self-defense against the Inner Enemy, chemotheraphy against a societal cancer, just as we saw in Der Stürmer's cartoons.
But reacting to one falsehood by fleeing in the opposite direction doesn't solve anything.
--There is a Yiddish expression, which has come current and common in Left Blogistan, used by Jewish-American bloggers about e.g. the disgraceful behavior of people like the guy who threw the $10,000,000 Bat Mitzvah party with money he got by selling sub-standard body armor to the army at high markups. It is "a shande far di goyim," a shame before the Gentiles, and it refers to someone behaving in a way that reflects very, very badly on their community, far more egregious than simply being a drunk or a dope or the sort of person who has never figured out what they're going to do when they grow up. I know what it means in the wider context, which I will explain in a second - or how it means - despite having grown up more or less part of the privileged-enough-to-be-privileged white ethnic Christian society in this country, from having seen it in action in another way, when I was in high school and working with a girl from Trinidad, with whom I usually spent breaks asking her about the Caribbean or rather, listening to her talk - about her family, the islands, the customs, the music, and doing the compare/contrast thing with New England, which she found cold and dull. But one day, one of the semi-regular probably-homeless guys who spent most of their days in the library where we worked went by, the people who I always felt sorry for, and whose existence thrust spikes of rocks into the already-turbulent waters of my moral certainty, spikes ignored by the respectable Christians so often.
But for Zan, this particular patron - unlike the others who staked out their carrels and spent the day unobtrusively reading or dozing out of the weather - filled her with rage. Because - unlike the others - he was black, too. And she felt it personally, as a shame and a disgrace, that here he was homeless, unemployed, scruffy, perhaps a little tipsy (and there are very many who think that only the rich and prosperous deserve painkillers, and never question that, not only young Zan) and felt that it reflected badly upon her - and that he had a duty to be better than the poor crazy PTSD white guys who lurked in the library, somehow. I didn't argue with her; it was an imago mundi, a mirror held reflecting around a corner that I hadn't known existed, and I didn't know how to process this new viewpoint, and I was pretty sure that it wasn't my place to tell her how to feel even if, as I also felt, she was being unfair and judgmental.
So we stayed friends, in so far as someone so depressed and dissociative as I could be/have friendship then, until she moved away, and I "stored it in my heart" and meditated on it, filing it away as part of the many-faceted world that was more than dreamt of in any philosophies that I could tell, until I opened that cupboard and it came tumbling out again all the sudden, as I found myself increasingly enraged with women who insisted on living down to all the stereotypes of us as shallow, spiteful, bitchy, greedy, and superficial in our obsessions with appearance and domestic trappings, using body to get ahead because of not having any brains-- You are an embarrassment to us all, grinding my teeth, you are making us all look bad by proving every sexist claim against women through the ages.
I am ambivalent about this - not about Zan's right to be angry, not about the bloggers' right to take Brooks' profiteering and squandering personally, not about feeling particularly outraged at "gender treason" any more than I do about the USA's crimes above all others - or Roman Catholic official corruption and coverups, for that matter. I don't think it's invalid exactly. But I do think it's...problematic.
You see, it simultaneously exists in 2 planes. One is the plane of responsibility which is heightened for yourself, and then for the group you self-identify with and benefit from the communal nature of, chosen or not. What your own family gets up to is necessarily your business in a way that the family two doors down is not. But your neighbors' down the block are more your business than someone across the sea - unless of course they're your family, too. And while real moral or legal responsibility is limited by realistic ability to control and authority over, emotional feelings of responsibility are not reasonable always, and besides there is that reciprocity thing: if you [are to be able to be] proud to self-identify as X (or XX) then it follows you are likewise liable to be embarrassed by the group collective identity, too.
As jesurgislac put it a while back, she is [quite reasonably to my mind) more embarrassed by what Tony Blair and his LibDems get up to, than by what our govt do, while deploring both, because Blair's is her government, her elected representatives, and thus her problem in a way that House Bush is not. While for me, it's the other way round - what goes on in England is important politically and personally, and interesting in the avenues and mirror of the world it holds up to me, I can't feel the same sting of embarrassment over what Poodle-boy gets up to as a British citizen must - except on a sliding scale; to the extent that we are self-identified as a unit, as "Christendom" or "the English-speaking community" or "the WASP-dominated Free World" or..., yes, I do feel a greater personal responsibility for what "we" do/have done (and I/mine benefitted from) than I do for some complete stranger's bad behavior - and yet if it's a complete stranger who turns out to be a Satrap following "our" orders, then yes it becomes a Family matter rather than Watching The Joneses Across The Street. Self is defined by Other, always.
And that's the problem with a shande fur de goyim and all that: it is an acceptance of Self as Other, and a response to a situation with that taken as a Given, for granted. And that is where I am of 2 minds, mostly - to be worried about what another member of one's group does, because it disgraces the whole group primarily, is to buy into the definition of that group as Other, to submit to the xenification of one's selves, one's self, to accept the empowered group's marginalization of you as something that must be accommodated and worked around, and must not be ignored.
