A woman who has had a long and successful career in journalism in a free press in a country free from genocide believes the United States is comparable to Nazi Germany.
Jemele Hill, a writer for The Atlantic and producer at Disney/ESPN, took to Twitter yesterday to recommend one of the latest entries in the anti-racist oeuvre, Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.”
Been reading Isabel Wilkerson’s new book, “Caste,” and if you were of the opinion that the United States wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany, how wrong you are. Can’t encourage you enough to read this masterpiece.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 23, 2020
Hill credits the book as enlightening her to the ludicrous idea that our great country is morally comparable to one of the most unspeakably evil regimes in history. “Caste” compares racism in the United States to both the Indian caste system (hence the name) and the oppression of Jewish people in Nazi Germany. It uses largely historical and outdated references.
The tweet, unsurprisingly, courted substantive controversy. Hill amended the initial statement, explaining that she was not referring to 21st-century America, but America’s history, comparing Jim Crow laws to the Holocaust.
Nowhere in my tweet did I say the current state of America is like Nazi Germany. I was referring specifically to our racial history. The parallels have been pointed out by plenty of historians, not just Isabel Wilkerson. You tell me to grow up. I say, you need to read more.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 24, 2020
What I’m attacking here is our sense of superiority when it comes to our racial history. The Nazis were impressed with us because of our ability to have high standing in the world, despite clear persecution and oppression taking place in our country.
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 24, 2020
She continued to double down, taking history out of context in an attempt to justify comparing the respective pasts of America and Germany in the 1930s and 1940s.
It’s obviously and unobjectionably true that Jim Crow laws were horrific and oppressive to black people in America, and are a shameful part of our legal history. However, it is important to note that the Nuremberg Laws went dramatically further than the laws in the United States. Likewise, they legalized a state-led genocide, which murdered 6 million people.
Precisely. For example, I knew that Hitler admired Henry Ford for his racism. I did not know that they stole the one-drop rule from us as well as criminalizing interracial marriage.
Also, what does it say that in 2020, lynching still hasn’t been outlawed? https://t.co/7hgzU5iW9h
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 23, 2020
What would you call it when a country that murdered millions of Jews learned their systems of genocide by watching America, and studying our history of racialized slavery, and great knack for racial terrorism?
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 24, 2020
They also borrowed significantly from American laws .. which is why some Nazi scholars were in America studying racial terror in the South
— Jemele Hill (@jemelehill) August 24, 2020
Hill is not the only one to embrace the book. It was a New York Times Bestseller and picked for Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. It currently sits as No. 1 most sold on the Amazon nonfiction and has been on the list for two weeks. “Caste” is clearly making a splash among the social justice crowd.
This tweet is not the first time Hill has resorted to a Nazi comparison to describe someone or something she dislikes. In 2008, as a columnist for ESPN, she earned a weeklong suspension for expressing her hatred for the Celtics as, “Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim.” As much as one may hate a basketball team, the comparison is absurd, as is any equivalency one may draw between the United States and Nazi Germany.
Aside from Nazi references, Hill has run afoul of ESPN’s social media policy and found herself in trouble for other controversially hyperbolic comments. The White House called for her to be fired when she tweeted that Trump and his supporters were white supremacists, tweets which earned her a public reprimand.
Hill received another two-week suspension in 2017 when she advocated for fans to boycott the Dallas Cowboys due to owner Jerry Jones’s threats to bench any players who knelt during the anthem.
She was bought out of her ESPN contract in 2018 for $6 million, after a failed stint at hosting “Sports Center.” However, she is returning to produce a docuseries about Colin Kaepernick, as part of his partnership with Disney.
Hitler comparisons are often not to be taken seriously but used when one wants to shut down dissent but has no actual argument. Now, leftists are earnestly making the comparison, as if a brutal regime under a genocidal dictator is at all similar to a free and thriving, if embattled, democratic republic. It’s absolutely insane that anyone doubts that America has over the course of its history been overwhelmingly superior to Nazi Germany, and the theory is presented as true in a widely read book.
