I’ve always been annoyed by the way many people use the term “self-hating [X],” usually “self-hating Jew” but often in other contexts. Here are three reasons, two general and one specific to a particular usage I’ve seen:
1. “Hating”: Often, the person being accused shows little evidence of “hating” anyone — he’s criticizing them, maybe he’s being unfair to them, but it doesn’t follow that he hates them. Labeling disagreement with a group, or even erroneous disagreement, as “hatred” (widely thought to be a highly reprehensible emotion, unless the target is genuinely evil) strikes me as unfair and misleading: It’s argument by epithet, rather than by providing evidence.
The criticisms of George Soros as a supposedly “self-hating Jew” are a classic example — I have no reason to think that Soros hates Jews (or his own Jewishness). One can certainly criticize statements he’s made about Jews; but calling them expressions of hatred is simply unfounded, unless one can point to some substantial evidence that they do indeed flow from hatred. (Nor is it enough to just say that similar statements have been made by people who hate Jews; that some anti-Catholic bigots, for instance, criticize Catholicism out of hatred, doesn’t mean that everyone who criticizes Catholicism is equally hateful.)
2. “Self”: That someone hates some group is already a pretty serious allegation, which requires some serious evidence to support it. But saying that he’s self-hating makes him look not just hateful, but pathetic and contemptible — he doesn’t just hate Jews, but he hates himself, because he hates his own Jewish side. The characterization sounds not just like a moral criticism, but a psychiatric diagnosis.
Yet it seems to me to be empty pop psychology at best. One can disapprove of the religious or ethnic group into which one was born without disliking oneself. In fact, coming from a group may give one a particularly good view (though it may also give one a distorted view) of the weaknesses and errors of many group members. It may well be wrong for people to overgeneralize, and to come to dislike Jews, Catholics, Armenians, or whoever else as groups because they dislike a lot of their fellow Jews, Catholics, or Armenians in their family, neighborhood, or social circle. But this dislike of a group hardly translates into dislike of oneself.
3. [X]: Finally, one recent set of “self-hating” references just further illustrates how this phrase can delude people — people calling Michelle Malkin a “self-hating Asian.”
Now I’m very glad that there’s been a serious debate about the merits of Malkin’s work (including, quite prominently, by Eric Muller while guest-blogging on this very blog). But the debate is not advanced by illogical name-calling.
“Asian” is a funny sort of term, which purports to cover a madly heterogenous group of people from Japan to the Philippines to Burma and (in many contexts) India and Pakistan. Many whites and some American Asians may see the group as “Asian.” My sense is that most Asians and many American Asians do not; they see the group as Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and so on.
Michelle Malkin is the child of Filipino immigrants. She is writing a book that is defending the internment of Japanese-Americans. Other than being from the same huge part of the world, and having similar eye shapes and hair colors, Filipinos and Japanese have little in common with each other. It’s true that racists have often lumped the two together, and that the hostility towards (and often hatred of) Japanese immigrants during World War II flowed partly from general hostility to Asians. But it also flowed, of course, from matters peculiar to the Japanese.
So even if one could somehow show that Malkin is motivated by hatred of people of Japanese extraction — and I have no reason to believe that this is true, and I accept it only to separate the various parts of my argument — the “self-” coupled with the “Asian” in the phrase “self-hating Asian” is especially nonsensical. To be accurate (again, assuming for a moment that some hatred is involved) rather than an illogical smear, the assertion would have to be “World-War-II-era-Japanese-hating Filipina” (where Japanese is used to include “of Japanese extraction,” as are “Filipina” and “Asian”). To be still more accurate, absent any evidence of hatred, it would have to be “World-War-II-era-Japanese-internment-defending Filipina.” A somewhat different-sounding criticism than “self-hating Asian,” no?
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