Only people who feel themselves as Other - unless a terrible shock, of doing way too much Truth, has cast one into that dissociated state of losing the blindness of Privilege - ever act like this. No white male feels - unless he is a feminist or a wild-eyed lefty - personally tainted and shamed by the deeds of some rapist, murderer, warmonger of his own race and gender. No straight man, and only some [mostly self-identified feminist] straight women, agonize over what it is to Be A Man/Woman, and wonder if they have a duty to avoid submitting to gendered cultural roles, to question, or to avoid being too ostentatiously heterosexual, in whatever gendered norms are in their sub/culture - but every GLBT person has had to, pretty much everywhere in the world, if not in all places at all times, perhaps. The more Other you are, or feel, the more you worry about these things - and are aware of it when other people in your subgroup don't care how it looks.
And it's all very well to say, "Stop worrying about whether or not some honkey is going to judge you for 'looking too black,' and just let your hair alone the way you like it," or "Stop worrying about whether or not guys will think you're a dyke/slut and just wear baggy/tight clothes that you like!" or "Stop worrying about what Miguel does and worry about your own life, who cares if he's out there jacking cars, it has nothing to do with us" - As the AJHS article about "the Battle of the Balcony" notes, not having to worry about behavior in front of outsiders is itself a sign of no longer being quite as much an outsider, of having assimilated to a degree - or rather, of having been allowed at last to assimilate.
Because you can tell yourself all you want that it doesn't matter how brown or how female or how accented you are, what you think about it doesn't matter. You can tell yourself that you're an individual and that's the only thing that counts - all They see is black/tits/immigrant/poor - and that for those who operate in that plane is an impassable wall to being recognized as an Individual. Sen. Barack Obama is asked for opinions on what some random black entertainer says, by "mainstream" media interviewers. It doesn't work the other way, with Sen. Trent Lott being demanded to account for, say, Eminem. You are not "yourself" alone to them, and you are not allowed to be "yourself" merely to your own folk, either.
So, while ideally it would be totally irrelevant, we would all be judged as individuals and judge each other as such, that is not how the groups in power act, and pretending it is other than it is will not change that any more than pretending a brick wall isn't there and walking straight into it. And yet we must challenge these things and confront them - tear down the walls, a brick here, a brick there, as we can.
But you can't make it happen, because the controls for that are in the hands of the powerful. And trying to make it happen by being "agreeable" and disavowing the more embarrassing members of your own group - whether they are doing things that are truly bad, or just things which make the majority group uncomfortable - and trying to force everyone to conform to some atrophied oversimplified version of the majority's "standards" ...just Doesn't Work. Ask the Nisei about how well it worked for them.
But skin color/appearance/gender/sexual orientation/country-of-origin are things you are born with, and religion is chosen and changeable, I am sure some will say. Except that it isn't that simple. Most people are born into a religious group, and that is as much part of their ethne as their language, both of them inculcated by parents at a young age. And besides, it doesn't matter - you can convert out of a minority religion, and unless you can also "pass" for a member of the majority ethnic group - which may or may not be possible, depending on your appearance - it won't make a difference, because that's not what it's about. (Here, in the US, bigots don't harrass blond blue-eyed Bosnian Muslim refugees for following Islam, because it doesn't occur to them that they might be Muslim. They attack Sikhs instead.)
One of the important points I tried to stress in "A Bloody Mess" and since, writing about that conservative heroine Isabella of Spain and her government's behavior, is that to the bigot, there are no "good Others," when you get down to brass tacks. The Conversos tried to conform, did what ostensibly mattered, changed their religion - and were still treated like second-class citizens, or worse. Because, underneath, it wasn't really about religion, it was about who was "Spanish" - and the people making the definition had no interest or honesty at all about their standards when they started building an ad hoc structure of laws allowing them to kick out people whose ancestors immigrated into the Iberian peninsula later than the Visigoths.
Converting to CoE wouldn't solve the prejudice problem for an Irish Catholic, any more than it ever did for an Indian or Goanese Christian because it wasn't about doctrine, it was ethnic, political, colonists vs natives, we-want-your-stuff/our-stuff-back - and you can't tell just by looking what church or temple that wog/dago/paddy is attending, but you can tell the important (to the bigot) thing, which is that they are Other. And if you can't - well, that's even worse. Passing, despite demands for assimilation and conformity, scares the bigots even more than visible Strangers. (OMGWTF!?!?theylookjustlikeus!!1!)
By the time we get to the mid-19th century, the number of people in Europe who are at all serious about their Christianity, as opposed to it being something social, culturally-mandated, and meaningless to them, is dropping drastically enough for it to be an important, even urgent, topic in books by Christian authors for the next hundred years up to the present; despite all the state funded churches and the mandatory prayer in schools and military chaplains, the ashes of the 1600s had cooled long ago and now people fought more honestly about stuff, although Christianity was good to bring up for a collective cultural boosterism, "look what WE made, cathedrals! look what THEY made, ugly idols in grass huts!" and thus becomes important as a way of contrasting "Us" with "Them" around the globe as empires expand and clash. The ultimate expression of this may have come in 1914, when Allied propagandists insisted in word and cartoon that the Prussians weren't really Christians at all, but "heathen" idolaters. Funny how what was considered very Christian and civilized behavior when it was done to fuzzy-wuzzy and the Chink, suddely becomes Not Christian At All when it's done to some of you by others of you in a re-enactment of the Hundred-Years-War and the Sack of Rome and all...
