Would you recognize oppression if you saw it?
This video asks whether you would recognize oppression if you saw it. By “oppression,” I mean things like racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, anti-Semitism, anti-Islam/anti-Muslim sentiment (sometimes called Islamophobia), colonization, people being dispossessed of their land and denied statehood, the failure to welcome refugees, and so on.
I suspect most people will say they can recognize oppression and that they would stand against it if they saw it. But what separates those of us who say this from well-meaning people in the past who said the same thing but failed to recognize oppression—or, if they did recognize it, failed to take a stand? Using the history of the Holocaust as an example, I trace events from Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the journey of the M.V. St. Louis, and the culmination of these events in places like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, and other concentration camps. When we look back at that history, we find well-intentioned people ignoring what was occurring, so what similar and different forms of oppression are occurring today are being largely ignored or mostly denied? In this video, I invite us to wonder what forms of oppression future generations will say we ignored today, when they look back at our history.