in Alabama, Amendment 2 would restrict abortion rights, completely banning it if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which is now likely.
in Arkansas, Issue 2 would disenfranchise voters by requiring photo ID.
in Florida, Amendment 5 would make it much harder to raise taxes.
in Louisiana, Amendment 1 would ban people with felony records who’ve served their time from running for office for 5 years, even if their offense was just e.g. marijuana possession.
in Oregon, Measure 105 would repeal its sanctuary state law protecting immigrants, and Measure 106 would restrict abortion rights by banning public funds from being spent on abortions.
in West Virginia, Amendment 1 would completely ban abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned, which is now likely.
in Arkansas, Issue 5 would raise the minimum wage to $11.
in California, Prop 2 would fund housing for the homeless, and Prop 10 would allow local rent control.
in Colorado, Amendment A would fucking ban slavery as punishment for a crime. (yes, that’s a real thing.) Amendments Y and Z would hopefully limit gerrymandering. Amendment 73 would tax the rich to pay for education. Proposition 111 would crack down on predatory payday loans.
in Florida, Amendment 4 would restore voting rights to people with felony records who’ve served their time, and Amendment 9 would ban offshore drilling (and also vaping in the workplace, because Florida is weird).
in Idaho, Proposition 2 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
in Maine, Question 1 would fund a universal home-care program for disabled people and older adults.
in Maryland, Question 2 would allow election-day voter registration.
in Massachusetts, Question 3 would protect the state’s transgender anti-discrimination law which is under attack. (it’s not good that this question is on the ballot, but you do need to vote YES on it.)
in Michigan, Proposal 1 would legalize recreational marijuana, and Proposal 3 would strengthen voting rights by instituting automatic voter registration, expanding absentee voting, pushing back deadlines, and more.
in Missouri, Amendment 2, Amendment 3, and Proposition C would all legalize medical marijuana (but they’d tax it different amounts and use the taxes for different things — you be the judge). Amendment 1 would make reforms to lobbying, campaign finance, and redistricting, and Proposition B would raise the minimum wage to $12.
in Montana, I-185 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
in Nebraska, Initiative 427 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
in Nevada, Question 5 would allow automatic voter registration, and Question 6 would require renewable energy.
in North Dakota, Measure 3 would legalize recreational marijuana and expunge existing marijuana convictions.
in Ohio, Issue 1 would downgrade drug possession offenses from felonies to misdemeanors and provide for some criminal justice reforms.
in Utah, Proposition 2 would legalize medical marijuana, and Proposition 3 would expand Medicaid eligibility.
in Washington, Initiative 940 would train cops not to murder people, and Initiative 1631 would charge polluters a fee on carbon emissions and fund environmental programs.
the outcomes of these and other important initiatives will be determined at the ballot box. you can make a direct impact on these issues in your state by doing your research and voting.
can’t vote? search for an organization supporting (or opposing) the initiative you care about, and consider donating your time or money to help them out.
(please note that i’m not an expert on all of these initiatives. you may conclude for example that one of them sounds good, but isn’t implemented well so you can’t support it. that’s fine! but now you know what’s going on in your state and can have your say, and that’s a good thing.)
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 itsmany 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?
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.
i’m gonna type up a quick rant on ‘white Jews’ here.
this is a picture of me. most of you have seen me before. the majority of you also know that i’m a Mizrahi-Maghrebi Jew, meaning i find my roots* both in the Jews of the Mashriq and the Jews of the Maghreb. more specifically, i’m ethnically from both Iraq and Morocco. so if i’m Middle Eastern and North African, why is my skin so light?
the short, angry answer is that Jews aren’t white and white people don’t have lighter features patented. maybe you guys haven’t been clued in, but white as a concept does not mean light skin.
have any of you ever seen Laila Mourad? she was a Mizrahi (Iraqi) Jew who was probably even lighter than i am.
i guess Laila is white too, huh?
do you know where my coloring comes from? if you say Europe or white people, then you’re wrong. my coloring comes from Morocco—specifically my Amazigh ancestry. Amazigh is usually called ‘Berber’ in English (i don’t like that word in the least) and it’s basically indigenous people of North Africa. here are some pictures of Imazighen:
we are diverse in facial features and coloring—but at the end of the day, we aren’t white. we aren’t even TREATED white by any of you—so why should we force ourselves to identify as white?
you don’t own my light skin. you don’t own my blue eyes. you don’t own my brown hair. you sure as heck don’t want to own my clearly Jewish nose or my Jewish facial structure—so what makes you think you can own the coloring passed down to me via the Imazighen who’ve lived in Africa forever?
you don’t get to colonize our identities and features too.
