Obscanity: You'll know it when you see it

“I’m not racist, but you’re black! Black, black, BLACK!” | The Bilerico Project.

I am so goddamned sick of people assigning whiteness to Jews. What the hell? Have these people ever been Jewish in a room full of white people? You know you’re not white – and more importantly, SO DO THEY.

No, we don’t know what it’s like to be African-American. No, we don’t know what it’s like to be Chicano/a. No, we don’t know what it’s like to be Asian/Pacific Islander. But YES, we know what it’s like to be Something Other Than White. We know what it’s like for people to attribute the actions of individuals to our entire community. We know what it’s like for the mainstream to form obnoxious stereotypes and caricatures of our perceived physical features, cultural traditions, sexuality, gender expression, and personality traits. We know what it’s like to have people make assumptions about our trustworthiness and morality based on our ethnicity. We know what it’s like to carry the collective burden and psychological damage of surviving generations of persecution and genocide and, simultaneously, to have people tell us, “It wasn’t that bad,” or “You weren’t even there,” or, “It was so long ago – will you just get over it already?”

We know what it’s like to lose our languages, some of us because our parents so desired assimilation that they refused to teach it to us, and some of us because our children resist learning it. We know what it’s like to have people scream racial epithets at our children from passing cars. We know what it’s like for our neighbors to regard us by our identity first and our personality second, and to whip out the epithets the minute they get mad at us for something personal. We know what it’s like to feel completely alienated from the K-12 curriculum because let’s face it, that’s not OUR literature or history – except maybe for a couple of lessons when we get to learn how much more it sucked to be us in the past. We know what it’s like to have people tell us we’re playing a race card, crying wolf, or being overly sensitive if we dare to mention examples of racism against us. We know what it’s like to be pressured into observing mainstream national celebrations which serve as stark reminders of our own persecution throughout the years. We know what it’s like for people to question our patriotism and loyalty to this country because we “come from somewhere else,” even if we’ve been here for generations.

Many of us knew what a bomb threat was before we knew what sex was, and experienced the former a decade before the latter. We know what it’s like to dread the slightest bit of conflict – be it international conflict or domestic economic turmoil – because our schools, community centers and places of worship will inevitably either receive said bomb threats or be shot up by racist wingnuts who don’t give a shit if they shoot adults or toddlers, because we’re all the same to them. We know what it’s like to be blamed.

So maybe we don’t know what it’s like to be you – but you don’t know what it’s like to be us, either.

That said…

I think we need to acknowledge that many of us – particularly Ashkenazim, but some Sephardim too – can ‘pass’ as white, particularly in large urban areas. However, 1) not all of us can pass; 2) our ability to pass depends on the presence of people who *don’t* look white; and 3) our passing depends on our willingness to be silent about who we are – a Semitic people who may happen to have white features mixed into our gene pool as a result of centuries of rape and violence. Intermarriage and conversion have become factors in the last couple of generations, but for most white-looking Jews, it’s mostly gonna be about rape and pogroms. Where did you think we came up with matrilineal descent, anyway?

This puts us in an awkward position; to people of color, we’re “white Europeans,” but to white Europeans, we’re Jews – we weren’t white OR European in Europe, so why would we be white AND European here? Case in point: I had my grandfather tested via one of those ancestral DNA companies. It doesn’t matter how long our family spent in eastern Europe. His DNA – that of his father’s father’s father – still carries the stamp of the Mediterranean / Fertile Crescent. We’re JEWS no matter how you spin it.

Now, don’t get me wrong – many of us absolutely are privileged by our skin color, to the extent that we are willing to shut our mouths and accept that privilege without dissenting about the way that privilege is distributed or withheld. And there are some complex issues within the Jewish community, e.g. confusion about – or more often suspicion of – black Jews, and also color-based tension and social/economic inequality between Ashkenazim and Sephardim. But more than anything else, I think a lot of this conflict and complexity is the result of 1) the “passability” of Ashkenazim, and therefore 2) Ashkenazi Jews being willing to take on this mantle of whiteness as though it belongs to us. There are definitely some Jews who self-identify as white, Jews who are happy to play the white role for the sake of keeping the privilege they get from their light skin and from relying on the oppression of people of color to distract white people from their own difference. Call me crazy, but I think that’s irresponsible – and yes, RACIST. We owe it to ourselves not to accept it.

If nothing else, it is a horrible insult to those millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust precisely because they weren’t white. And this is not to say, “Let’s resist whiteness because the Nazis were white.” That’s not what I mean here. It’s deeper than that – I’m asking, what is the prize here? What is the lesson to be learned from the Holocaust – that Jews should fight to achieve whiteness? Maybe that’s one component of the endless turmoil in Israel – the faction of right-wing extremists who believe that our prize for enduring the Holocaust is the right to be Just Like Them – not Nazis, per se, but people who assert their privilege at the expense of others’ well-being. That’s a huge generalization that misses the complexities of Zionism, Jewish nationalism, but I think it’s still a legitimate observation.

So again I ask, have we truly won anything when all we can say is, “At long last, we Jews are granted access to whiteness, so long as we also succumb to assimilation and agree to participate in the perpetuation of alleged white superiority”? Is that a prize worth winning? It’s not one that I want. Shouldn’t we have our eye on the real prize, a society where we can acknowledge people’s different ancestral roots and heritages without assigning supremacy to one group over others? Do we have to live in a melting pot, or can we aim to live in a giant stew where we can layer flavors and spices without losing our own shape and texture?

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