Death to the Dialectic!—A Critical Essay On Antiracism and Radical Progressives
A case study of the antiracist who showed antisemitic propaganda at a psychology conference in Philadelphia.
At a conference for Dialectical Behavioral Therapy last month, an “antiracism” speaker, Dr. Nathalie Edmond, managed to single-handedly cleave an entire professional community in two by presenting material sourced from a pro-Hamas organization that depicted all Zionists, among other things, as fascists and rapists. Edmond’s artless attempt to integrate anti-Zionist propaganda into her presentation was initially received with a standing ovation, but has since backfired.
ISITDBT’s antiracism board have since publicly condemned the talk, but not before coming under scrutiny for allowing it in the first place. At least one longtime board member has allegedly resigned over the incident and large groups of Jewish professionals are discussing a permanent break from the conference, as well as possible legal action against schools that engender such programming.
I wrote an open letter about this incident shortly after it happened that provides additional context:
In the meanwhile, I began looking into Dr. Edmond. I subscribed to her blog, read her online material, watched her videos and even interviewed some people who took her workshops. What I found is disheartening.
On her website, Edmond openly describes incorporating segregation into her programming. She also requires white people to pay more for the same classes, explicitly stating it is because of their race, which is a protected class, so that is textbook illegal discrimination.1 As a reminder, in addition to being a professor, conference speaker and antiracism trainer, this person is the Director of Villanova’s Counseling Center, treats patients in private practice, and supervises trainees.
Ultimately, the Jewish community did not receive an apology from Dr. Edmond. Instead, we got this video—Edmond’s only major communication about the incident—wherein she attempts to justify her weaponizing of intersectional and antiracist frameworks to attack Zionist Jews. She explains that her goal was to “amplify the voice of the Palestinian people,” who she calls her siblings, and this was presumably accomplished by injecting antisemitic propaganda into a slideshow at an American psychology conference. She emphatically states that she does not regret this decision, rooted as it is in her “antiracist, abolitionist worldview,” as well as her priority to be a “good ancestor”—a priority which apparently supersedes showing basic respect to her colleagues.
Edmond uses a lot of jargon to obfuscate what she means by her “antiracist, abolitionist worldview” and why she has refused to engage in any good-faith open dialogue with her Jewish peers for years. This article is a good overview if you are unfamiliar with critical theories, but everything I’m about to say can be pieced together by studying her videos, website, and blog posts.
Edmond’s worldview appears to categorically label all white-passing people as oppressors and anyone who would disagree with that, including other BIPOC people, as having internalized racism. Righteous offense is a prerogative reserved for BIPOC people so Jews are not entitled to it—both because Dr. Edmond doesn’t recognize Jews as having an intersectional identity and because she considers them to be part of the “oppressor class.” Ergo, we have no right to be offended and are not entitled to an apology, regardless of what was said about us. Within this framework, a white person cannot question a BIPOC person, period. It’s written in plain English on Dr. Edmond’s website, and most likely the result of a piecemeal integration of black feminist epistemology.2
The video Edmond released is over seventeen minutes long. A real apology—or even plainly stating “I regret nothing. Zionists are fascists”—should take a few minutes tops. But I don’t blame her for not wanting to tell the truth about how she probably sees the situation. It would sound something like “The outrage and hurt people are witnessing, the collective offense and humiliation from the Jewish community, are like the death throes of a collectively guilty white conscience that needs to be put down—and it can’t be helped.”
Dr. Edmond says her video is about “reflections,” which can refer to introspection or the physics of letting something bounce off a body without absorbing any of it. It is with the spirit of the latter meaning that Dr. Edmond proceeds to blame a litany of parties, everyone but herself, including the offended attendees themselves, colonialism, and systemic racism. What had Dr. Edmond done wrong? She admits she “miscalculated”—miscalculated DBT therapists’ ability to “use their DBT skills to find the kernel of truth” in what she was saying. This is a cheap truncation, if not outright misinterpretation, of DBT, which would make this a strikingly stupid thing to say to an audience of DBT practitioners.
