Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

Consider this idea that KKKers and white supremacists apparently maintain: they are genetically or otherwise superior to Jewish people. This aspect of their belief system is often ignored because they’re so preoccupied with hating black people.

I don’t know about all of your experiences, but I know quite a few Jewish people for someone who doesn’t get out any more than he needs to. I was actually shocked to learn in my mid-twenties that only about 2 percent of the U.S. population is Jewish, given how many Jews I had hung around with, studied under, and lived with by that point.

There aren’t a whole lot of things about the Jewish people I know that qualify as inferior by even the most outlandish measures. My landlord is a retired dentist who at 70 has a second home on a another continent, surfs, rides his bike around like a maniac, and pretty much dominates Match dot com. One of my best friends is a successful runner and accountant who owns a home in Boulder. My supervisor, a woman from Israel, is a math genius but only on the side because of the other things she’s involved in. This sampling barely scratches the surface; I am just talking here about people with whom I interact almost every day. I often forget that they are Jewish because they never mention it and are all approximately as devout as I am, although I may have to fire up an interfaith prayer group for the locals just for kicks.

Contrast this with a typical cross-section of a Klan meeting, as I understand such gatherings from television and the Web. I am going to offer the tentative opinion that these folks are doing a sterling job of keeping under wraps whatever aspects of themselves they believe to be supreme in either relative or absolute terms. Many are struggling with weight and employment issues, and are not among the most well-spoken, even-tempered men of the citizenry. Collectively, they seem to take perverse pride in saying and doing the most misguided things imaginable while cameras are rolling or the screen-shot police are deployed. They seem wondrously oblivious to operating in accordance with pre-Korean War societal norms. A startling number of their vocal churchgoers wind up embroiled in apocalyptically embarrassing sex scandals.

Now I could be accused of selection bias here, and like I said, there aren’t that many Jewish people in all of the United States — around six million. But when was the last time you read about a cadre of drunken Jews getting caught trying to steal the ATM out of a Waffle House with a pickup and a winch? Or observed a potential member of U.S. Congress named Solomon Goldberg rambling on about how evolution is bullshit and the gay agenda is ruining schools? Alternatively, how many fellows named Cletus Jessup or Homer Gantry do you know who are completing neurosurgery residencies or publishing papers in theoretical physics journals?

I mean, it’s one thing to be jealous, if that’s what this is all about. But come on, trying to dress it all up as smugness and superiority? Time for a new strategy.