More clueless white person flailing

[liv]

Several different stimuli, mostly Twitter fights if I'm honest, have pushed me to having one more try at talking about prejudice against white minorities. This is probably the topic that has drawn the most controversy in the 19 years I've been writing about all my opinions here, but I need to write this down somewhere.

There is an ever-rolling debate on the topic of whether Jews are white. I sort of reject the terms of the debate; Jews are not one ethnic group, and never have been. Like, if you consider Abraham to be the first Jew, many of the other first Jews were his household and various hangers-on and they are explicitly described, right there in the Bible, as being from all kinds of different ethnic backgrounds. If you think Jews didn't exist as a distinct religion until Sinai, again, it's absolutely explicit in the text that the group who received Torah included both the direct descendants of Jacob and a mixed multitude of people from all over the known world. One of Abraham's wives was Black, Moses' wife was Black (or possibly one of his wives, it's a bit ambiguous how many times he married). Equally, to say that white Jews are white is very close to a tautology.

Are light-skinned, European-descended Ashkenazi Jews white, then? According to American race theory, yes. But also the question itself is problematic because it rests on the underlying assumption that Jews who trace their ancestry back to European Jewish communities are the "real" Jews and everybody else is just an afterthought. That's the background of the numerical majority of Jews today, but so what? But those sorts of Jews are white, in the sense that we have white privilege, in the sense that the racial hierarchies of the rest of society are reproduced within the Jewish community just as in most groupings.

But even if I grant that, it so easily turns into a shouting match because serious scholars of race and racism have an understanding of what racism is and what white privilege is. And lots of people arguing on the internet have picked up a very superficial understanding of the theories and derive a lot of wrong conclusions from the assertion that (majority-typical) Jews are white. And if they disagree with those wrong conclusions they are going to end up arguing with the assertion. This can end up with another instance of white people saying, oh, I'm not really white / I don't have white privilege, because I'm minoritized in another way, eg I'm disabled, I'm Queer, I'm poor etc. It's not helpful for white Jews to say, oh no, I'm not white because antisemitism exists, and anyway my ancestors were a persecuted minority and never owned slaves or even property.

I think one of the superficial-to-the-point of wrong assumptions about what it means to say that Jews are white is about how a right-thinking, decent white person should think about race. I get the impression that a generation ago, the right attitude for decent people was so-called "colour-blindness"; one should act as if people's racial backgrounds were completely irrelevant, because race isn't real, and it's racist to even notice that a POC is different in any way. I don't believe serious anti-racist campaigners ever wanted this idea to take root, but that was the message taken by (white) people who were vaguely well-meaning but not highly educated or highly engaged. Now I think most have grasped that it's not helpful to pretend we're all the same underneath, and to do so is to deny people's reality and to make excuses to perpetuate racist structures. But this simplification has been replaced with a less bad, but still over-simplified, meme that anti-racism should always centre BIPOC. That's not untrue; it's a pretty poor sort of anti-racism that's all about white people! And it's not untrue that racism is prejudice plus power; POC making less than positive generalizations about white people are not meaningfully being racist. However, a lot of people extrapolate from this basically sound but simple idea to the view that racism doesn't affect white people at all, or is purely beneficial to white people.

As a result, people who experience kinds of prejudices that look a lot like racism, but who have light skin and don't have recent Black, Brown or Indigenous ancestry, get the message that their problems aren't real problems, their oppression isn't real because racism doesn't affect white people. So in order to legitimize talking about their experiences, they might claim not to be white. This I think is part of what's fuelling the claim that Jews aren't white. At one point recently I got involved in a Twitter argument that started with some kind of parody question, why don't the white community do something about violent extremists? what is it about white culture that radicalizes white supremacists? And people in that discussion were straight up declaring that white supremacists are not a threat to white people. White people are whining about minor inconveniences when POC are being murdered.

I just bluescreened, basically. Like, within living memory the Nazis actually murdered more than 10 million people, the vast majority of whom were white according to contemporary American race theory. (Yes, the Nazis murdered Black people too, I'm not saying that didn't happen, but it's still a huge genocide of mostly white people.) Am I supposed to believe that today's literal Nazis have somehow accepted modern American understandings of race and are only a threat to POC? Really? That when they hold rallies chanting about 'Jews will not replace us' or '6 million wasn't enough' they only mean Jews of Colour? That the attacks on synagogues from Pittsburgh onwards only incidentally led to violence against white Jews and the real targets were POC?

The exact flipside of this is Whoopi Goldberg's unfortunate claim that the Holocaust wasn't about race, it was white-on-white violence. She's not incorrect, if you hold the view that racism is only racism if it is perpetrated by white people against POC. Here's a very good thread by a Black Jewish thinker, Michael Twitty KosherSoul unpacking this: Her commentary that the Shoah was white on white violence is less of an issue that separating the Holocaust from white supremacy and racial Anti-Semitism bc "race" is indeed woven into the whole history of European Anti-Semitism.".