So you have an era, the Victorian Era, in which at home in Europe the objects of religious fervor had shifted for the most part from denomination and sect to property and patriotic symbol, the Cross important as a prop for the Union Jack, rather than as it was in the days of the Conquistadors, being the cover for political nationalism. And as certainty in dogma and passion over theology have faded, post-Bunyan, post-Milton, post-Enlightenment, so too have the religious aspects of the prejudices - without those prejudices themselves fading in the least. So, where before it was suspicion of heresy, now it is suspicion of genetic "weakness" and "inferiority" - disease-proneness, mental illness, idiocy - which justifies ethnic prejudice and discrimination both legal and privately-practiced.
Because it didn't matter if you were a practicing Orthodox or a complete atheist - not to the bigot in Paris yelling "Death to Jews!" at the trial of Capt. Dreyfus, not to the Viennese bigots depicted as being turned off by seeing a "Jewish" nose on a girl in a Thomas Mann short story, not to the practitioners of eugenics whose followers sent letters home with Lutheran high school students telling them they couldn't get married or go to college, for having one Jewish grandparent, or sent the Catholic convert and nun Edith Stein, daughter of secular Jewish intellectuals, to the camps for her race.
But then, we should hardly be surprised at this, in a country where members of the majority ethno-religious ur-group went out and shot total strangers working at gas stations in the mistaken belief that they belonged to the same religion as the 9/11 hijackers, because of their color or costume, and then invaded the wrong country and firebombed it and burned large parts of it down and killed many many people...
(but it's different when it's us. We can do those things, and nobody can say it's us or it's wrong. But if inferior groups of humans do it, then it's both wrong and further proof of their inferiority. Just ask the Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference about the "towelheads", they'll tell you--)
One day, when he was in a merry mood, he made a looking-glass which had the power of making everything good or beautiful that was reflected in it almost shrink to nothing, while everything that was worthless and bad looked increased in size and worse than ever. The most lovely landscapes appeared like boiled spinach, and the people became hideous, and looked as if they stood on their heads and had no bodies. Their countenances were so distorted that no one could recognize them, and even one freckle on the face appeared to spread over the whole of the nose and mouth.
The demon said this was very amusing. When a good or pious thought passed through the mind of any one it was misrepresented in the glass; and then how the demon laughed at his cunning invention.
All who went to the demon’s school-for he kept a school-talked everywhere of the wonders they had seen, and declared that people could now, for the first time, see what the world and mankind were really like. They carried the glass about everywhere, till at last there was not a land nor a people who had not been looked at through this distorted mirror. They wanted even to fly with it up to heaven to see the angels, but the higher they flew the more slippery the glass became, and they could scarcely hold it, till at last it slipped from their hands, fell to the earth, and was broken into millions of pieces.
But now the looking-glass caused more unhappiness than ever, for some of the fragments were not so large as a grain of sand, and they flew about the world into every country. When one of these tiny atoms flew into a person’s eye, it stuck there unknown to him, and from that moment he saw everything through a distorted medium, or could see only the worst side of what he looked at, for even the smallest fragment retained the same power which had belonged to the whole mirror. Some few persons even got a fragment of the looking-glass in their hearts, and this was very terrible, for their hearts became cold like a lump of ice.
A few of the pieces were so large that they could be used as window-panes; it would have been a sad thing to look at our friends through them. Other pieces were made into spectacles; this was dreadful for those who wore them, for they could see nothing either rightly or justly. At all this the wicked demon laughed till his sides shook-it tickled him so to see the mischief he had done. There were still a number of these little fragments of glass floating about in the air, and now you shall hear what happened with one of them.
"The Snow Queen," by Hans Christian Andersen (1844)
(Be advised that I hold one of these pieces, although most of them are currently employed in TV cameras these days; it is by a most curious coincidence snapped into precisely the shape and size of a single contact lens; which means that I can see only a little more than half the world this way, at a time, ever, and that I can take it out or put it in at will - more or less easily, because that's how those things are. --And that I can make other people look through it, if I choose. You'll see.)
--I am no historian; I took no history classes in college except those that were of other disciplines: literature, art, music, philosophy, theology; all my studying of it has been erratic and self-governed, like a wild pony on the Fells running hither and yon. And yet, I have of my own amateur interest read more material in any number of eras than most people I know IRL, including some who are actually degreed in the discipline of history - and most of all in the area of timespace comprising Western Europe and the United States from about 1790 to the Second World War, with greatest emphasis on the French Revolution/Napoleonic Era and the Gilded Age up to the Interbellum period, most particularly with regard to pop culture, often of a fairly "low" sort, particularly that available in English language versions.
