Jon Stewart has spent quite a bit of time making fun of Rick Sanchez, and this week, Sanchez appeared on the satellite radio show “Stand Up! With Pete Dominick” and fired back.
Sanchez called Stewart “a bigot.” If he had simply left it at that, the popular host of “Rick’s List” might still have his job today.
Sanchez began by quite rightfully asserting that there are large cultural and economic differences between him and Stewart. What follows is a partial transcript of the conversation by Mediaite.
Dominick: How is he a bigot?
Sanchez: I think he looks at the world through his mom, who was a school teacher, and his dad, who was a physicist or something like that. Great, I’m so happy that he grew up in a suburban middle class New Jersey home with everything you could ever imagine.
Dominick: What group is he bigoted towards?
Sanchez: Everybody else who’s not like him. Look at his show, I mean, what does he surround himself with?
I don’t believe it is at all bigoted to suggest that coming from a different frame of reference might potentially make Stewart unable to understand what it was like to grow up poor and Hispanic. There seems to be this idea that if you grow up with a particular marginalization, that you are aware of what others who face different oppressions go through. All bigotry is bad, but oppressions are not akin to each other. Even as we recognize this, it is important not to engage in oppression Olympics.
Dominic falsely suggested that Jews can relate to the oppression of Hispanics because of the Holocaust. This is absolutely a red herring.
Pete asked, “They can’t relate to that? A Jewish person doesn’t have a constant fear in the back of their head that we could [inaudible] the Holocaust?”
“I think his father could,” Sanchez replied, referring to Stewart.
“I think every Jewish person feels that way,” Pete said.
“I hope so,” Sanchez responded.
Sanchez’s statements are quite shocking, but once again, if we look within the context of the conversation, it is clear that he is not promoting a repeat of the Holocaust, but suggesting that liberal successful Jews like Stewart need to remember what it is like to be hated simply for existing; to remember what it is like to be thought of as less than human.
This is important because if you can personally forget what this feels like, it is much easier to take privileges that have been handed to you, such as Stewart’s whiteness and middle-class comfort, and then use those privileges to oppress others. This is not as impossible as it sounds; White members of the LGBT community experience oppression in the form of homophobia, but that does not mean that they are willing to forgo engaging in racism simply because they understand what it is to be hated for their sexuality.
What Sanchez sees is the discrimination that he has faced at the hands of men like Stewart and the fact that their shared identities as marginalized people has not stopped them from using race to “other” him. This is specifically because though Stewart is Jewish, he is still a White man and that privilege has most certainly graced his path through life.
The Washington Post also reported on snippets of the conversation:
[Sanchez:] “I’m telling you that everybody who runs CNN is a lot like Stewart, and a lot of people who run all the other networks are a lot like Stewart, and to imply that somehow they, the people in this country who are Jewish, are an oppressed minority? Yeah.”
“I’ve known a lot of elite Northeast establishment liberals that may not use this as a business model, but deep down when they look at a guy like me they look at a — they see a guy automatically who belongs in the second tier and not the top tier,” said Sanchez, who was born in Havana, according to the bio on CNN’s Web site.
“White folks usually don’t see it. But we do — those of us who are minorities and women see it sometimes, too, from men in authority.” Sanchez paraphrased what he said a CNN executive had once said to him: “I really don’t see you as an anchor, I see you more as a reporter. I see you more as a John Quiñones — you know, the guy on ABC. . . . Now, did he not realize that he was telling me. . . . An anchor is what you give the high-profile white guys, you know. . . . To a certain extent Jon Stewart and [Stephen] Colbert are the same way. I think Jon Stewart’s a bigot.”
Even though Sanchez is a light-skinned Hispanic male, he most certainly would have experienced racism in his everyday life. It’s also equally possible that he experienced racism in his position as an anchor at CNN – remember, this is the same station which allowed Lou Dobbs to spread his special brand of anti-Latino rhetoric on his show.
Even pointing out that there is a large presence of Jewish people in the media, to my mind, does not rise to a level of bigotry because it happens to be factual. It is a trigger point because a supposed Jewish supremacy is what Hitler argued to justify the Holocaust. Sanchez moved from fact to bigotry when he suggested that Jewish people are no longer an oppressed minority. Jews face a different form of oppression than Blacks, Hispanics or Asians, but there can be no doubt that anti-Semitism is alive and well.
Israel, meanwhile, is very important to the American government’s foreign policy. The media has helped to support this by classifying any critique of Israel as anti-Semitic. This is discursively problematic in that it centers anti-Semitism as the only public relations disaster which cannot be recovered from. Clearly racist taunts have been aimed at the Obama’s since the day that Barack announced that he was running for office, but unless the N word is involved, it is deemed acceptable to question whether or not a comment was racist and to wrap oneself up in the First Amendment with no recognition of the harm principle.
