There is a really interesting trend circulating around social justice blogs on tumblr. It has to do with racialization of ethnic groups, and deeming oneself as the authority on racial subjugation of ethnic groups, despite their less than satisfactory knowledge on how racism works. How is it that they don’t understand how racism works? Well, they do, to a limited extent. Racism only goes as far as they say it does, and because they have deemed it so, it clearly must be absolute truth. This is fallacious on so may levels.
thisiswhiteprivilege is a blog that discusses examples of white privilege in the U.S. and how it affects people. Recently, as many of you on tumblr may have recalled, there has been some controversy generated over a few statements made by the mods about racialization of Jewish people. The mods made enough questionable statements that lead me to the conclusion that they really do not have a full understanding of how complicated the issue actually is.
“Jews were not considered white at the time of the Holocaust. Now with their status as white, they’re oppression is something we are supposed to “never forget,” while slavery and the continued genocide against people of color all over the world is something we’re supposed to “get over” and we’re supposed to “stop using the race card.” For reparations of the Holocaust, the Jews got an entire country.” *
No, they were not considered white. And yet, here, it’s just immediately assume they are considered white everywhere. This is not the case. As pointed out in a later ask, Jews can access white privilege here in the U.S. But the forced assimilation of Jewish people as white is not a solidified experience as it is with white European immigrants and descendants of Anglo-Saxon, Germanic, and other Western-Europeans. They have a sealed experience as white people (in the U.S., mind you) and will be regarded as such. With Jews, whiteness is multi-axial and layered and doesn’t exist in a nutshell. A more correct “racialization” of some Jews in the U.S. is conditionally white-passing. Many Jews pass as white (in some scenarios) and may even identify as white, but as a Jewish blogger once told me, “there’s also a deep collective understanding that we are not white people in a white world”. [Bolded for emphasis.]
I think this quote rather nicely sums up the whiteness of Jews in the U.S.:“We — my sister, mother, and I — were constantly urged to speak quietly in public, to dress without ostentation, to repress all vividness or spontaneity, to assimilate with a world which might see us as too flamboyant. I suppose that my mother, pure gentile though she was, could be seen as acting “common” or “Jewish” if she laughed too loudly or spoke aggressively. My father’s mother, who lived with us half the year, was a model of circumspect behavior, dressed in dark blue or lavender, retiring in company, ladylike to an extreme, wearing no jewelry except a good gold chain, a narrow brooch, or a string of pearls. A few times within the family, I saw her anger flare, felt the passion she was repressing. But when Arnold took us out to a restaurant or on a trip, the Rich women were always tuned down to some WASP level my father believed, surely, would protect us all — maybe also make us unrecognizable to the “real Jews” who wanted to seize us, drag us back to the shtetl, the ghetto, in its many manifestations.“
Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity”Jewish whiteness is assimilation, and though, yes, the privilege of whiteness and the colorism/racism they exhibit is problematic, ignoring their experience is highly dangerous. What exactly is whiteness, again?
As defined by eastafrodite, whiteness is:
a political, societal and institutional structure of racial hierarchy that generally puts white people at the top, whereas PoC are aligned in accordance to their intersectionality (class, race, skin color, gender identity, sexuality, etc).