It's amazing, how much context you pick up that way, without even realizing it. Stuff that isn't available to those who have limited themselves to "respectable" and "mainstream" sources, which are both second-hand and heavily-edited, in all sorts of ways.
One of those things gleaned along the way, dowsing through the stacks of tawdry and trashy and just disposable that didn't get disposed, is how not nice our Edwardian, Victorian and Enlightenment ancestors were. And, by corrolary, just how much of that unacceptable behavior has been edited out of the record, and the collective contemporary memory. If I were to try to explore them all, the mythmaking and the lies of ommission and the rhetorical uses of them, not to mention the cognitive dissonance that must be maintained to hold onto the myths, it would be a lifetime's work of research over many volumes.
I've touched on the surface of the Yellow Peril meme, and its consequences, and how it is used today, and how far the myths of chivalric respect for Womanhood were from the real treatment of flesh-and-blood women, and nicked a chip off the glacier of racism towards Africans and African-Americans, and the icebergs of the same towards Spanish- and Native Americans, as well. And in "A Bloody Mess" I did my damnedest to show that trying to sort out neatly what was "religious" anti-Jewish prejudice from what was "genetic" pseudo-scientific anti-Jewish prejudice was impossible - but that was drawing on medieval and Renaissance influences primarily, and mostly through a religious prism, because of the target of the piece.
Today, dredging more recent skeletons out of the collective Western Cultural closet, a little more recent and secular in nature.
You often hear the [untrue] allegation made that "nobody knew" outside Germany about the Holocaust until after it was over. Even students of history are shocked to find it false - although the BBC is hardly an arcane source in an inaccessible language, then or now, and the truth is out there plain, as I have demonstrated in the past. Anyone who "didn't know" chose to disbelieve the reports, for whatever reason. But why the denials? The conviction that our grandparents must not have known? I suspect that there is shame involved, conscious or not: the conviction (even now, even despite Rwanda and Darfur) that had they known, they would have done something, could not have stood idly by; but they did not do anything, and thus they must not have known. Our collective self-respect as Americans/Britons/Christians/"civilized" Westerners will not allow the alternative. --Despite all our history.
Because that's the bigger question, the kraken raised by the fishhook of yes but they did know, the grownups at least, or chose to put fingers in ears and hum - in Poland and in France and in Italy and in the Ukraine and in Hungary and in Holland and Belgium no less than Germany proper and Austria, how did it "just happen", how did a minority of invaders manage to carry off their lethal scapegoating with no significant resistance by the French and others to the hauling away of their neighbors and coworkers and supposed friends of a lifetime--?
The answer is, that enough of the majority of non-Jewish Europeans either believed or suspected that really, deep-down, no matter what appearances might be to the contrary, no matter what anyone said or proclaimed or denied, really, Jews were dangerous to "Western" society and harmful to the majority "ethnic-Christian" population and thus deserved to be persecuted and dispossessed and even killed - even if they chose not to think about it. Not only was it no skin off their noses, it made them feel safer, society purified of dangerous elements and made more "authentically" European by this reduction. And Americans were not too far behind, although the minorities our ancestors had more pressing concerns about were different here.
And why shouldn't they? Their popular culture and media had been telling them so, for generations, in so many different ways. And usually contradictory ones, too, just as we saw with the anti-Chinese and Japanese xenophobic memeage.
Thus, the negative stereotypes of "typical" Jewishness in European pop culture (which meant, very shortly after appearing there, American pop culture, since we imported it wholesale as fast as packet ships could go) held both the image of "dirty", criminal, poor and cowardly - and too-smooth, too-clean and respectable, too-prosperous and law-abiding to be up to any good, brazenly thinking themselves as good as "proper" Englishmen. Mostly, despicable because weak (so unlike bluff honest macho Britons!) but equally contemptable if strong, with the added element of fear of their power, just like the alternately cringing and violent assassins in the Fu Manchu novels.
Thus we have this typical interjection into a "humorous" 1870 London guidebook, by an anonymous British lawyer:
... the dirty, cunning-looking, hook-nosed, unsavoury little Jews, with thick gold rings on their stubby fingers, and crisp black hair curling down their backs, the rule. They are the embodiment of meat, drink, washing, and professional reputation to the needy barristers whom they employ, and, as such, their intimacy is, of course, much courted and in great request. Of course many Old Bailey barristers are utterly independent of this ill-favoured race; but there are, unfortunately, too many men to be found whose only road to professional success lies in the good-will of these gentry. There are, among the thieves' lawyers, men of acute intelligence and honourable repute, and who do their work extremely well; but the majority of them are sneaking, underhand, grovelling practitioners, who are utterly unrecognized by men of good standing.