“The truth,” in the context of DBT, is about interpersonal truth and synthetical progress achieved over a long period of time in a very delicately held relationship. But even outside of the context of DBT, the very absence of an opposing opinion precludes something from being called a “dialectic.” The truth is a result of tension; it is a synthesis resulting from two opposing viewpoints. I only see one viewpoint here.
For someone who makes a big deal about being a “good ancestor” and “sibling” to people she has nothing to do with, she evidently has no qualms disrespecting her own ancestors’ real historic suffering by disingenuously calling criticism a hate crime in order to garner pity and escape accountability for her own racism. In response to colleagues’ requests for an apology, Dr. Edmond declared in her video that she was being “lynched” for being “ a fat, black, queer.”3
As an expert on antiracism, Dr. Edmond knows that an actual lynching in the particular sense she is trying to evoke is a brutal public execution on the physical person associated with white-on-black violence and the celebration of white supremacy. It’s not receiving some emails you didn’t like from a white person while being black.
This is further evidence of how low she will stoop to sell a narrative consistent with her portrayal of Zionist Jews as violent, genocidal fascists. It is also an exhibition of how both she and her worldview are not grounded in reality. The reality is that she was criticized for sharing antisemitic material, not for being fat or black or queer. Nobody laid a finger on her. In fact, we were discouraged from even criticizing her. Dr. Edmond has much more in common with her privileged, bourgeois white colleagues than she does Emmett Till, Mary Turner, or Jesse McIlherron.
Since Dr. Edmond did not apologize or recant her inflammatory beliefs, she should have at least made more of an effort explaining how her peculiar blend of critical theory, decolonization, and black-feminist frameworks justified the categorical remarks she made about Jews, Zionism, and Israel. At its core, critical theory must integrate a holistic understanding of a society—history, religion, social and political science, economics, etc.—before critiquing it.
Dr. Edmond professes to be well-read on the conflict in the Middle East and Zionism because she studied the 2500-year history extensively last year, and therefore feels qualified to talk over Jews, Israelis and actual experts on the topic in “a way that balances both sides.” Having seen her talk on these subjects, my strong impression is that she has a superficial level of knowledge of mostly recent events that is extremely one-sided. She’s barely a tourist of Middle East history, let alone an authority on Jewish identity, yet she persists in her sophistry.
What proof do we have of her expertise? I could find absolutely nothing after scouring her academic history. All I could find was her publicly published “2023 reading list for liberation and settling into 2024”. The post says she read two books on the subject that year: “The Hundred Years War On Palestine” and “The Crisis of Zionism,” two extremely anti-Zionist books. The rest of her reading list is overwhelmingly about black victimization and white oppression. For someone who talks about “holding multiple truths,” tolerance, and multiculturalism ad nauseum, I’ve seen very little proof that she has a taste for anything that doesn’t reaffirm her existing beliefs.
Unfortunately, I also have to call Dr. Edmond’s reading comprehension skills, or at least the veracity of her reading lists, into question because I cannot grasp how someone with a doctorate has read “The Coddling Of The American Mind” and summarized it as “intellectual safety is important.” The entire book is about how progressives are destroying schools with their prioritization of intellectual safety, which can be gleaned from looking at the cover.
Since the publication of my first letter, several people have come forward to say that the ISITDBT presentation may be the most brazen public display of Dr. Edmond’s teachings and disrespect towards Jewish colleagues to date, but it’s been happening for years.
Erica Taxin, for example, is a social worker and coach who considered herself a good friend of Dr. Edmond for over seven years. She runs the yoga studio where Dr. Edmond became credentialed as a yoga teacher and personally completed a number of Edmond’s workshops. She considered the two to be friends, but at one point became “super concerned about Nathalie’s underlying antisemitism” due to troubling things Nathalie was mass-emailing, including “broad misinterpretations of Jewish identity” that revealed Edmond’s “significant lack of education regarding sociopolitical history, genocide and Zionism.” Erica warned Dr. Edmond earnestly that she was getting into bed with actors who “first and foremost hate Jews, but don’t see BIPOC people as allies either.” Erica was completely dismissed, despite being completely right: Black people of various faiths are being perpetually slaughtered and enslaved by Islamic jihadists.4
Sivan Komatsu, an Israeli graduate student, was the young woman who confronted Edmond immediately after her presentation and was gaslighted and dismissed. On social media, Sivan recounted multiple occasions she tried to gently initiate a dialogue with Edmond to offer her perspective. She was ignored or dismissed every time.
