The past few weeks have brought a kind of closure to last year’s tumult. The inauguration of President Donald Trump — a definitive endmark on a hectic election cycle — coincided with a somewhat less definite ceasefire between Israel and Hamas. As the news cycle looks forward, anticipating the geopolitical moves of a new presidential administration, it’s an appropriate moment for Americans to consider what the challenges of the last year revealed about who we are becoming as a people.
One thing stands out to me: Under a Democratic administration, Americans have become attuned to identifying and affirming minority groups. Yet, our overwhelming response to the conflict between Israel and Hamas — or an entity which many have generalized as “Palestine” — revealed that, far from developing a more nuanced understanding of ethno-religious minorities and people groups, Americans have generalized race to such a degree that we can see only two groups: white people who are the oppressive majority, and colored people who are the oppressed minority. Ta-Nehsis Coates was the most prominent example of this last year with the publication of his book The Message. The result of this limited perception of minority groups is that Americans are not only ignorant of most of the minorities in the Middle East, we are still largely ignorant of those in our own backyard.
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