Thus too the famous magazine Punch:
In 1875, the year The Way We Live Now appeared in print, Punch confirmed the prvalence of fashionable anti-semitism by publishing an article mocking Jews. Punch, the magazine's fictional representative or voice, describes the Jews he encountered at a furniture sale, who he believes tried to swindle him. Filling his article with harsh stereotypes of Jews, he depicts them as greedy, money-hungry, filthy individuals who all possess hooked noses: "I am aware that many eyes are on me, that noses are tending towards me, that beaks will swoop down upon me, as a hawk on a lamb, without waiting for the mint sauce. They are one and all of the Hebrew persuasion. Shall I escape without being inveigled into laying out money on a lot of things I don't want?" Punch even implies that all Jews have poor educations and as a result speak broken English. He succeeds in illustrating this by mimicking the speech of a Jewish broker he encounters: "Bootiful thing that! Bootiful! Couldn't find a pair of 'em anywhere. Bootiful! Quite a little gem" ("On View at a Furniture Sale - All among the Noses - An Escape," Punch, June 5, 1875).
On the one hand, this sort of sneering mockery is slightly less harmful than some stereotypes: after all, if you think someone is feeble and contemptible, no matter how repulsive, you are [theoretically] less likely to be so afraid of him that you feel compelled to destroy him.
"It's strange that they don't seem to mind you, Otto," he said, calming down a little.
"Vell, I'm not official," said Otto. "I do not haf zer sword und zer badge. I do not threaten. I am just a vorking stiff. And I make zem laff."
Vimes stared at the man. He'd never thought about that before. But yes...Little fussy Otto, in his red-lined black opera cloak with pockets for all of his gear, his shiny black shoes, his carefully cut widow's peak and, not least, his ridiculous accent that grew thicker or thinner depending on whom he was talking to, did not look like a threat. He looked funny, a joke, a music-hall vampire. It had never previously occurred to Vimes that, just possibly, the joke was on other people. Make them laugh, and they're not afraid.
Thud, Terry Pratchett, 2005
But again, there is no logic to bigotry, as noted already. The apparent-harmlessness itself can be seen by the paranoid as a covering for still-deeper threat, a sinister camouflage hiding the true villainous nature, and thus make the paranoid xenophobe even more fearful, angry and threatened - just as happened to Japanese-Americans, in fact. All the depictions of Asians as ugly inarticulate and grovelling did nothing to prevent the fear-enabling-greed of 1942, no more than did the old Step'n'Fetchit game stop lynchings and pogroms. You cannot grovel low enough to avoid threatening the insecure - and besides, who would live that way, even given the risk? It is amazing, the hypocrisy and blindness of supposed champions of rebellion and liberty, insisting that strangers be utterly supine and self-effacing even in the face of insults, in order to be barely-tolerated, or else - and still hold themselves champions of liberty and rebellion.
A lot has been written and said about the problem of the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist, much of it scholarly, much of it naive and obtuse, missing the point because the context of it is gone. No, Dickens wasn't out to start pogroms when he wrote a Jewish crimelord in a London slum as a villain; and yes, there certainly were crooks who were also Jews in metropolis - it's statistically unlikely, to say the least, that out of 20,000 people there would be none who were not totally law-abiding and/or virtuous.
But to say that therefore there is nothing in the least wrong with the picture, and that any looking-askance at it is unjustified, oversensitive on the part of Jewish or [ahem!] "PC" gentile readers and reading-back into it unwarranted negativity retrofitted from the Holocaust.
No, Dickens wasn't trying to push prejudice - he was just mindlessly falling into the patterns of repeating conventional prejudice, the way an American humorist of the time would of course get laughs over how stupid and funny-sounding those Irish and blacks were - and the way even today TV producers and writers scarcely think anything of casting blacks and Latinos and Asians as thugs, servants, or not at all. And the fact - the point of this essay in fact, ultimately, tho' I have not gotten all the way there yet - is that this is relevant to subsequent atrocities and outrage: the Holocaust and the apathy that enabled it in Europe, did not come out of nowhere. It matters that this was part of the pop culture, as is the portrayal of Shylock in Shakespeare - leading to the use of "Shylocks" as a generic noun for "Jews" in pre-WWII England, even.
There ought to be discomfort when we encounter this stuff, but confrontation, not sweeping under the rug, just like when we hit routine sexism and anti-gay stereotypes. We need to be aware of the climate of the times, and what real obstacles there were to full equality, even legal ones. There were 2.3 million people in London in 1850, most of them WASPs: why single out that less than 1% minority to supply one of the most memorable and repellant villains of English fiction, lacking any redeeming qualities and exonerating circumstances such as we find in Nancy (let alone Mme. Defage) or even the at-least-clean and respectable, not wholly grody figure of Oliver's wicked half-brother or the physically-fit and "manly" Bill Sikes.
The thing about Dickens, however, is that when in after years he made some Jewish friends, and one of them called him on the damaging nature of the stereotype he had indulged in with Fagin, he eventually saw her point, and rather than being defensive and digging in and writing another and worse Fagin, set about making amends in his last finished book before his death, Our Mutual Friend (one of my personal favorites, btw, for many reasons.) In it, he both plays off and subverts the stereotypes, for Mr. Riah it turns out is the victim of Christian financier-parasites, and in a strong reversal of the "Protect Our Womenfolk From The Alien!" meme, is the one who looks after two lower-class girls from terminally-disfunctional families, protecting them from the "nice" good British young men who are so full of their own privilege that they consider themselves entitled to rape if turned down.