Halina Brooke, a therapist from Arizona, provided proof that she reached out to Dr. Edmond years ago about troubling material in an antiracism presentation Edmond gave at Halina’s organization. Instead of speaking to Halina out of professional courtesy, she charged her a $200 consulting fee just to quickly tell her that she “was wrong” about her understanding of the subject, and that Dr. Edmond knew better than her because she had “done the work.”5
“Doing the work” is a cryptic phrase that Edmond often deploys some variation of as a stand-in for substantiating her claims of expertise. The phrase is a hallmark of progressive sophistry. I once inquired into its exact meaning during a graduate “People and Oppression” class and my professor told me it’s something that would come after “shedding the white skin and reflecting.”
Several of Edmond’s students have also posted on social media that she was extremely biased and would fail anyone who disagreed with her. Her two reviews on Rate My Professor echo this sentiment. One student writes that it is “terrifying” that she is a clinician in the field and that they would sooner drop out of school than learn from her again.
Edmond’s supporters, naturally, have either buried their heads in the sand completely during this entire fiasco or actively defended her misapplication of critical theory. Many have gone online to say that she should be left alone simply because “she is a nice person,” an “academic fighting against oppression,” and, my personal favorite, “love in human form.”
Her supporters repeatedly suggest that she is above rebuke because she is a black woman (and apparently not bound by any code of ethics or sense of accountability). The worst of this band of apologists, however, are the “unoffended” Jews who have gone out of their way to insinuate that because they do not identify as Zionists, the rest of us should be okay with being slandered in the extreme.
None of these enablers have piped up to suggest, perhaps, that injecting extremely divisive personal politics into a professional atmosphere—a basic notion of civility—was an error in judgment. Not one has admitted that the shared material was plainly inappropriate, ill-sourced, and irrelevant; not one has explained how the material wasn’t antisemitic; the most that they can offer is that they weren’t personally offended, or that Zionism is separable from Jewish identity (an extremely popular position of anti-Zionists that most Jews vehemently disagree with), or that complainants “lacked context” for the materials, the presumption being that “context” magically nullifies self-contained categorical statements about Jews—statements that label 90% of us as fascists and rapists. And many of us did see the full talk—I personally saw it live.
Some have even called Dr. Edmond brave. What, precisely, is brave or impressive about a paid academic—a mercenary peddling jihadist rhetoric—slandering a historically oppressed minority group from a podium? She didn’t even come up with the material—she copied and pasted it from Instagram!
To consciously present pseudoscientific content from an internet propaganda page during a professional conference would alone be a career death knell for many. In this case, the presenter has not only done that, but also vilified roughly fourteen million Jews in the process, and in the worst way imaginable; her imagery, at a minimum, suggests even Holocaust survivors are white colonizers to be associated with fascism, rape culture, and genocide, despite the historical fact that most of them fled to Israel to escape endless persecution and an actual genocide.6
Let’s be honest: Most of us would be professionally and socially ostracized for doing anything like this, so for someone whose entire schtick depends on being stuck at the ass-end of a power dynamic, Dr. Edmond sure can get away with a whole lot more than most of us!
"What is it with progressives, Zionists, and Palestine?"
One person who read my first letter asked “what does any of this have to do with DBT?” The honest answer is “nothing.” It has nothing to do with anything most of us came to the conference for. But the fact that it happened is not altogether surprising either.
For years, academic and professional spaces have been subsumed by radical leftist politics and misguided progressivism that has alienated liberals, conservatives, and moderates alike. The fruits of this takeover include infantilizing “antiracism” programming, which is usually more masturbatory than enlightening, and has the added effect of shaming white clinicians who probably do much more for oppressed BIPOC people than the presenter.
It is clear that even the most intellectually lazy and politically toxic programming will be permitted and encouraged in progressive spaces, regardless of the cost, as long as it’s racialized at the expense of white people. Antiracism consultants directly profit from this kind of racial antagonism because it creates demand for their niche pedagogical approach, which leads to prestigious jobs, followers, book sales, lucrative workshops, consulting gigs, speaking fees, and so on.