*all Jews find their ultimate roots in the Middle East, ‘even’ Ashkenazi Jews.
also this is a really poorly written post, i’m just annoyed at goyim ugh
Yeahh, PoC are capable of producing light pigmentation ‘cause pigmentation is a genetic thing!!! *gasp* Some populations have a more centralized phenotype but people are genetically diverse so different pigmentations pop up everywhere!
And when I say “whiteness,” I include concepts such as white-passing, conditional whiteness and functional whiteness. I am no longer going to discuss Jews in terms of whiteness.
First of all, confident assertions about the whiteness of Jews as a whole, certain kinds of Jews and/or a particular Jewish person relies on treating race as biology and geography, which is diametrically opposed to the purpose of using the phrase “people of color.”
Secondly, a lot of those “white Jews” live under a particular set of circumstances that only applies to a narrow segment of Jewish people, a segment that is deeply assimilated into mainstream American culture, all the way down to internalizing its most toxic attitudes and behaviors. The issue of Jews and assimilation beyond stringent halachic observance is a conversation worth having, but not like that.
Calling most Jews white because they’re lighter than a brown paper bag relies on an understanding of racial oppression that uses the Black American experience as a control group or a measuring stick, which I’ve repeatedly expressed my frustration with. If we go by that, every non-Black and non-Native group who willingly came to the United States is white. That sounds really ignorant when said out loud, doesn’t it? Ignores a lot of history, a lot of struggle, a lot of intergenerational trauma, doesn’t it? Yeah, exactly.
If I can be real for a second, I notice strong parallels between antisemitic stereotypes and anti-Asian ones, and I don’t believe that’s an accident. I remember when there was real, earnest discussion about whether East Asian people should be considered honorary whites and therefore exempt from anti-discrimination policies, particularly college admission. (And, when I’m feeling cynical, it comes with an added dose of, “See? They hate, fear, and exploit Black people too!”) No, this was not on Tumblr. This was in reputable media sources.
Thirdly, my experience with gentiles who are convinced of the whiteness of Jews is similar to Eric K. Ward’s. There’s something distinctly regional about it because most of the people I’ve encountered who are intractable about the whiteness of Jews are from New York and Chicago. I wasn’t particularly surprised by what happened at Chicago Dyke March, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing happens in New York, Los Angeles or DC. I’d be more shocked if it happened at the Albuquerque Dyke March. Not saying that they love Jews in Albuquerque, but places like NYC and Chicago maintain a certain brand of antisemitism that masks itself as resisting injustice. Not saying that these places are more antisemitic, just that the expression of it is different and often unacknowledged and unexamined. In my neck of the woods, antisemitism is more like–well, you remember Charlottesville.
Fourth, the majority of concepts and frameworks that dominate how we talk about racial justice are by and for people who are insiders to US history and culture, even if their experience of it is a horror show. Make no mistake, lots of folks on this website decry US-centrism as a way to shut Black Americans up when we talk about our experiences with antiblackness. Even so, there is an awful lot of projecting US racial dynamics onto non-US contexts, ignoring the historical, political and cultural distinctions of US racism. Don’t get it twisted. This doesn’t make other countries into some post-racial utopia. It just means that the how it functions and who it targets does not neatly map onto the US context. (Though everybody seems to have it out for Black folks, including other Black folks.)
Fifth, and this is where I’m gonna lose you if I haven’t already, I honestly believe that whiteness and Jewishness are antithetical to one another.
To be white is to own every place you go to. To be a Jew is to wander in search of home. To be white is to always be on the VIP list. To be a Jew is to never forget that we were strangers. To be white is to ignore the past. To be a Jew is to remember, remember, remember. To be white is to be a god to be obeyed. To be Jewish is to struggle with God.
Take whiteness away, and what is left? Whiteness is a blank sheet of paper. Whiteness has no center. It has neither roots nor wings. Whiteness rules the world (for now), but it sold its soul.
If (when) whiteness goes away, there will still be Jews.
Yep, don’t whitewash all Jews’ experiences solely based on their skin tone. We definitely will always have certain elements of white privilege inevitably because of our skin color, particularly in the United States, but it is far from being a monolithic privileged experience, especially for immigrant/ refugee Jews, poor Jews, disabled Jews, etc. Even just more “Jewish looking” Ashkenazi Jews or Jews who more openly express/show their Jewishness. It’s nuanced and complicated and reducing Jews to just being white is pretty fucking ignorant and antisemitic. It’s an erasure of Jewish experiences of oppression.