But while they remain famous today in the flattering way of memory-editing, books like Daniel Deronda and Our Mutual Friend were slender reeds to stem the flood-tide of ugly and brutal stereotyping. Even Ivanhoe which is among the earliest popular fiction that tries to show positive Jewish characters is awesomely offensive in its stereotypically-cowardly and greedy merchant - no matter how brutal the Crusaders are, they are still filled with manly bravery, even the wicked Templars, and that is what we are supposed to admire most in the book. But all kinds of stuff which has not endured in the collective consciousness, but was popular in its day, was much worse. Thus, the popular Raffles novels, about the eponymous archetypal dashing gentleman jewel thief and loveable Robin Hood-style rogue, as here, not to be excused as in this critique by "that was then and they didn't know better" as if adults should be judged like four-year-olds; thus the casual acceptance of all manner of ugly stereotypes and bigoted behavior, in the bestselling dime novels, such as this one, where even the good guys find hate crimes committed by the outlaws amusing enough to be distracted from doing their duty, and yet the James Gang are still described as somehow worthy of admiration for their manly Anglo-Saxon courage, even as they bully a "Jewish peddlar" (the detective hero in disguise) after killing unarmed bystanders and bank tellers; the casual contempt and stereotyping of the landlord in H.G. Well's Invisible Man--
And this is the ur-culture which destroyed Captain Dreyfus, (which case I have mentioned before) and which produced and popularized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1905, and in between indulged in no end of coded, subtle, and quite-overt bigotry: religion based for the devout, genetics-based for the secular, or political-economic, for both.
--A popular bit of NRA-gun-nut memeage in this country is to say that the rise of the Third Reich proves the rightness of their view that any restrictions on gun ownership are not only wrong by the Constitution but also self-destructive foolishness. If only the Jews of Europe had had guns, they say, they could have fought back and defended themselves effectively! Considering both the recent racist patterns in Europe and US history in re slave rebellions and fear of the same, we can say with certainty, au contraire. It would have meant only earlier demands for and acquiescence to "ethnic cleansing" out of a xenophobic terror gone from passive to active, if the screeches for the same today against Muslims are any guide to European politics.
For another meme, not entirely pernicious or ill-intentioned, but no less destructive as all such myths and deep untruths are, is that The Jews™ were all helpless, pitiable, unresisting victims. The virtue, such as there is, in this myth is that it is a polar reaction, the antithesis of the racist memes embraced and expounded by Streicher and other propagandists of the era, in which the active evil of The Jews™ forced the Good People of Brutopia to defend themselves, and that was all that was going on in the Holocaust - an act of self-defense against the Inner Enemy, chemotheraphy against a societal cancer, just as we saw in Der Stürmer's cartoons.
But reacting to one falsehood by fleeing in the opposite direction doesn't solve anything.
--There is a Yiddish expression, which has come current and common in Left Blogistan, used by Jewish-American bloggers about e.g. the disgraceful behavior of people like the guy who threw the $10,000,000 Bat Mitzvah party with money he got by selling sub-standard body armor to the army at high markups. It is "a shande far di goyim," a shame before the Gentiles, and it refers to someone behaving in a way that reflects very, very badly on their community, far more egregious than simply being a drunk or a dope or the sort of person who has never figured out what they're going to do when they grow up. I know what it means in the wider context, which I will explain in a second - or how it means - despite having grown up more or less part of the privileged-enough-to-be-privileged white ethnic Christian society in this country, from having seen it in action in another way, when I was in high school and working with a girl from Trinidad, with whom I usually spent breaks asking her about the Caribbean or rather, listening to her talk - about her family, the islands, the customs, the music, and doing the compare/contrast thing with New England, which she found cold and dull. But one day, one of the semi-regular probably-homeless guys who spent most of their days in the library where we worked went by, the people who I always felt sorry for, and whose existence thrust spikes of rocks into the already-turbulent waters of my moral certainty, spikes ignored by the respectable Christians so often.
But for Zan, this particular patron - unlike the others who staked out their carrels and spent the day unobtrusively reading or dozing out of the weather - filled her with rage. Because - unlike the others - he was black, too. And she felt it personally, as a shame and a disgrace, that here he was homeless, unemployed, scruffy, perhaps a little tipsy (and there are very many who think that only the rich and prosperous deserve painkillers, and never question that, not only young Zan) and felt that it reflected badly upon her - and that he had a duty to be better than the poor crazy PTSD white guys who lurked in the library, somehow. I didn't argue with her; it was an imago mundi, a mirror held reflecting around a corner that I hadn't known existed, and I didn't know how to process this new viewpoint, and I was pretty sure that it wasn't my place to tell her how to feel even if, as I also felt, she was being unfair and judgmental.