The degree of this success and the relevancy of antiracist work depend on the narratives in presentations like Edmond’s. There is a reason she is far from the first progressive academic in recent years to bastardize Jewish identity and Zionism and normalize antisemitic rhetoric and violence.
Why Zionists and why Palestine? There are a few other reasons I will go into in a separate article, but we can at least say it’s a conflict that 1) is topical, with an abundance of accessible propaganda and trauma porn; 2) snugly fits a narrative where strong “white” people are oppressing BIPOC people; 3) is easy and safe to virtue signal bravery and activism for; 4) is strategically advantageous, since the people most likely to speak up are the same people being smeared as white oppressors; and 5) presents a fantastic marketing opportunity for professionals who can train you to be an “antiracist” via webinar for $55 a month (that’s Edmond’s white price).
Dr. Edmond cherrypicked the sole topical global crisis that can be assimilated into her worldview and narrative that white supremacy and systemic racism are the scourge of all BIPOC people and the primary obstacles of their collective liberation. Invoking this framework stokes the American crisis of conscience surrounding Palestine, which generates so much moral outrage it’s impossible to tell how much of it is being artificially manufactured, much like with Kony 2012.
“Selling” a crisis like Palestine on the terms progressives need requires gross reductionism, simple equivalencies, a racial dichotomy, and an authoritative “antiracist” who supplies a racialized value judgment. A snippet of some of the dynamics that were at play with Kony 2012:
Since the video's release, Invisible Children has come under criticism for oversimplification of events in the region and has been accused of engaging in "slacktivism", in which a person donates or takes actions that have little to no effect beyond making said person feel as if they contributed to a positive cause. While the campaign promotes global activism, it has been criticized for providing a black-and-white picture rather than encouraging the viewers to learn about the situation. Mikaela Luttrell-Rowland from Clark University's Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies stated that it was "irresponsible to prize feel good, simplistic messages over complex history and to treat consumerist-consciousness raising as interchangeable with education."
Why does there need to be so much singular emphasis and manufactured outrage on Palestine? Why do we see encampments and hunger strikes on campuses against Zionism, but nothing for, say, the fourteen African countries torn apart by Jihadism? Process of elimination. In every other notable conflict, the oppressors are either considered BIPOC, or nonwhite, per the antiracist framework. So Islamic Jihadists are out. Their terrorist attacks on white people are framed as resistance and the war crimes they commit against other BIPOC people are drowned out by the manufactured outrage against whites.
This tells you that it’s not about liberation or lifting oppression after all—at least not in any efficient, pragmatic sense. A progressive moral calculus only addresses problems that fit a prefixed racial narrative, and it justifies doing this by always assigning more weight to white oppression. More exposure and manufactured outrage reinforces the impression that the white-on-black conflict is worse. Traditionally, this has always been accomplished most easily in hotbeds of advocacy where young people are expected to care, have the free time to do so, and the naïveté to not know any better. Social media, however, has revolutionized and decentralized this process.
Today, Hamas has a media arm that can stage high-quality trauma porn—as they often do with dead children—and get it on the internet in the time it takes you and I to send a photo or watch a cooking tutorial. They probably never imagined that entire American academic institutions would endorse the packaging and dissemination of that material, yet here we are. Now their material is even shown at American professional conferences, weaponized against their mortal enemies—and they don’t have to lift a finger.
The opportunity cost of all this inflated attention on Palestine is egregiously high and progressive politics are to blame for it. By every metric, the crisis in Gaza pales in comparison to nearly every other modern global conflict. For example, quite inconveniently, Jihadism has been a deadlier and far more widespread threat to BIPOC peoples by orders of magnitude. Islamic insurgents are currently responsible for 34.5 million displaced people and widespread destruction across major swathes of Sub-Saharan Africa, ensuring instability, food insecurity, and extreme poverty for nearly half of the population.
