"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/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.