No group’s experience of racial annihilation is reductively exemplary

Evidence

In short, the Shoah in many ways is an exemplary experience, raising in sharp relief the entire range of human responses when faced by a popular state machinery of mass death and desired extinction. And yet; and yet. Antisemitism, alas, is neither the only experience of attempted racial annihilation nor the paradigmatic one. It is not paradigmatic because in matters of racially driven or inflected violence and exclusion, no group’s experience is reductively exemplary. Each reveals something both general and unique. Never forget, absolutely, each historical instance. Saying so doesn’t belittle even the most extreme case. Quite the contrary, it draws attention to the connections, causal and fabricating, to conditions, expressions, and relations both preceding and following, or following from, the Event. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 851

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the theme of comparability across genocides and moral competition over suffering; echoes debates in Holocaust studies about uniqueness vs. comparability.
• SEED: Angle: an essay arguing that treating one genocide as paradigmatic actually obscures causal connections between instances of racial annihilation.