#pentagon-sama

pentagon-sama replied to your post:So confused about why people pushing monosexism...

i guess it’s because mono=attracted to one gender and ace is not attracted to anyone at all, ie not one gender, ie nonmono?

Snow White:  Do you consider yourself pretty?

sometimes depending on my self confidence but i know that one time anna was going to the bathroom and got distracted for an hour looking at herself in the mirror

Rapunzel:  Do you like being outside?

no

Rumpelstiltskin:  What is the meaning of your url?

congratulations!!

not surprising. i also just saw an sj blogger reblog a post saying the nazi imagery wasn't nearly as bad as Drake saying he likes fat women in the song though he never dates them in real life

NOOB

I know the feeling. I’ve also had white supremacist literally treat me as non-white. Like several months ago, I had one neo nazi talk about my attitudes toward white people, clearly talking about me as if I was not one of them. It was the first time I’d ever experience that and it was incredibly upsetting and baffling for me at the time. Most of the time people consider me to be white—especially since I live in a big city in the US.

The whiteness of non-PoC Jews in the US is a big point of contention, debate and complexity. I would say we definitely have a lot of white privilege. I’ve used the term “conditional whiteness,” and I’ve seen other people (including PoC) use this term for us before.

I really want to stress, though, that in the US we have a lot of access to whiteness—a lot more than white passing PoC do. And for me, 99% percent of the time I am treated as white. I have experienced a few instances where I felt racialized as other, though. I’ve had a man hit on me and fetishize my “foreign” features before (although he described them as European and asked if I was from Easten Europe). I’ve had people think I’m from somewhere else (another country I mean). I’ve also, like I said, had white supremacists target me online, and I fear them on a level i know WASPS (that is, non-Jewish white people) don’t have to fear them. In trying to connect with my heritage and identity, I’ve found this process difficult and the experience of Jewish ethnic erasure and assimilation very unlike what I think people of uncomplicatedly white ethnicities ever experience.

But yes, we are not PoC by any stretch of the imagination. And the vast majority of time in my waking life I have loads and loads of white privilege and have to check myself much like most other white people. I also do think some of this can come down to geographical location. When I lived in a rural area in high school, people were much more overtly antisemitic and would literally call people “Jew” as an insult, laugh at my brother during a presentation on the Holocaust, and ask him shit like “where’s your gold chain?” Stuff like that. But where I live now I pretty much never encounter anything like that (except for that one fetishizing dude and a few people who have thought i was from another country - but those are three instances in my entire five years living here).

I also agree with you about the weird othering that can happen to us in debates about racism. For instance, once I was talking to my (non-Jewish and white) mom about a death threat I got in an anonymous submission on tumblr. This person called me a kike and said I should be slaughtered like a pig, and, frighteningly enough, seemed to attend my college, given that the email they used was from my school. And this happened, one day after I shared my blog with people in one of my classes. This resulted in me dropping all my classes and carrying pepper spray on me and fearing for my safety. After I told my mother about this, she started telling me about an experience of ~reverse racism~ she experienced as if it were the same. I felt REALLY othered and really racialized as non-white in that moment. Like you, up until recently, I went through my whole life blissfully believing I was white and had the same access to whiteness as everyone else, and I never had to question it until I saw Jewish bloggers on tumblr talk about it. And then I never really questioned it deeply until that neo-nazi overtly treated me as not white.

So in short, it’s complicated. We aren’t PoC, we have privilege over PoC, which becomes even more obvious when you compare our experiences to PoC Jews, AND we have a lot of access to white privilege, but the fact KKK members and other white supremacists literally obsess over us and commit hate crimes against us and see us as “enemies to the white race” really shows that it’s not quite so clean cut. Different people have different views on the Jewish question of whiteness. To be honest, I move back and forth a little. I get worried about us non-PoC Jews in the US downplaying our white privilege. But at the same time there’s this weird tension where tons of Jews strive to assimilate into whiteness and disappear into it, and yet so many people won’t let this happen. Like, either we are good Jews and our Jewishness is erased or we are bad Jews and it’s emphasized and degraded. There’s not usually much outside of this dichotomy (the exception of course being Holocaust survivors because that plays into a particular US-friendly narrative). And we often get punished the more we overtly display our Jewishness: we are expected to downplay and hide it and are rewarded for that. Consider the fact many Jewish celebrities like Jon Stewart change their names to be more goyish. As far as I know, there aren’t people of uncomplicatedly white ethnicities doing shit like the en masse in 2014.