"Ask A Jew" Wednesday

[u/AutoModerator]

It's everyone's favorite day of the week, "Ask A (Anti-Zionist) Jew" Wednesday! Ask whatever you want to know, within the sub rules, notably that this is not a debate sub and do not import drama from other subreddits. That aside, have fun! We love to dialogue with our non-Jewish siblings.

Please remember to pick an appropriate user-flair in order to participate! Thanks!

[u/valonianfool]

Do you think jewish people can be white/that being jewish cancels out white privilege?
I've noticed that its often jewish zionists who claim that being jewish makes you inherently a POC, and I've seen a post stating that all jewish ppl, even converts from completely white backgrounds are not only poc but "middle Eastern", and I don't really accept that.

While I'm aware that for the vast majority of history jewish ppl were excluded from whiteness and treated as a racial "other", so there is a fair argument that no jew, no matter how pale their skin is privileged to all of whiteness, at the same time some of the most prominent out of touch "White Feminists" like Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, and I have some trouble with dealing with the fact that being jewish doesn't preclude you from being a white feminist.

[u/Thisisme8719 → u/valonianfool]

Racial categorization isn't a description of reality, but of how race is perceived in different societies. So it varies from place to place. In the US most of the Jews were legally considered white because they came from Christian European countries. That was actually how they were able to naturalize since one of the legal requirements for foreigners to attain citizenship before 1952 was to be a "free white person" or of "African descent." Jews who came from other continents, or even Ottoman Europe, had to fight in court to naturalize or rely on legal precedents from other Jews or Christians who immigrated from the same regions, and they didn't always succeed because it wasn't clear if they could legally be considered "white."

[u/acacia_tree → u/valonianfool]

Jews are an ethnoreligious group, not a race. White Jews are white full stop. It doesn't matter if historically we've been racially otherized. Today in most countries where white privilege exists, white Jews have all the privileges that come with being white. Black, brown, and Asian Jews do not have the same privileges white Jews have.

Here's a parallel: Latino/a/e is an ethnic group. There are white Latinos, Afro-Latinos, and Latinos with range of skin tones and nationalities. Are white Latinos otherized for being ethnic? Yes. But they have the same privileges that come with whiteness that Black and brown latinos don't have.

[u/STEMpsych → u/acacia_tree]

You seem to have confused whiteness with being white passing. By this logic a black person who can pass as white is not a person of color.

Whether or not a pale-skinned Jew of European descent experiences white privilege depends not on what they "are" but how they are "read" by other people around them and those people's ideas of race. Those can change in time and place. There are have been times and places in my life when I have been read as white, and times and places where I stood out like a sore thumb because of having a body that was racialized; in no places could I be sure that if I would be "read" as Jewish that that, itself, wouldn't be seen as disqualifying, as it were, of being white and construed as belonging to another racial category. Same as a white-appearing Latina might suddenly find herself racialized when someone who previously "read" her as white but then discovered she was a Latina and construed that as a racial category.

People don't "have" races that they "are". We have racial categories projected on us by others – which is one of the important things the concept of white privilege gets at – based on their mental categories of race and how we seem to them. The way you are discussing race reifies the particular racial constructs of the particular categories of US-specific white supremicism as if they were real and objective categories. This supports white supremacy, is more than a tinge culturally imperialistic, and not helpful for doing antiracism work.

[u/sudo_apt-get_intrnet → u/valonianfool]

I feel like racism -- including the categorization of "whiteness", but also others -- is a mix of 2 separate but connected bigotry classes. The first and obvious one is genetics/bloodline -- you are white because you have pure European blood, or are Black because you are descended from slaves, or latino because you are descended from people south of the USA, etc. The second is appearance based -- people associate certain appearance traits with these bloodline categorizations and then group based off of that. "White people have light skin" (ignoring Italians), "Black people have dark skin & curly hair" (ignoring Michael Jackson), etc.

Since people don't have an innate ability to detect bloodline, most casual and day-to-day racism (and therefore, "experiencing of whiteness") is based off of the latter. A "white-passing" and Americanized Jew/Latino/Arab/etc will be treated as a white person in their day-to-day and, for all intents and purposes, not experience many of the horrors of white supremacy/racism themselves.

However, the actual power of racism is not in the appearance-based discrimination but the bloodline one. Once the racism transitions from subconscious and instinctive to conscious and structural no amount of "passing" really saves you. Jews, Arabs, Latinos, Roma, etc are still attacked regularly by racists, even the "white" ones, because of their bloodline.

Ashkenazi Jews (emphasis on ASHKENAZI, since those are the only ones that white-pass as a group) are pretty unique because they are the only people-group I know of that are categorically white-passing without being considered fully white. Usually its something done at an individual/sub-group level instead. It's a really weird in-between state to be in.

Most of the time people, including Jews, will internalize it either as Ashkenazis being fully white and therefore antisemitism being a "racism" based purely on religion, or they'll internalize it as Ashkenazis being purely "not-white" and therefore reject the idea of Jews benefiting from white supremacy entirely. This is because right now the dialogue is really bad at separating out different aspects of racism and "whiteness" and instead defines it as a single checkbox. In reality the entire idea of "whiteness" has too many different components to be accurately divided up in all cases (even if it works in the majority of cases) and trying to shove Jews into a box doesn't really work. As a they/them it reminds me of gender in a lot of ways.

TLDR: Whiteness means multiple things, some of which Jews have and others Jews don't.