And when I say “whiteness,” I include concepts such as white-passing, conditional whiteness and functional whiteness. I am no longer going to discuss Jews in terms of whiteness.
First of all, confident assertions about the whiteness of Jews as a whole, certain kinds of Jews and/or a particular Jewish person relies on treating race as biology and geography, which is diametrically opposed to the purpose of using the phrase “people of color.”
Secondly, a lot of those “white Jews” live under a particular set of circumstances that only applies to a narrow segment of Jewish people, a segment that is deeply assimilated into mainstream American culture, all the way down to internalizing its most toxic attitudes and behaviors. The issue of Jews and assimilation beyond stringent halachic observance is a conversation worth having, but not like that.
Calling most Jews white because they’re lighter than a brown paper bag relies on an understanding of racial oppression that uses the Black American experience as a control group or a measuring stick, which I’ve repeatedly expressed my frustration with. If we go by that, every non-Black and non-Native group who willingly came to the United States is white. That sounds really ignorant when said out loud, doesn’t it? Ignores a lot of history, a lot of struggle, a lot of intergenerational trauma, doesn’t it? Yeah, exactly.
If I can be real for a second, I notice strong parallels between antisemitic stereotypes and anti-Asian ones, and I don’t believe that’s an accident. I remember when there was real, earnest discussion about whether East Asian people should be considered honorary whites and therefore exempt from anti-discrimination policies, particularly college admission. (And, when I’m feeling cynical, it comes with an added dose of, “See? They hate, fear, and exploit Black people too!”) No, this was not on Tumblr. This was in reputable media sources.
Thirdly, my experience with gentiles who are convinced of the whiteness of Jews is similar to Eric K. Ward’s. There’s something distinctly regional about it because most of the people I’ve encountered who are intractable about the whiteness of Jews are from New York and Chicago. I wasn’t particularly surprised by what happened at Chicago Dyke March, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing happens in New York, Los Angeles or DC. I’d be more shocked if it happened at the Albuquerque Dyke March. Not saying that they love Jews in Albuquerque, but places like NYC and Chicago maintain a certain brand of antisemitism that masks itself as resisting injustice. Not saying that these places are more antisemitic, just that the expression of it is different and often unacknowledged and unexamined. In my neck of the woods, antisemitism is more like–well, you remember Charlottesville.
Fourth, the majority of concepts and frameworks that dominate how we talk about racial justice are by and for people who are insiders to US history and culture, even if their experience of it is a horror show. Make no mistake, lots of folks on this website decry US-centrism as a way to shut Black Americans up when we talk about our experiences with antiblackness. Even so, there is an awful lot of projecting US racial dynamics onto non-US contexts, ignoring the historical, political and cultural distinctions of US racism. Don’t get it twisted. This doesn’t make other countries into some post-racial utopia. It just means that the how it functions and who it targets does not neatly map onto the US context. (Though everybody seems to have it out for Black folks, including other Black folks.)
Fifth, and this is where I’m gonna lose you if I haven’t already, I honestly believe that whiteness and Jewishness are antithetical to one another.
To be white is to own every place you go to. To be a Jew is to wander in search of home. To be white is to always be on the VIP list. To be a Jew is to never forget that we were strangers. To be white is to ignore the past. To be a Jew is to remember, remember, remember. To be white is to be a god to be obeyed. To be Jewish is to struggle with God.
Take whiteness away, and what is left? Whiteness is a blank sheet of paper. Whiteness has no center. It has neither roots nor wings. Whiteness rules the world (for now), but it sold its soul.
If (when) whiteness goes away, there will still be Jews.
“But, Eshu, if you’re not discussing Jews in terms of whiteness, how are we going to discuss the ways that some Jews are privileged over others because of skin color? Or anti-blackness within Jewish spaces like you’realwaysharpingabout? Or the ways that some Jews flat-out collaborate with white nationalists?”
I’m glad you asked, dear reader!
We can talk about colorism. We can talk about horizontal aggression. We can talk about internalized white supremacy. We can talk about assimilation. But none of that requires framing Jewishness as a form of whiteness or defaulting to white when talking about “regular” Jews.
THANK YOU.
(And a reminder for those in the back, calling (Ashkenazi) Jews white because of Ben Shapiro and Jared Kushner is about as stupid as calling Japanese people white because Japan collaborated with the Nazis. So shut up.)
A reminder, the president did not merely call himself a nationalist. He posited himself a nationalist as opposed to a globalist, which is a well worn antisemitic canard. In context, nationalism here is not a love for country, it is a statement of white ethnonationalism.
Death By Catchphrase 