and by Mehreen Kasana:”The practices of whiteness and the accompanying “white race” were invented in the US in specific and in the West in general as part of a system of racial oppression designed to relegate Others to the bottom of social and global hierarchy. Racial oppression is a key element in whiteness and white people benefit disproportionally from the race and class hierarchy maintained by whiteness.“ *
So, to an extent, yes, certain Jews can access white privilege based on economic standing, physical makeup (to an extent,) and other socioeconomic and sociocultural factors; but their whiteness is conditional and complicated. That’s in the U.S. alone. Their status as white is virtually non-existent in Europe, as evidenced by being singled out by other Europeans, otherized and dehumanized by Europeans, even in Germany, having antisemitic, anti-Roma, and anti-LGBTQAI+ political parties come to power in European countries such as Hungary and Greece (And in Greece, the Golden Dawn has been targeting Jews and Rromani for as long as they have existed and no one has made a scene about the party until trans* people recently became targeted!) You want to pretend that Jews have a solidified experience worldwide, but this is not the case. “White” Jews are not racialized as white outside of the U.S., and their whiteness in the U.S. is conditional, coupled with otherizing and antisemitism. Don’t forget that the U.S. also has European Immigrants, so Jews and Rromani aren’t safe here when the immigrants are around either. Mehreen Kasana so perfectly puts it into words:
“…what many people tend to do on social media especially Tumblr: Wherein light-skinned POC are instantly thrown aside due to a highly superficial reason aforementioned. I understand that light-skinned privilege is certainly a thing; It exists in brown and black cultures but what Tumblr seems to forget is that many light-skinned, non-white cultures have gone through actual genocides, wars, embargo, racial profiling, spying and even more. And while they do have a certain privilege in terms of being more “aesthetically pleasant” to racists, their historical struggles should never be brushed aside so abrasively.“ *
Several bloggers have talked about being light-skinned PoC and “racialized” as white without considering their historical and cultural background, such as Uma in their dissertation on whiteness in relation to Jews. Mehreen brings up an interesting point. As a whole, Jews are generally regarded as non-white, and they’ve gone through several wars, genocides, forced migration, and other atrocities. But, wait, thisiswhiteprivilege says that we should brush aside their oppression because the only reason people make a big deal about is because Jews are white. Let’s examine this.
Antisemitism is definitely a thing, but there’s a reason why it’s called antisemitism and not racism, and that’s because Jews are considered white and, for the most part, benefit from white privilege.
- Jews are most certainly not considered white in all due sincerity, and definitely were not considered white during the attempted annihilation of their people.
- Antisemitism IS racism, as the whole purpose of WWII antisemitism was to purify the Aryan race. The thing is that antisemitism is based on ethnic-discrimination and not discrimination based on colorism, as racism is most commonly perpetuated in the U.S. We have a term for racism against black people, too: antiblackness. Racism is rooted in antiblackness, but as it’s noted, isn’t limited to black people and scopes anyone regarded as a PoC in the hierarchy of whiteness created by imperialism and colonialism.
- The idea that we’re told to “never forget” the Holocaust because the Jews were white is so extremely problematic and erasing the entire reason the whole thing even happened!!
Again, Mehreen brings up an excellent point in that light-skinned cultures (whether they’re racialized as PoC or white) have gone through various atrocities throughout history, and tumblr conveniently ignores these realities to justify their limitations by using the U.S.-centric lens.
If we really only remember the Holocaust (which included the genocide of Rroma, a factor almost always ignored, as well LGBTQAI+, people with disabilities, and religious minorities) because the Jews are “white” (total erasure of PoC Jews) then we would also remember…
- the Jedwabne, Farhud, Iași, Lwów, Kiev, Białystok, Kishinev/Chișinău, Tripoli, Aleppo, Kielce, Yekaterinoslav, Rostov-on-Don, Gomel, Tredegar, Kaunas, Oujda, Jerada, and Aden, in which Jews faced violent pogroms
- the history of European antisemitism and how Jews have been persecuted for centuries, and not just the Inquisition and passing mentions of the Black Death massacres
- How the U.S. REFUSED Jewish migrants into the country during WWII prior to the discovery of the concentration camps
as well as atrocities committed to groups racialized as white in the U.S.
- We would have extensive knowledge about the genocide against the Pontian and Anatolian Greeks in Ottoman Turkey, which numbered up to about 1.5 million deaths
- We would also be discussing about the Armenian genocide (which also occurred in the Ottoman Empire, which also amounted to about 1.5 million deaths.
