So here is what is weird to me, in addition to race being a bogus concept constantly redefined for the sake of the bigotries of the moment.
I was born in the US shortly after World War II, in which hundreds of my relatives known by name to my grandparents had been slaughtered in the name of purifying the Aryan race by getting rid of Jews.…
So here is what is weird to me, in addition to race being a bogus concept constantly redefined for the sake of the bigotries of the moment.
I was born in the US shortly after World War II, in which hundreds of my relatives known by name to my grandparents had been slaughtered in the name of purifying the Aryan race by getting rid of Jews. In reaction, Jews in the US worked hard to be seen as anything other than a race - a religion, an ethnicity, a culture. We weren't even a little bit white here then. Most of us were not black either. Over time, lighter skinned Jews became conditionally, sort of white - never all the way there, but enough so the cops didn't shoot you unless you were demonstrating for civil rights with your black friends, the colleges let more of you in, that sort of thing. Recently bigoted violence against Jews here has increased a lot, often by people who are in fact racists in the classic white vs black sense of the word, but we still don't call antisemitism racism. So that's my context. And it totally puzzles me that some progressive people are in a big hurry to call my Muslim cousins a race. How does that do them any good?
Well, I'm definitely in agreement that it makes no sense for progressives to call "Muslim" a race. I think it's useful to know when a religion-based bigotry is connected to a race-based one, though, mainly as a way to figure out how to counter it.
I was being glib in my comment, but your response was a perfect illustration of what I was trying to get at, which is the lack of any kind of consistency when it comes to bigoted reasoning. The goal is "I hate X" and then they have to work backwards to get there.
I guess I've always thought of antisemitism as a specific type of racism, but that does downplay the religious side of the hate.
So here is what is weird to me, in addition to race being a bogus concept constantly redefined for the sake of the bigotries of the moment.
I was born in the US shortly after World War II, in which hundreds of my relatives known by name to my grandparents had been slaughtered in the name of purifying the Aryan race by getting rid of Jews. In reaction, Jews in the US worked hard to be seen as anything other than a race - a religion, an ethnicity, a culture. We weren't even a little bit white here then. Most of us were not black either. Over time, lighter skinned Jews became conditionally, sort of white - never all the way there, but enough so the cops didn't shoot you unless you were demonstrating for civil rights with your black friends, the colleges let more of you in, that sort of thing. Recently bigoted violence against Jews here has increased a lot, often by people who are in fact racists in the classic white vs black sense of the word, but we still don't call antisemitism racism. So that's my context. And it totally puzzles me that some progressive people are in a big hurry to call my Muslim cousins a race. How does that do them any good?
Well, I'm definitely in agreement that it makes no sense for progressives to call "Muslim" a race. I think it's useful to know when a religion-based bigotry is connected to a race-based one, though, mainly as a way to figure out how to counter it.
I was being glib in my comment, but your response was a perfect illustration of what I was trying to get at, which is the lack of any kind of consistency when it comes to bigoted reasoning. The goal is "I hate X" and then they have to work backwards to get there.
I guess I've always thought of antisemitism as a specific type of racism, but that does downplay the religious side of the hate.