Anti-Semitism is in a unique category when it comes to the media, because it results in immediate dismissal and/or censure. There is no room for various truths, only the repetition of the party line, even when a person has a different frame of reference.
Helen Thomas, a long-time reporter with a distinguished career, lost her job when she stated that “Jews should leave Israel and return to Germany, Poland, America or wherever else they came from”. This was deemed to be anti-Semitic, though as a Lebanese woman, the expectation that she would take a Zionist approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in and of itself offensive.
Sanchez and Thomas are two people of colour who were very obviously disciplined, because they chose to center their truth over and above the ideology that Israel or Jewish people are above critique. It is intellectual dishonest to limit discussion in this fashion – in order to uphold a political ideology.
It is also important to note that Sanchez said, “I just don’t buy this, that the only people that are prejudiced are on the right. There’s people are there who are prejudiced on both sides.” We have a tendency to give people on the left a pass on their racist behaviour. Yet liberal racism is just as oppressive as that oppression coming from the right, even if they are wearing an expensive suit and avoid the trigger words.
Even CNN’s golden boy, Anderson Cooper, has repeatedly asked if minorities are “playing the race card” when they complain about the racism they face. Meanwhile, it is very easy for Stewart to look around his contemporaries and notice that they largely look like him and have similar backgrounds, whereas the same cannot be said of Sanchez.
Much of what Sanchez had to say in the interview was on point and properly critiqued the White male supremacist state. Stewart may be Jewish, but in terms of working in the media, he is certainly not a minority and on some level, this had to have helped him to reach the position that he has. Sanchez could have chosen to express himself differently, and ultimately, this is what got him fired. His fate, much like that of Helen Thomas, rested in the hands of those who are determined to have their truth become recognized as the norm.
This is probably the best article that I have read on this subject, especially the last sentence. I would only disagree with one point. That it is bigotry to say that Jewish people are no longer an oppressed minority in America. I don’t think saying that they are no longer oppressed diminishes the prejudice they still face. It just means that they have full, unfettered access to everything in American life. In other words, they have a seat at the table.
“Even pointing out that there is a large presence of Jewish people in the media, to my mind, does not rise to a level of bigotry because it happens to be factual.” It isn’t true that Jewish people run the media and it is a common anti-semetic stereotype that they do (despite the fact that it is Christian males who run most media corporations and people with Jewish coded names like Jon Leibowitz have to use names like ‘Jon Stewart’ to make themselves viable as media figues). There are stereotypes and bigotry about jewish people existant in American society, even though I absolutely agree that white jewish people are read as white in the modern US (as compared to historical situations where they were not). I would put modern american anti-semitism in the religious/xenophobia based bigotry categories.
It is also worth noting that Jon himself stated on the first show he aired after Sanchez’s firing that if this was the reason that Sanchez had been fired, then he should not have been fired (there was talk before that Sanchez was getting the boot) and that he thought that Sanchez said something in the heat of the moment that did not represent his general beliefs (Stewart aired a clip of Sanchez calling out neo-nazi anti-semitism as inexcusable bigotry). Was Sanchez’s statement bigoted? Yes. Was it very extreme? No. This is more of a ‘gay people like fashion’ stereotypes than a ‘gay people abuse kids’ one. Bigotry comes in degrees and Sanchez’s statement was fairly low degree (in Stewart’s words ‘banal Jew baiting’). Would Sanchez have been fired had he been a white male anchor saying the same thing? I think he absolutely would not have been. That is the issue I see here. White anchors make comparable and worse anti-semetic statements with decent regularity without this kind of outcry. The fact is, I don’t think the true motivation behind firing Sanchez was outrage over this statement, but rather that this was a pretense for firing him for calling out racism in his workplace and in news industry hiring in general [about a coworker saying that he thought of Sanchez as a reporter]”Cause in his mind I can’t be an anchor. An anchor is what you give the high-profile white guys, you know. So he knocks me down to that and compares me to that and it happens all the time i think. ” Considering the kind of racist bull that Anderson Cooper has been spewing towards Sanchez over this incident, I think Sanchez was right on about that part. It’s just sad that he made a foolish comment and that has been used as a distraction from his very honest, meaningful claims.
I never liked Rich Sanchez from day one! I thought he was far too cocky and I stopped watching CNN and went back to Fox News because of his attitude. I am glad he is gone but sorry he may have messed up his whole career.
Renee, you could have saved a lot of time and effort by just saying white people and Jews in particular are inherently racist because that is exactly what you said. Long winded pseudo intellectual racism is still racism. You have proved that with your article. You can fool yourself and other blacks but whites are not buying it anymore and that’s what really bites, is’nt it………