90% of religious murders occur in Nigeria, where jihadists have been slaughtering, kidnapping, and raping black Christians for years. Meanwhile, Nigeria will receive 1% of what Palestinians received in US aid for roughly the same timeframe: just $27 million.
1.25 billion people live in Sub-Saharan Africa. 5.16 million live in Palestine. Sub-Saharan Africa will collectively receive $3.7 billion in aid from the US in 2024, just 48% more than Palestine despite having over 242 times as many people.7
When was the last time you heard a college student or a DEI/antiracism lecturer mention Sudan? It is home to the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. 25 million black people—five times Palestine’s entire population—are dying of famine alone. The country is currently undergoing another civil war. Islamic governments and rebel groups have turned the entire nation into a veritable bloodbath since at least 2003, when evidence of genocide was first documented in Darfur. Even though 2.5 million Sudanese have been slaughtered in the 21st century alone, the oppressors are Muslim Arabs, so there’s no progressive appetite for it.
Violence returned to Darfur in the modern era with the growing influence of the Arab Gathering (Tajamu al-Arabi), which was an Arab supremacist group following an ideology developed by Mu’ammar Qaddafi and spread by the leaders of Libya’s Islamic Legion (Failaq al-Islamiya) in the 1980s. Clashes over land developed between the Arab and the non-Arab Muslim tribes of Darfur, particularly the Fur, the Zaghawa, and the Masalit. The latter groups united in outright rebellion in 2003, while the Bashir government responded by unleashing Janjaweed (a Sudanese Arab militia) gunmen and bandits on the non-Arab civilian population under military direction - The Jamestown Foundation
The insurgencies in Myanmar have also displaced significantly more people than there are in Gaza—but that is violence being perpetrated by none-white people as well. The humanitarian tolls in Ukraine and Syria both dwarf Palestine by orders of magnitude, but in Ukraine white people are the oppressed—an irreconcilable dynamic in Edmond’s framework—and the mass graves in Syria were filled with Arab and indigenous bodies by other Arabs. Even just the Lebanon-Israel warfront would be unfashionable to mention since it portrays Arabs as an antagonistic majority and Israel as a minority defending itself. Burkina Faso, Mali, Somalia—all worthless crises to radical progressives, which is why you virtually never hear about them.
There are at least 350,000 displaced children in Haiti and 5.5 million people in need of humanitarian aid (again, Palestine’s entire population). The entire country is controlled by gangs and has been on the verge of collapse for years. Dr. Edmond is a first-generation Haitian herself. Do you think she’s breathed a word of advocacy for them? I cannot find a single thing.
“Progressivism” isn’t serving us well—how about some pragmatism? Let’s look at reality. Hypothetically, even if we all unanimously agreed that Dr. Edmond was correct and that we should prioritize helping Palestinians, there would still realistically be nothing of substance we could do. Until white guilt can be harvested as an energy source to power Palestinian generators, the best we can do is send money—and US taxpayers have already sent $2.5 billion in aid to the West Bank and Gaza since Hamas started the war on Oct 7, 2023, including $230 million just last month. Americans clearly don’t feel pressured to shoulder the financial burden of all humanitarian conflict started by Islamic militants, so why the double standard for Palestine, where most of the aid is stolen anyway?
I think all of us—not just Jewish clinicians—need to zoom out and have a conversation about priorities. It is absurd that one speaker’s crude display of misguided slacktivism should wreak so much havoc on our entire professional community, but the greater irony is that it was done in Philadelphia, minutes away from some of its most drug-and-poverty-addled streets and the largest open-air drug market in the country. Why are progressives dying on a hill for Palestinians on the other side of the world, who we can do nothing for, when nearly 200,000 African-Americans live in poverty and die every year due to gun violence, drug abuse, and health disparities in our backyard?
Why are we encouraging and defending people that engender divides, echo chambers, and the alienation of fellow professionals over cherrypicked moral crises halfway across the world? We are diverting resources, time, and attention away from coordinating and training ourselves to better serve the people in need around us right now. Solely because of Dr. Edmond’s actions, hundreds of professional relationships have been severed, reputations have been ruined, and an entire conference is in shambles. And for what? What has been accomplished here? Was Dr. Edmond able to sell a few more copies of her book, fleece a few more people with her overpriced workshops?
