In Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), a “rich old woman” shopping in their Madison Ave. grocery store irritably calls Henry Park and his father “Oriental Jews.” Her wealth matters because the store is an upscale one, and it’s making its owners, the Park family, rich too. Her age matters because it identifies her antisemitism as something of a relic. In the 90s Jews were already looking pretty white; in fact a book called How Jews Became White Folks was published in 1998, as was an article called (albeit in protest), “How the Asians Became White.” 

But, of course, the point of her comparison was less about assimilation and more about money. There are no official income numbers for Jews (the census takes them for white folks too), but the Pew Research Center describes them as “a relatively high-income group.” Meanwhile Asians have been the highest earning group in the US for some time (it’s Asian men first, Asian women second, white men third). This is why both Jews and Asians have been stereotyped as “model minorities,” which works precisely because of the minorities who are supposedly failing to follow the model: no one has ever called black people “African Jews” or Mexicans “Latin American Jews.”

Native Speaker is only one of dozens of novels that focus on the complexity of the Asian experience in the US, that complexity consisting precisely in the simultaneity of Asian economic success in American life and of the persistence (especially during Covid) of anti-Asian harassment. The Jewish novel, by contrast, has been much diminished from its prominence in the 50s and 60s. Probably the most important fiction about antisemitism has been David Mamet’s The Old Religion (1997) and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), and they’re historical novels. Mamet’s is about Leo Frank, lynched for a murder he didn’t commit in 1915, and Roth’s about the rise of Charles Lindbergh’s America First antisemitism in the 30s. Probably every Jewish kid is told growing up about Frank’s lynching, but as an account of the Jews’ history in the US, it’s not even a half-truth. There may have been as many as four Jews lynched in the US; more Italians, more Greeks, even more plain vanilla white guys (over a thousand) were lynched. And of course many, many more blacks—about 3500. 

The Plot Against America is more openly counterfactual. It’s not just that one of its most dramatic scenes—Jews being turned away from a Washington hotel just because they’re Jews (“What just happened?” the younger brother asks; “Antisemitism,” the older brother answers)—didn’t take place in the US. It’s that a version of that scene, only for black people not Jews, was a structural principle of American life. From this perspective The Plot Against America is a kind of extended experiment in blackface, a way for American Jews to depict ourselves as victims of a kind of racism that, as American Jews, we never faced.

To what degree Roth’s novel is a literary success is a question for another day (I’ll say this: it’s better than his passing novel, The Human Stain). But the last few years have conclusively demonstrated that the strategy of treating Asians and Jews like the victims of American racism—and sometimes linking them together—has been an unqualified political success. The Supreme Court’s opinion in “Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard” crucially depended on the finding that Harvard’s affirmative action in admissions has led to “an 11.1% decrease in the number of Asian-Americans admitted.” Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion notes that Harvard originated its “‘holistic’ admissions policy” in an effort “to exclude Jews.” And the amicus brief filed by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the Silicon Valley Chinese Association Foundation puts a bow on it: “During the 1920s, Harvard revised its admissions policy for the sole purpose of reducing the number of Jewish students.” Now it “employs the same subjective methods… to intentionally discriminate against Asian-American applicants that it used to intentionally discriminate against Jews.”

It's one thing for Native Speaker’s Koreans, despite their success, to be added to the list of victims of American racism. Some Asians were denied admission to the Ivies and had to content themselves with schools like Johns Hopkins. It’s another thing for Jews to become the imaginary victims of Jim Crow, replacing the real ones; it’s just a novel after all. But it’s another thing altogether for Oriental Jews not just to replace the real black and Hispanic victims of American racism but to be mobilized against them. Today people who are overrepresented in the wealthiest decile of American society and correspondingly overrepresented at elite universities are deemed, in the name of fairness, to be insufficiently overrepresented. And the group that is disproportionately among the poorest is now more or less guaranteed to be underrepresented. 

Not that affirmative action at elite institutions was ever any use to the vast majority of black people. Just the opposite. The top decile of black people own 63% of black wealth; the bottom half own none, and the figures are about the same for Latinos. Trump’s executive order banning DEI and his extremely effective efforts to impose the ban on elite universities won’t do any harm to the black working class. This is why Adolph Reed and I have been insisting that contemporary anti-racism is a class project. In a world without racism there might be more rich black people and fewer rich Asians. But if what you want is some redistribution of wealth downward, anti-racism is not a way of getting it. It’s a way of not getting it. 

It thus makes complete sense that MAGA has turned out to be just as anti-racist as woke ever was, only now the victims are white people. We can see the problem: basically along the same lines as blacks and Asians, the top decile of white people own 72% of white wealth, while the bottom half own 3% (and the bottom third own nothing). Why are so many white people falling behind? Trump voters have an answer. Replying to the question which race “is favored in America today,” a majority of them said “racial minorities”; only 14% thought white people were.

And Trump agrees. He thinks “the laws are very unfair… and education is being unfair…. There’s absolutely a bias against [white] people… a definite anti-white feeling in this country,” which, he said in an interview last summer, “can’t be allowed.” It’s in this context, proving that Jews really are white folks now, that the battle against DEI has found its cutting edge in the battle against antisemitism. 

It would thus be a complete mistake—a mistake now being made by a great many people—to think that the attack on affirmative action, and now on DEI, is just a refusal to grapple with the problem of racism or just a new form of anti-black racism. On the contrary, it’s a way of locking in racism as the only imaginable legitimate grievance, and antiracism as the only legitimate technology for redressing grievance. Make America Great Again needs to convince poor white people of what Black Lives Matter tried to convince poor black people—that it’s racism, not capitalism, that’s the problem. In this respect, although, as Cedric Johnson has brilliantly shown, the idea of racial capitalism was originally deployed as a form of anti-Marxism, it contains a clue to the truth. Capitalism today does need race because it needs racism, and it needs racism because it needs anti-racism. The race reductionists who have spent the last decade proclaiming that racism is the original sin were at least pointing us in the right direction. It’s the original fig leaf covering up the original sin.

