Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World

The lie of Indigenous absence, familiar to all settler colonial projects, required a great deal of effort to maintain.

But none of these changes will happen fast enough until more of us figure out how to soften the borders around our individual selves and around our various identity groups to allow for a coming together in common cause.

That is the opposite of the discourse that dominates today, the one that is so very hard on people and far too soft on structures.

In Europe, meanwhile, boat after boat of Black migrants continue to be left to drown, the dangerous doubles of their passengers overtaking them before they even reach dry land.

“What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?”21 a friend asked in 1917. She replied, “I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch … I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at ho

But all of those baser impulses have been greatly exacerbated by a culture that places limitless value on attention and money, while creating information tools that seem designed to turn every person’s screwup into an opportunity for public shaming, mockery, abandonment, and humiliation on a scale previously unimaginable.

In truth, any number of identity-based divisions can be marshaled to perform this function: Jews versus Blacks, Blacks versus Asians, Muslims versus Christians, “gender critical” feminists versus transgender people, migrants versus citizens. This is the playbook used by Trump and the other pseudo-populist strongmen the world over: throw some minor

their “question everything” led to many of us not questioning enough.

Within this imaginary, the Palestinian, as the Jew’s new eternal enemy, was treated as so illegitimate, so irrational, so other, that Israelis believed themselves to be justified in reenacting many of the forms of violence, dehumanizing propaganda, and forced displacement that had targeted and uprooted the Jewish people throughout Europe for centur

The illusion of our separateness fell away. We were not, and never were, self-made. We are made, and unmade, by one another.