So we stayed friends, in so far as someone so depressed and dissociative as I could be/have friendship then, until she moved away, and I "stored it in my heart" and meditated on it, filing it away as part of the many-faceted world that was more than dreamt of in any philosophies that I could tell, until I opened that cupboard and it came tumbling out again all the sudden, as I found myself increasingly enraged with women who insisted on living down to all the stereotypes of us as shallow, spiteful, bitchy, greedy, and superficial in our obsessions with appearance and domestic trappings, using body to get ahead because of not having any brains-- You are an embarrassment to us all, grinding my teeth, you are making us all look bad by proving every sexist claim against women through the ages.
I am ambivalent about this - not about Zan's right to be angry, not about the bloggers' right to take Brooks' profiteering and squandering personally, not about feeling particularly outraged at "gender treason" any more than I do about the USA's crimes above all others - or Roman Catholic official corruption and coverups, for that matter. I don't think it's invalid exactly. But I do think it's...problematic.
You see, it simultaneously exists in 2 planes. One is the plane of responsibility which is heightened for yourself, and then for the group you self-identify with and benefit from the communal nature of, chosen or not. What your own family gets up to is necessarily your business in a way that the family two doors down is not. But your neighbors' down the block are more your business than someone across the sea - unless of course they're your family, too. And while real moral or legal responsibility is limited by realistic ability to control and authority over, emotional feelings of responsibility are not reasonable always, and besides there is that reciprocity thing: if you [are to be able to be] proud to self-identify as X (or XX) then it follows you are likewise liable to be embarrassed by the group collective identity, too.
As jesurgislac put it a while back, she is [quite reasonably to my mind) more embarrassed by what Tony Blair and his LibDems get up to, than by what our govt do, while deploring both, because Blair's is her government, her elected representatives, and thus her problem in a way that House Bush is not. While for me, it's the other way round - what goes on in England is important politically and personally, and interesting in the avenues and mirror of the world it holds up to me, I can't feel the same sting of embarrassment over what Poodle-boy gets up to as a British citizen must - except on a sliding scale; to the extent that we are self-identified as a unit, as "Christendom" or "the English-speaking community" or "the WASP-dominated Free World" or..., yes, I do feel a greater personal responsibility for what "we" do/have done (and I/mine benefitted from) than I do for some complete stranger's bad behavior - and yet if it's a complete stranger who turns out to be a Satrap following "our" orders, then yes it becomes a Family matter rather than Watching The Joneses Across The Street. Self is defined by Other, always.
And that's the problem with a shande fur de goyim and all that: it is an acceptance of Self as Other, and a response to a situation with that taken as a Given, for granted. And that is where I am of 2 minds, mostly - to be worried about what another member of one's group does, because it disgraces the whole group primarily, is to buy into the definition of that group as Other, to submit to the xenification of one's selves, one's self, to accept the empowered group's marginalization of you as something that must be accommodated and worked around, and must not be ignored.
Only people who feel themselves as Other - unless a terrible shock, of doing way too much Truth, has cast one into that dissociated state of losing the blindness of Privilege - ever act like this. No white male feels - unless he is a feminist or a wild-eyed lefty - personally tainted and shamed by the deeds of some rapist, murderer, warmonger of his own race and gender. No straight man, and only some [mostly self-identified feminist] straight women, agonize over what it is to Be A Man/Woman, and wonder if they have a duty to avoid submitting to gendered cultural roles, to question, or to avoid being too ostentatiously heterosexual, in whatever gendered norms are in their sub/culture - but every GLBT person has had to, pretty much everywhere in the world, if not in all places at all times, perhaps. The more Other you are, or feel, the more you worry about these things - and are aware of it when other people in your subgroup don't care how it looks.
And it's all very well to say, "Stop worrying about whether or not some honkey is going to judge you for 'looking too black,' and just let your hair alone the way you like it," or "Stop worrying about whether or not guys will think you're a dyke/slut and just wear baggy/tight clothes that you like!" or "Stop worrying about what Miguel does and worry about your own life, who cares if he's out there jacking cars, it has nothing to do with us" - As the AJHS article about "the Battle of the Balcony" notes, not having to worry about behavior in front of outsiders is itself a sign of no longer being quite as much an outsider, of having assimilated to a degree - or rather, of having been allowed at last to assimilate.
Because you can tell yourself all you want that it doesn't matter how brown or how female or how accented you are, what you think about it doesn't matter. You can tell yourself that you're an individual and that's the only thing that counts - all They see is black/tits/immigrant/poor - and that for those who operate in that plane is an impassable wall to being recognized as an Individual. Sen. Barack Obama is asked for opinions on what some random black entertainer says, by "mainstream" media interviewers. It doesn't work the other way, with Sen. Trent Lott being demanded to account for, say, Eminem. You are not "yourself" alone to them, and you are not allowed to be "yourself" merely to your own folk, either.
So, while ideally it would be totally irrelevant, we would all be judged as individuals and judge each other as such, that is not how the groups in power act, and pretending it is other than it is will not change that any more than pretending a brick wall isn't there and walking straight into it. And yet we must challenge these things and confront them - tear down the walls, a brick here, a brick there, as we can.
