Until a year ago, I could enter my Holocaust Studies class trusting that at least on one point my students and I unanimously and indisputably agreed: Genocides are bad. Then came Donald Trump, and then came the Neo-Nazis.
On August 11, 2017, just before the start of a new semester, the nation witnessed aghast the violent white supremacy marches through Charlottesville, Va., which climaxed in the death of three people that weekend. My class enrollment for Understanding the Holocaust through Literature and Film went from 60 to 150. A good sign, I thought. When I entered the lecture hall, however, I was confronted with something I had neither foreseen nor experienced before: a slightly more hostile audience.
At the first mention of the word Nazis, propaganda, government-sanctioned anti-Jewish riots, and bystanders, bodies shifted, throats were cleared, an unseasonal chill cracked the late-summer southern heat block. Am I turning the Holocaust into anti-Trump propaganda?—I could hear my brain self-sabotage. There comes the progressive feminist agenda!—I could hear some of them think. I shifted in my skin and stuttered a tad.
A group of white young men, clustered together in the upper middle section of the amphitheater, made sure to let me know their conservative opinions from the start: verbally, asking disingenuous questions about history, and visually through Trump-Pence stickers and hats. From the low orchestra where I stood, I unremittingly looked upward toward them, neck stretched, endeavoring to make eye contact, to gently draw them into my field of reasoning, desperate to elicit a sympathetic nod of agreement.
I spent the rest of the semester on pins and needles, overly qualifying my statements every time I used conservatism triggers like oppression, misogyny, racism, xenophobia. To this new audience, these are just the wearisome pet words of liberal propaganda. My teaching assistants reported hearing such comments from some students on their way out. “I am tired of feeling guilty of being white” the refrain went. I was not guilting anybody for being white: although it would be an effort to make whiteness lily white when reckoning with the Holocaust. Even the implicit yet obvious inference that the Holocaust was perpetrated by “caucasian” Europeans now seemed in bad taste and in need of qualification. I had to make sure to segue such inferences by explicitly reassuring them “of course, not everybody is guilty or bad.”
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