I had a good friend who worked at my Toyota dealer. He is Persian. Went to pick up my car and i told the Black woman behind the counter my name was Torres, which is a Hispanic name. Of course I always "mispronounce" my name because I don't roll my Rs. My friend teased me "Torres, Torres, roll your Rs! You're such a white girl! The Black woman, trying not to choke, scolded him by saying "You did NOT just call her a white girl!" I explained that I am Irish/Swedish which is considered white. Except that my skin is more Olive and a lot of the year I am always well tanned.
People offhandedly throw these racial descriptors around like confetti without any real knowledge about the person they are describing. There's no good reason to use such descriptors in most of the situations they are asked for.
Yes, in fact for many years - maybe 18th, 19th centuries in some places in the US? - Jews were not considered white, just as neither Italians nor other Mediterranean people were who had darker skin and features than “typical” Anglo Northern Europeans. It was clearly a method of othering and I believe there is also some scholarship on this.
I think it's important to note that there are Jews across the racial categories (unstable as those categories are), and that one of the difficult things when we talk about whether or not antisemitism is also racism is that white Jews certainly have a very different experience than Black Jews do, and that the complexity of the question of racism is in part based on the fact that race doesn't really exist, in any biological sense, and so definitions and arguments can treat it elastically to make whatever point the interlocutor wants to make.
That is very true--and it extended into the early 20th century. Jews, along with with anyone from southern and eastern Europe (the bulk of the immigrants in the Ellis Island era) were often considered not just inferior, but racially different. For some excellent scholarship on this, read "The History of White People" (details in a comment I wrote below.)
Fascinating, though not completely surprising. Shocking that it was applied so uniformly. The best thing I have read about whiteness as a construct and its shifting definition is "The History of White People," the 2009 book by historian Nell Irvin Painter, a black woman.
I never knew about this issue. My goodness.
Guess we know who the fair hair boy was
I had a good friend who worked at my Toyota dealer. He is Persian. Went to pick up my car and i told the Black woman behind the counter my name was Torres, which is a Hispanic name. Of course I always "mispronounce" my name because I don't roll my Rs. My friend teased me "Torres, Torres, roll your Rs! You're such a white girl! The Black woman, trying not to choke, scolded him by saying "You did NOT just call her a white girl!" I explained that I am Irish/Swedish which is considered white. Except that my skin is more Olive and a lot of the year I am always well tanned.
People offhandedly throw these racial descriptors around like confetti without any real knowledge about the person they are describing. There's no good reason to use such descriptors in most of the situations they are asked for.
Yes, in fact for many years - maybe 18th, 19th centuries in some places in the US? - Jews were not considered white, just as neither Italians nor other Mediterranean people were who had darker skin and features than “typical” Anglo Northern Europeans. It was clearly a method of othering and I believe there is also some scholarship on this.
I think it's important to note that there are Jews across the racial categories (unstable as those categories are), and that one of the difficult things when we talk about whether or not antisemitism is also racism is that white Jews certainly have a very different experience than Black Jews do, and that the complexity of the question of racism is in part based on the fact that race doesn't really exist, in any biological sense, and so definitions and arguments can treat it elastically to make whatever point the interlocutor wants to make.
That is very true--and it extended into the early 20th century. Jews, along with with anyone from southern and eastern Europe (the bulk of the immigrants in the Ellis Island era) were often considered not just inferior, but racially different. For some excellent scholarship on this, read "The History of White People" (details in a comment I wrote below.)
Fascinating, though not completely surprising. Shocking that it was applied so uniformly. The best thing I have read about whiteness as a construct and its shifting definition is "The History of White People," the 2009 book by historian Nell Irvin Painter, a black woman.