- We would also know about how the Greeks are generally regarded as non-white in Europe (even modern Greece’s racist policies has less to do with Greek culture and more to do with the European Union) and how their culture and history was romanticized by Anglo-Saxon and Germanic writers and absorbed in their writings to feed their Eurocentric ideologies * * *
- In general, there would also be more coverage on the marginalization of Eastern European groups during WWII in addition to our coverage on the Holocaust
But we don’t. The real reason why the U.S. sensationalizes the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust (and ignores the other victims) has absolutely nothing to do with the Jews, but everything with the U.S. involvement in WWII. The U.S. did NOT care about the Jews until they discovered the concentration camps during their heroic conquest of Europe, redeeming the world through violence!! *sarcasm* And with every country they colonized (such as Japan, where we also have the “Never forget! narrative * *) they adopted this ideology of the Holocaust. The publicity of the event went something like this:
“After World War II, a new consensus emerged in the United States and Europe that Jews had to be integrated posthumously into white Europeanness, and that the horror of the Jewish holocaust was essentially a horror at the murder of white Europeans. Since the 1960s, Hollywood films about the holocaust began to depict Jewish victims of Nazism as white Christian-looking, middle class, educated and talented people not unlike contemporary European and American Christians who should and would identify with them. Presumably if the films were to depict the poor religious Jews of Eastern Europe (and most East European Jews who were killed by the Nazis were poor and many were religious), contemporary white Christians would not find commonality with them. Hence, the post-holocaust European Christian horror at the genocide of European Jews was not based on the horror of slaughtering people in the millions who were different from European Christians, but rather a horror at the murder of millions of people who were the same as European Christians. This explains why in a country like the United States, which had nothing to do with the slaughter of European Jews, there exists upwards of 40 holocaust memorials and a major museum for the murdered Jews of Europe, but not one for the holocaust of Native Americans or African Americans for which the US is responsible.“
The Last of the Semites by Joseph Massad(Keep in mind, though, that this portion leaves out how the Rroma and other groups were erased from the Holocaust Narrative)
Keeping your understanding of racism limited to U.S.-centric prerogatives opens up numerous opportunities for you to erase experiences and delegitimize the struggles that PoC groups face, even if they are not visibly PoC. Racializing PoC as white based on their perceived color within a U.S. context is equally as detrimental to eradicating the Kyriarchy as perpetuation of white privilege and racism within institutionalized settings. Identity policing and refusing to acknowledge the limitations of color-based racialization is noxious and erroneous and needs end. Color-based racism isn’t the only existing form of racism and U.S. racial stratification isn’t universal.
I think my point is perfectly summed up in this post:
Blogs which revel in “calling out” people on their privilege, most predominantly anything with the phrase thisis_________privilege (insert word of choice), tend to be run by people fueled by an intense need for acceptance and validation of their self-righteous nature. I don’t buy their efforts as a desire to educate, or promote change. Their lack of knowledge on the subjects they so ardently pontificate on, and a virtually non-existent consideration of social and cultural world history, only make their blogs platforms for petty bickering. If you want to understand oppression, privilege, social justice, or any of the like, I suggest you log off Tumblr and forget anything you’ve read about “checking your privilege” on this site.
That’s it for today, folks.
“Why are you reblogging this old-assed post, Eshu?”
Because I don’t have the energy to compile all the information and analysis myself, so people looking for factual information and nuanced analysis can have some.
thisiswhiteprivilege are unquestionably antisemites who fail to understand the nuance (or hell, the fucking in-your-face simplicity) of jewish suffering and history. no denying that, but
what about converts who are undeniably, unconditionally white?
where do we fit in this narrative? i have yet to see anyone address this at all. it seems to me that viewing all jews as non-white is still problematic, especially since ashkenazi jews have more societal privilege than black gentiles in north america?
and on the flip side, those of us who are undoubtedly white have still experienced antisemitism on the basis of religion rather than race.
white people are racist but they’re also xenophobic. if someone has a different religion, culture and language to you, even if they’re white, you’re more likely to view them as separate from you.
does being viewed as non-white make you non-white? or are you referring to this monolithic white culture that only has one heritage, language and history? (meaning, anyone who diverges from this is inherently not white?)
where do we fit in this narrative? i have yet to see anyone address this at all. it seems to me that viewing all jews as non-white is still problematic, especially since ashkenazi jews have more societal privilege than black gentiles in north america?
*sigh*
Can we stop using anti-Blackness as the measuring stick for “real” oppression?
Can we not use the suffing and death of Black people to legitimize or delegitimize the oppression of non-Black people?
Don’t non-Black Jews have enough real history to work through without making a rhetorical prop out of Black people’s?
right, but since i absolutely did not say that jews dont experience real oppression or suffering, my questions remain unanswered. this is an issue that every white convert has to deal with on their journey but in even asking, we get accused of invalidating the jewish struggle. especially when we have many articles from black jews that say otherwise.
You have completely missed my point, and hoisting up think pieces by other Black Jews as a way of avoiding the critique is exactly how not to respond to the problem I have with what you said.
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