In the era of woke, fighting against anti-blackness was a pure class program—it advanced the interests of the black PMC, left the black working class as badly off as ever, and provided left neoliberalism its good conscience. Fighting against an antisemitism that has been weaponized as a surrogate for anti-whiteness, woke for whites will do the white working class exactly as much good as the original did for the black working class.

Which, obviously, is a feature, not a bug. In real life the absence of antisemitism at Columbia today is matched only by the absence of anti-blackness yesterday. Various scholars have introduced us to the concept of antisemitism without Jews; the MAGA variation is antisemitism without antisemites. But making universities into theatres of racial justice, whether or not they’re the site of any racial injustice, has been a tactic embraced by every fraction of the ruling class. The old theory was that if you could get people to buy the idea that black students at Harvard were representatives of black people as a whole, then you could get the black health aide (making $30K) to think of the black Harvard grad working at Goldman Sachs (making $250K) as her racial sister rather than her class enemy. Whether or not this convinced the health aide, it totally worked for everyone, black and white, at Harvard. 

The new theory is that maybe you can sell the same story to white people, and the new theorists couldn’t care less if the faculty approves. What they want is just the opposite—to humiliate the faculty and everyone responsible for what Charlie Kirk calls “the anti-white bias we’re seeing on our college campuses.” The project here is not only to rescue the victims of supposed anti-white racism in the university: attributing all injustices to anti-white bias, it’s also to describe all the white people who never got to go to elite colleges (which is to say, virtually all white people) as victims of that bias. Finally, it’s to imagine the white people who have nevertheless gotten rich as having overcome that bias. They’re not MAGAlomaniac nepo babies, they’re tech bros; they’re not exploiting us, they’re representing us. 

This is the class project of the super-rich, pursuing its own ideological agenda so nakedly that the defense offered by its ideologues (“the pursuit of truth”) is more like a victory lap than an effort to persuade. Will it work? With universities, it’s already working, precisely because it doesn’t need to convince, or even to pretend to convince. Woke 1.0’s characteristic modes of enforcement were career disincentives, social media pile-ons, and cancellation; woke 2.0 has upgraded to arrests, deportations, accusations of terrorism and, most powerful of all, defunding. Columbia is already preparing to treat what were at most microaggressions as if they’d been pogroms. 

It’s also hard to see a mass movement in defense of elite universities, if only on account of the tension between “mass” and “elite.” One of the ideals universities are supposed to embody is class mobility, but when students from the top 1% of the income distribution outnumber students from the bottom 60%, that’s a hard sell. And these guys really have a tin ear for equality: at the very moment when universities are trying to defend their endowments against taxation by pointing out that they’re used for financial aid, Harvard has just announced that students from families making up to $200,000 will now be eligible for free tuition. Harvard’s contribution to social mobility will be making it easier for the merely rich (75% of American households don’t earn anywhere near $200K) to go to school with the super-rich. And to do so with money that, had it been taxed, could have gone to people who needed it.

But it’s hardly a surprise that the social mobility project isn’t going well. It hasn’t been going well for half a century and, despite Trump’s carrying on about restoring the American Dream, it hasn’t gone all that well for almost 200 years. The success of some immigrant groups as a racialized type has largely stood in for the success that most of their members haven’t had—the top decile gets rich, the bottom half stays poor.

But, of course, the real problem with social mobility isn’t that hardly anyone rises, just as the real problem with anti-racism (and anti-discrimination more generally) isn’t that it hasn’t fully ended discrimination. I said earlier that racism is not the original sin of American inequality but the original fig leaf. What it’s a fig leaf for is exploitation. Racism justifies it; now anti-racism also justifies it. Racism justifies it by telling us, for example, that black people are inferior. Anti-racism justifies it by telling us that in a world where no one is held back by race, gender and class (class being treated here, J.D. Vance-style, as your economic background, your degree of “inherited privilege”), people who nonetheless fail are inferior. Or, more to the point, people who succeed are superior. Whether it’s because of their whiteness or their merits, the rich are always the deserving rich.

Is there any such thing as the deserving rich? That question was crucial to the outbreak of antisemitism I learned about as a kid. Tom Watson, who led the campaign that got Leo Frank lynched, almost always referred to him as a “rich Jew.” It’s relevant here that the 14-year old girl he was falsely convicted of raping and murdering worked for him, that she earned about $6 a week while Frank earned $180, and that his persecutor Watson had earlier been at the head of the Populist Party in Georgia, leading its campaign against “race antagonism.” Watson argued to whites and blacks both that they were “kept apart” only so that they could be “separately fleeced of their earnings.” But he lost the argument. Capital’s success in deploying white supremacy to defeat that version of Populism was embodied in Watson’s subsequent career, as he converted to the racism he had begun by attacking.

Today’s populists are not the slightest bit worried about workers being fleeced of their earnings and, of course, on Ivy League campuses they’re currently defending, not attacking, rich Jews. Does MAGA actually care about antisemitism? Probably just as much as corporate liberals cared about Black Lives Matter. Some do and some don’t. But it doesn’t matter. The point is not the sincerity, and the problem is not the possible hypocrisy. It’s rather the promotion of a vision of social justice that, seeing every individual as a potential subject or object (or both) of discrimination, not only works against class consciousness but against the very idea of class. MAGA’s anti-woke is not a repudiation of this strategy but an extension of it. 

Walter Benn Michaels is a writer who lives in Manhattan.