Daily Inspiration Quote by Barbara Smith

Barbara Smith lands the punch where coalition politics usually goes to die: not in ideology, but in lived expectations. Her line isn’t an excuse for ignoring anti-Semitism; it’s a diagnosis of why the ask to “oppose anti-Semitism” can sound, to many Black women and other people of color, like a moral pop quiz graded by the same white institutions that routinely dismiss racism as exaggeration. The phrase “profound scepticism” matters. It signals something earned, not trendy: a hard-won suspicion built from watching whiteness function as a shield in courts, schools, housing markets, and media narratives. Against that backdrop, the idea that “white people can actually be oppressed” can register as category error, even when Jewish history (and present-day Jewish vulnerability) complicates easy racial binaries.

The subtext is both empathetic and strategic. Smith is naming the friction point without conceding it’s morally acceptable. She’s also warning that anti-racist movements can stumble when they treat anti-Semitism as a side quest or as an externally imposed loyalty test. If oppression is understood only through a Black/white U.S. lens, Jewishness gets misread as simple access to whiteness, not as a position that can be conditionally white, precariously protected, and violently targeted.

Contextually, Smith’s work in Black feminist and lesbian organizing insisted that liberation isn’t modular. She’s arguing that solidarity requires more than correct slogans; it requires retooling our mental model of power so we can recognize how racism, anti-Semitism, and whiteness intertwine without collapsing into each other.