In a recent episode of Andy Ostrow’s Back Room podcast, the actor Julianna Margulies made statements about, well, everyone who is not exactly like her, and took up the now-familiar argument that anyone who doesn’t support Israel at this time is anti-Semitic. She misrepresented a group that had purposely posted that no Zionists were invited to their event by claiming that they had put signs that said “No Jews Allowed.” Even the New York Post didn’t go so far, and you know it’s bad when your vitriol is more extreme than what you might read in the Post.
But what’s most striking about her comments is her willingness to use what I call White Saviour Math to strike at everyone she claims is ungrateful for everything she and her community has done for them.
The entire podcast episode is an exercise in hysteria and hate-mongering, two white straight people coming together to insist that the Blacks, the Gays, and everyone else have it in for them. The Daily Beast has a comprehensive description with substantive quotes that convey the gist of this deeply unhinged, revisionist conversation. (And, as usual, there’s lots of commentary, much of it funny and biting, on Twitter).
Ordinarily, this would not be worth anyone’s time: it’s the sort of discussion that’s often found on ultra right-wing shows. Margulies is not a particularly eloquent proponent of whatever she imagines her cause(s) to be, and both she and Ostrow repeat the usual canards and false stories about current events, including the false one about babies being torn out of wombs and burnt.
But it’s worth paying attention to the actor as an example of where liberalism, which is all about protecting the status quo, takes us. And nothing shows that more than her angry and spiteful comments about what every other minority community owes the people she identifies as her community. Although she keeps referring to her Jewish identity, it’s clear that Margulies really means to point to her whiteness and her consequent supposed supremacy.
Consider these representative quotes in the Daily Beast piece:
The Nazis were watching how the Jim Crow South were treating slaves and said, ‘Oh, great call, let’s do that playbook. That’s what we’ll do to the Jews.’ Which is also why, in the Civil Rights movement, the Jews were the ones that walked side by side with the Blacks to fight for their rights, because they know. And now the Black community isn’t embracing us and saying, ‘We stand with you the way you stood with us’?”
And,
“Jews died for their cause. Where’s the history lesson in that? Who’s teaching these kids?” Margulies went on. “Because the fact that the entire Black community isn’t standing with us to me says either they just don’t know, or they’ve been brainwashed to hate Jews. But when you’ve been marginalized so much as a community, the way I feel we have, isn’t that when you step up?”
Margulies also thinks that African Americans should be required to watch the Ken Burns documentary The U.S and the Holocaust.
What Margulies wants is for everyone else to remember how much Jews (and, again, she really just means White People) did for everyone else: she marched for George Floyd, she supported gay marriage, and it’s now Black and gay people (she appears to not realise that many are also Jewish) who need to support her in…this demented vision of a world where Zionism stands in for Jewishness and Israel can never be criticised.
What Margulies is doing here is familiar to many people of colour and other minorities: White Saviour Math.
We’ve all been there: the white donor to the nonprofit working on Black women’s issues who relentlessly reminds the director of the organisation of her support, the supposed white “comrade” who, incensed at what he perceives as a slight of some kind from his Asian counterparts, rears up to remind them of how much he did for them, the white professor who, when even gently corrected on his constant refusal to engage any non-Western works huffs that he has spent years, years teaching Marx to students of colour and, why, many of them still write letters of thanks and tell him that he alone showed them the meaning of revolution.
All of this is of the same cloth as Margulies’s vicious, angry screeds, even if the people noted above seem more sophisticated, more learned and surely unimpeachable. Surely, we might think, none of them have anything in common with an angry White Lady who seems incapable of holding two coherent thoughts together in her head.
But many people of colour know these kinds of moments too well. We chug along with those we imagine as our fellow travellers, and we see ourselves fighting for the same revolutions, animated by the same kindred spirit, the belief that there is a “we” in all this and then, one day, boom, comes the Great Accounting, the inevitability of White Saviour Math. In the podcast, Marguilies rants like a woman rummaging in her Special Kitchen Drawer, hunting for All the Receipts. “Look,” she screams, triumphantly pulling out a yellowed piece of paper, “There was that time Jews walked across that bridge with all you Black People! And remember those George Floyd protests? We marched then! As for you Gays: you ungrateful twits can forget about us the next time you need to fight for anything!”
What’s perhaps most striking about Margulies’s ugly rhetoric is that—as far as I can tell and with my limited knowledge—it violates basic principles of Judaism and, really, that of most systems of belief. At the core of being and living in the world is the idea that you do what you can to better it; part of the pact you make with yourself and/or whomever you consider your maker or your world of people is that your actions are not meant to reap the benefits of gratitude and servitude. And that you treat others as you would be treated, as equals. Instead, Margulies makes clear her contempt for Black people in particular: they are nothing but child-like creatures who need to learn the history she wants them to learn, and they owe her a lot.
This is typical White Saviour Math: we never know when the Great Debt has to be repaid. The bill is always due, even if we never ordered anything in the first place.
Yasmin Nair is tired of all the math.
Update, December 2: Margulies has since issued the usual celebrity non-apology. In a statement released on December 1, she said “I am horrified by the fact that statements I made on a recent podcast offended the Black and LGBTQIA+ communities, communities I truly love and respect.” In other words: “I said what I said, sorry you feel offended.” As many have pointed out, Margulies–like Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer–is unlikely to experience any real backlash for her statements, while those who publicly support Palestine, like Susan Sarandon and Melissa Barrera, have been shamed and punished. Sarandon has been dropped by her talent agency UTA and Barrera was removed from the Scream franchise.
Many thanks to Danielle for tipping me off to the “apology.”
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