But you can't make it happen, because the controls for that are in the hands of the powerful. And trying to make it happen by being "agreeable" and disavowing the more embarrassing members of your own group - whether they are doing things that are truly bad, or just things which make the majority group uncomfortable - and trying to force everyone to conform to some atrophied oversimplified version of the majority's "standards" ...just Doesn't Work. Ask the Nisei about how well it worked for them.
But skin color/appearance/gender/sexual orientation/country-of-origin are things you are born with, and religion is chosen and changeable, I am sure some will say. Except that it isn't that simple. Most people are born into a religious group, and that is as much part of their ethne as their language, both of them inculcated by parents at a young age. And besides, it doesn't matter - you can convert out of a minority religion, and unless you can also "pass" for a member of the majority ethnic group - which may or may not be possible, depending on your appearance - it won't make a difference, because that's not what it's about. (Here, in the US, bigots don't harrass blond blue-eyed Bosnian Muslim refugees for following Islam, because it doesn't occur to them that they might be Muslim. They attack Sikhs instead.)
One of the important points I tried to stress in "A Bloody Mess" and since, writing about that conservative heroine Isabella of Spain and her government's behavior, is that to the bigot, there are no "good Others," when you get down to brass tacks. The Conversos tried to conform, did what ostensibly mattered, changed their religion - and were still treated like second-class citizens, or worse. Because, underneath, it wasn't really about religion, it was about who was "Spanish" - and the people making the definition had no interest or honesty at all about their standards when they started building an ad hoc structure of laws allowing them to kick out people whose ancestors immigrated into the Iberian peninsula later than the Visigoths.
Converting to CoE wouldn't solve the prejudice problem for an Irish Catholic, any more than it ever did for an Indian or Goanese Christian because it wasn't about doctrine, it was ethnic, political, colonists vs natives, we-want-your-stuff/our-stuff-back - and you can't tell just by looking what church or temple that wog/dago/paddy is attending, but you can tell the important (to the bigot) thing, which is that they are Other. And if you can't - well, that's even worse. Passing, despite demands for assimilation and conformity, scares the bigots even more than visible Strangers. (OMGWTF!?!?theylookjustlikeus!!1!)
By the time we get to the mid-19th century, the number of people in Europe who are at all serious about their Christianity, as opposed to it being something social, culturally-mandated, and meaningless to them, is dropping drastically enough for it to be an important, even urgent, topic in books by Christian authors for the next hundred years up to the present; despite all the state funded churches and the mandatory prayer in schools and military chaplains, the ashes of the 1600s had cooled long ago and now people fought more honestly about stuff, although Christianity was good to bring up for a collective cultural boosterism, "look what WE made, cathedrals! look what THEY made, ugly idols in grass huts!" and thus becomes important as a way of contrasting "Us" with "Them" around the globe as empires expand and clash. The ultimate expression of this may have come in 1914, when Allied propagandists insisted in word and cartoon that the Prussians weren't really Christians at all, but "heathen" idolaters. Funny how what was considered very Christian and civilized behavior when it was done to fuzzy-wuzzy and the Chink, suddely becomes Not Christian At All when it's done to some of you by others of you in a re-enactment of the Hundred-Years-War and the Sack of Rome and all...
So you have an era, the Victorian Era, in which at home in Europe the objects of religious fervor had shifted for the most part from denomination and sect to property and patriotic symbol, the Cross important as a prop for the Union Jack, rather than as it was in the days of the Conquistadors, being the cover for political nationalism. And as certainty in dogma and passion over theology have faded, post-Bunyan, post-Milton, post-Enlightenment, so too have the religious aspects of the prejudices - without those prejudices themselves fading in the least. So, where before it was suspicion of heresy, now it is suspicion of genetic "weakness" and "inferiority" - disease-proneness, mental illness, idiocy - which justifies ethnic prejudice and discrimination both legal and privately-practiced.
Because it didn't matter if you were a practicing Orthodox or a complete atheist - not to the bigot in Paris yelling "Death to Jews!" at the trial of Capt. Dreyfus, not to the Viennese bigots depicted as being turned off by seeing a "Jewish" nose on a girl in a Thomas Mann short story, not to the practitioners of eugenics whose followers sent letters home with Lutheran high school students telling them they couldn't get married or go to college, for having one Jewish grandparent, or sent the Catholic convert and nun Edith Stein, daughter of secular Jewish intellectuals, to the camps for her race.
But then, we should hardly be surprised at this, in a country where members of the majority ethno-religious ur-group went out and shot total strangers working at gas stations in the mistaken belief that they belonged to the same religion as the 9/11 hijackers, because of their color or costume, and then invaded the wrong country and firebombed it and burned large parts of it down and killed many many people...
(but it's different when it's us. We can do those things, and nobody can say it's us or it's wrong. But if inferior groups of humans do it, then it's both wrong and further proof of their inferiority. Just ask the Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference about the "towelheads", they'll tell you--)