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Imagine racism is a millstone, a crushing weight that grinds and presses down relentlessly on people intended to be a permanent underclass. Its purpose is to extract the oil of profit from us, right to the edge of extermination and beyond. It presses and crushes and grinds, but the people push back, and it generates heat that begins to rise. If the owners of the mill, their handle on the switches and cranks, don't insulate themselves, it will all get too hot to handle.

Image the oppression of Jews is that insulation, a pressure valve, a shunt that redirects the steaming rage of working people away from the mostly white and Christian 1%, who own the machine and collect the oil pressed from our lives. Imagine a valve they can open at will, a pipe that diverts the scalding heat off to the side. For Jews to be blamed for oppression, some of us must be seen to prosper, must be well paid and highly visible, positioned as the public faces of an inequality we help to administer, but do not own. The purpose of oppressing Jews is not to crush us day after day. It's to have us available for crushing. To be the bone they throw.

Nobody sees the owners. They don't let their faces appear on the cover of Time and Newsweek. They hire us to be their faces. They send us to collect taxes. They appoint us as judges. Long before they let us live in their neighborhoods, they let us manage their inner city buildings full of brown people. And some of us agree. And some of us don't. But they keep telling stories about how we're greedy. When they cut 500 million dollars from the budget of the City University of New York, the tell the working class people of color who study there that the reason isn't that they hate public universities. The reason, they say, is that the people of color have upset the Jews. We are 1.7% of the world's people and 1.7% of the world's rich, but they say we are the reason people are poor.

Imagine the people under the grindstone are in a fury, marching down the road toward where the owners live. Imagine the oppression of Jews is a conjuring trick that works through misdirection, that the Protestant heirs of slaveholder fortunes, pilgrim entrepreneurs and railroad barons grown rich from stealing Indigenous land, the people who shoot our children, poison our water and break the circle of seasons are holding a great big DETOUR sign with red arrows pointing toward the Jews, and some of the marchers on the road begin to think the problem with Jewish financiers is that they are Jewish, not that they are financiers, that the problem with Jewish slumlords is that they are Jewish, not that they are slumlords. They don't notice that nobody ever says Presbyterian banker, Baptist slumlord. Some of them wander onto the side road, the momentum of their fury drains away into resentment, and they talk about Jews instead of class, begin to think maybe Jews ARE class. The steam thins out and blows away, and the owners are safe for another day.

— Rimonim by Aurora Levins Morales (Page 61 - 62)