Faced with this obvious absurdity, people retreat to the claim that Jews aren't white-white, they're conditionally white, provisionally white. But that again is basically a tautology. The whole point of racism is that anyone, anyone can be declared racially tainted. All whiteness is conditional whiteness. Racial purity doesn't exist, because racial purity is a made-up lie by racists. The Nazis murdered white people, (even if you want to argue about whether Jews are white, which as I've said I think is a bad debate); they murdered several million white Polish people, white Russian people, other white Europeans, disabled people and gay men and non-conformist Christians and Communists with impeccably white German ancestry, even on Nazi terms. And not only did they murder white people, they racialized their victims in order to justify genocide. (The Nazis also murdered probably a million Roma people and people from related ethnic groups; I am not leaving them out of the list because their Devouring doesn't matter, but because Roma seem to be mostly regarded as white, but there are also strong arguments that they are POC, and as an outsider I don't want to take a position on that. Linked Twitter thread contains a demonym that many Americans consider a slur.)

Another Black Jew who studies the history of race. Prof Prescod-Weinstein IBJIYONGI points out that very few people are good at talking about race as a historical or contemporary phenomenon.. I very much include myself in the people who are bad at talking about race; I expect people to take umbrage at this post for a variety of reasons, and maybe it would be better not to post it at all, because I'm flailing a lot. But I really need to work out some way to take anti-Black and anti-POC racism seriously (and not make the conversation 'all about white people'), but also to take into account the historical and current reality of colonialism, xenophobic violence and genocide against white people, because they are a real physical threat to me and to people I care about. I don't mind reserving the term 'racism' for police disproportionately murdering Black people, if that's important to activists, but I need a way to talk about this ethnic-violence-that-isn't-racism, but without derailing.

Here is someone who I think is good at talking about race. Prof Crystal Marie Fleming alwaystheself explains that The complicated thing about the myth of “race” is that it’s not just a boundary between “whites” and “non-whites”.. it’s also a boundary and hierarchy *among* whites. I really recommend that thread; it's very good on the complex historical relationship between Europe and the US, and the historical connection between antisemitism and racism, without setting up some oppression olympics about whether Black African-Americans or white European-descended Jews are the real victims.

Comments

[ewt]

Thank you for this post. I don't have anything to add at the moment (I am also pretty terrible at talking about racism), but I appreciate your thoughtfulness and the links to other voices on the issue.

[princessofgeeks]

I think one ongoing problem with all the misunderstandings about all this is that the USA has a very particular way of discussing and understanding race, and that does NOT map onto other countries or continents at all. And yet our problems with race tend to dominate the discourse any way.

Also as you say the position of the Jews has changed over time and varies from decade to decade and from country to country in lots of different and complicated ways.

[cesy]

Yeah, ethnic violence and xenophobia and so on are huge problems and overlap with global racism but don't map neatly to US racism, and some US people forget that the rest of the world is different.

[silveradept]

I am seeing people more consistently using white supremacy (or White Supremacy) to encompass what you're talking about, to include the concept of the hierarchy of whiteness (which doesn't get taught well, if at all, here in the States) and the willingness of white supremacists to attack people who aren't aligned with their goals or who they see as working contrary to whiteness.

It does require a person to see whiteness as something other than the unmarked default, which can be difficult for people who are very invested in the idea of white supremacy being a conscious act, instead of an unconscious or a systemic one.

[lethargic_man]

One of Abraham's wives was Black

Which? Clearly not Sarah; Hagar was Egyptian, and as a super-Saharan African brown-skinned, as ancient Egyptian art shows, and whilst I am not aware of Keturah's ancestry, her descendants are a bunch of Arabian tribes, so again, brown-skinned but not black, unless you once again go for inappropriate USAn racial identifications.

[to_do_list]

This is the most thoughtful and educational take on the whole question that I have seen.

Other than thank you, I only have a personal anecdote to contribute. As a Russian immigrant to Canada, I still struggle with some distinctions that people around me just, kind of, see? Part of the race narrative includes visual distinctions, which seem really weird. For example, it seems like the social construction of "Latin" includes the ability to easily and visibly separate it from "white".

And where I grew up, there were some people of Georgian, Armenian, Greek and Caucasian (the actual, original, Caucasians from Caucasus) ethnicities, both in real life and the media, as well as several Jewish friends. My grandmother was half-Jewish and visibly so, yet since she grew up literally next to one of Siberian Gulags, it was far safer to joke about Turks among her ancestors. And all those ethnicities were alternatively counted as European and as non-European, depending on the conversational agenda.

So when some people in Canada were saying, "can't you just tell that this actor is Latin?", I was going "What on earth do you mean??". Why are the visual features of dark hair and tan/olive skin "Latin" in North America, and those same exact features are "white" when someone is Italian or Greek, and then potentially vaguely "POC" when Turkish or Iranian? I definitely understand those social constructions better at this point in my life, yet my earlier naive confusion makes it so much easier to recognize them for what they are - constructions.

[andrewducker]

I definitely agree that any issue which takes the American experience of Race and attempts to map it onto how other countries have experience Race is going to go badly wrong.

[andrewducker]

Also, none of the above includes how incredibly contextual it is depending on the power imbalances in the country you're in. There are definitely places in Asia where being white moves you down a rung on the power levels, because of a frequent belief that the local "race" is the superior one. Of course they'll probably still be ranked above people with actively dark skin...

[lokifan]

My feeling would be that (European-descent) Jews are conditionally white makes sense in that it expresses the hierarchy? And the ways that Jewish people could access some resources & services that weren't available to others, but also, white supremacists won't and don't accept Jews of European descent as white. I mean, as you say, race is fundamentally mutable and conditional, but it's still a different relationship with whiteness than say, mine (as a white Brit from an Anglican background).

idk it's all very complicated