...so, let me tell you a story about the last time someone looked at my blond hair and blue eyes and assumed I "looked like a Nazi".
I was at the D.C. Holocaust Memorial Museum on a 6th grade class tour.
The docent looked at me and used me as an example for the whole group, saying that, "with your blond hair and blue eyes, you would have been a member of the Hitler Youth."
Here's the thing: I'm Jewish.
And here's the other thing: because I'm Jewish, being at that place was already pretty hard for me. And my 12yo ass was running low on spoons.
The entire class gasped when the docent said I'd be a Nazi sympathizer, because they were remembering what happened two weeks before...
When my teacher had asked the class if anyone was Jewish, and I had nervously raised my hand.... and he asked, "did you have any relatives in the camps?" I had swallowed hard, and then said, "Yes, I did. And you do not get to ask me that, and I'm not talking about it."
Thankfully, my teacher was immediately aware of just how much he Fucked Up™️, and had apologized and we had moved on.
But this docent had also just Fucked The Fuck Up™️, and she didn't get the benefit of the doubt, and the entire class knew it and were waiting to hear what I was going to say about it.
12yo me looked her dead in the face and said, "No the FUCK I would not. I'm Jewish. You know how we got blond hair and blue eyes into our Ashkenazi gene pool? We either made the choice to marry a gentile in the hope of assimilating a little bit and maybe being chased less often with torches and pitchforks, or we were raped by Nazis and managed to somehow survive the living hell of the camps. Every time I look in the mirror, I am faced with the knowledge that I look the way I do because people thought it was okay to exterminate my people for existing, or to take away freedom over our own bodies."
And then I walked away, because 12yo me just remembered that I was on a school field trip and swearing usually ended up getting you detention.
That same teacher from before? He came over to where I was, and I was convinced I was in big trouble. But he asked if I was okay, and what I needed. If I needed to be alone, if I needed to call someone... and he assured me I was not in trouble, despite making the docent cry. Because I was right.
I ended up staying and walking through the museum with everyone, because I decided I needed to stay- I needed to acknowledge what my people and my family had been through, and I would not let that docent who judged me based on appearance (who worked at a museum meant to teach that judging people based on appearance is BAD) break me.
You have no idea how someone's genetics got that way. And yes, blue eyes are recessive, but someone with brown eyes may have gotten that blue-eye gene in many different ways, some of which are horrific.
I have blue on my father's side because that family line is Celtic and Scandinavian. There's a whole lot of blue eyes up there. I have it on my mother's side because I have multiple female relatives who were raped by Nazis, and were pregnant when they were released from the concentration camps.
If you claim to hate Nazis, but also believe that anyone with a certain physical trait must be a terrible person who is better off dead or not contributing to the gene pool?
You just sat down at their table, and you're far more like them than I ever will be.
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