Are patients in our clinical work clamoring for a confrontation with Zionists? Are they so distressed about the war in Gaza that it ranks chief among their problems? All of my patients are low-income, black Philadelphians and, oddly enough, I’ve never heard a thing about Gaza, Palestine, Zionism or the Zionist Jew who treats them. Not one has ever told me that “collective liberation” is among their priorities.
The disconnect, in my opinion, stems from the fact that the progressives leading us astray are not prioritizing the needs of the people we are most capable of helping. We’re taking our cue from a coddled grifter who is nestled away in a cushy office at $65,000-a-year Villanova, who has the luxury of entertaining academic and political indulgences unavailable to most of us. She is not in touch with reality or what actual helping clinicians currently do in the trenches for people with real, not abstract, problems. I doubt the beleaguered poor of Ewing, New Jersey crawl into Edmond’s private suburban practice, suicidally depressed, their quality of life crushed by Zionism and the crisis in Gaza.
Instead, Edmond prioritizes an imaginary patient population in need of “liberation,” knowing full well she will end up peddling her books to other “antiracists,” career academics, impressionable patients and students—privileged white people with guilt complexes who she will “do the work” of antiracism with for only $700 to $2000 an hour.
I would pay good money to see a demonstration of how Dr. Edmond’s rhetoric on Zionism or her pseudoscientific training has helped a single patient with anything. I’m curious to see her apply her antiracism training to an actual racist, and not the white social workers, therapists and professors she implies are being exorcised of an insidious, systemic racism. Why doesn’t she go work with white supremacists in carceral settings or something like that? Collective liberation, Zionism and Gaza may be more salient interests among the spoiled, impressionable students visiting her counseling center on campus, but that’s because of manufactured media outrage and the rampant antisemitic indoctrination on college campuses being perpetrated by radical progressives like her to begin with.
Reductionist messaging and echo chambers are dangerous, especially in the day of social media. Defending sophists and charlatans just because you agree with their political messaging degrades us all and reverses political progress. Every day I see startling news and published materials amplifying this simple untruth: Zionism is evil, and hating Zionism doesn’t mean hating Jews. And yet, American Jews are the ones being indiscriminately attacked and harassed. Even if academics like Nathalie Edmond have philosophized their way out of believing what they are doing is unethical, directly stoking a furor that harms innocents—Jews or not—is still irresponsible.
Academics picking fights that most black Americans don’t want or need are preventing all of us from building community and doing real work against oppression. Progressive politics and the “antiracist” agenda distorts our collective world view to the benefit of literal terrorists. 99% of BIPOC people’s suffering is discounted for the sake of this tunnel vision on Palestine and progressives’ ridiculous, ineffectual crusade for a faction of Arabs who do not give a shit about any of us, least of all queer, black progressives. Dr. Edmond and her ilk represent the real impediment to progress, not Zionist Jews.
Despite all that Jews have given to this field and the helping professions in general, look how rapidly our professional circles have regressed to a fear-led cult mentality since “progressive” leadership has taken the reins. Look how welcomely we are reviled and dehumanized by our colleagues, who would sooner jettison all good sense and prostrate themselves completely than criticize a black woman in the slightest. They would rather see the whole thing burn.
Collins, P. H. (2000). Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (2nd ed., pp. 327–331). Routledge.
I believe she later retracted this and said she was merely being stoned—a problem she is more likely to run into with her “siblings” in the Middle East than with the Jewish fascists in the US
A 2014 report that barely scratches the surface of what jihadists have done, and continue to do, to black people.
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/postwar-refugee-crisis-and-the-establishment-of-the-state-of-israel
https://ng.usembassy.gov/united-states-announces-27-million-in-humanitarian-assistance-for-nigeria/
She sounds awful but not atypical. This kind of idiot thrives in academic spaces where wypipo always too afraid to speak up about anything race related because they are racist. They just want to be perceived as virtuous.
https://marlowe1.substack.com/p/just-one-more-time-the-stories-of
Excellent article. Horrifying content. I can understand individuals that have become radicalised or lost the plot. But it’s hard to believe these nutcases are being platformed.