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An entry in the works (the 2nd quote is lengthy)
In unrelated news, I called Dr. Brassard's office and it was so very nice to talk to someone about my body and surgeries in French. Oh so very nice. She had to ask me a few times if I really did live in Ontario and she questioned a few times how long I've lived here (my affectionate apologies, I didn't leave Québec), etc. etc. She found it refreshing to talk to an FTM who had done a fair amount of research before calling. I got all warm and fuzzy inside when she took the time to establish that I was calling from a number/place where I could use the non-stealth vocabulary. I met some of Brassard's team before when I was at the house he used to have in Sainte-Eutache but it is just nice to deal with really nice and considerate medical professionals. I never take it for granted.
Why do we have such an absurd need for a solid, deep-rooted, robust, and pink-cheeked identity, a peasant identity anchored for centuries to the same land? Why not embrace an empty self? I have no roots. It's a fact .... I am a crowd, a one-woman march, procession, parade, masquerade .... To be a crowd, what a marvelous gift!
-Alicia Dujovne Ortiz
The history of which French people came over to New-France/Lower-Canada/Québec (rather than the colonies in Africa or South-East Asia), what happened once they got here and then after the battle on the Plain of Abraham is drastically different from the history of Eastern European Jewish immigration at the end of the 19th/early 20th century either to the US or Canada. It would be ridiculous to try and compare the Holocaust to the Durham Report (and the policies that followed from it), the decades of "survivance" until the Quiet Revolution with the Property legislations in the USA during and post-WW II, etc. etc. It simply can't be done. I relate to the spirit, so to speak, of the text. The "I'm white and yet not white 'enough' for some people." French-Canadians/Québécois did not experience the upward socioeconomic mobility that (anglophone) European Jewish immigrants both in the US and in Canada. Historical artifacts show that (anglophone) European Jews in Québec had a socio-economic advantage over Québécois in Québec up to the Quiet Revolution. I am not as familiar with what's happened since, certainly anti-semitism is still prevalent in all "reasonable accommodation" discourse in Québec today. But the author's disconnected relationship to one's race/ethnicity, the awareness that she is white, without question, and yet her name and other things that mark the social text of her racialized body making her aware that she is still in some ways at odds with white (anglophone) Christian USians, that I can relate to. And really, I am happy to learn about other white but not WASP history and experience (okay, I already knew most of this but no harm in reviewing and expanding on the knowledge!)
I am white, not once in the epic dramatic flame war in![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
feminist did I dispute that. I even own up to the fact that by virtue of having traded accents when speaking English, I acquired additional privilege to that of someone who is fluent in English. But my name, the lingering switcheroos in my franglish grammar and/or when someone learns through another mean that I am French-Canadian, I have lived too many day to day experiences when I live in English Canada to be told my cultural background is irrelevant in this day and age. No, it is not like being of African/Carribean descent nor the history and present day realities of being 1st Nations/Inuit. But I am growing tired of affirmations that someone can be accent deaf, especially by those who know they are not colour blind. I am fed up with an inability to inspect the privilege that comes with changing one's name (be it legally or not, just the 1st or both names, etc.) Yes, this has historically been largely done against people's will rather than internalized racism. That doesn't change the result. The acquired privilege if one becomes fluent in English or is an anglophone regardless of one's skin colour, etc. etc. It does shift the social positioning that one body would have. I am tired of the racism in oversimplifying what race/culture/ethnicity is and isn't. It is racist. It is racist to decontextualize present day manifestation of racism on Turtle Island as though it occurs in a vacuum separated from the rest of the world. It is racist to project the manifestations of systemic racism from Turtle Island onto the rest of the globe.
The following excerpts are from "Beyond the Pale": Rearticulating U.S. Jewish Whiteness by Caren Kaplan. It was written in the 1990's and although it is US-centric this author is one of the most aware ones I've come across who does locate her experience and theories with an awareness for the rest of the globe (not just Europe or Canada).
---
Internalized anti-semitism? Insufficient ethnic identification? Classism? Racism? The list of possible crimes again "my people" is as long as my propensity for self-flagellation can support. Betrayal is at the end of the road for such a journey away from home base. But what is "home base" in the current climate of identity politics in the United States, when so many subjects express contradictory, ambivalent, or multiple affiliations? Between the demand for singular adherence to a modern identity script and the homogenization of assimilation there lies a zone that could be described as "beyond the Pale." The literal meaning of pale is a stake driven into the ground to mark a boundary. The word also connotes a limit of restriction. Thus, to be beyond the pale suggests a transgression, a movement beyond the boundaries of civilization, beyond the reach of a community or collective sense of values and identities. [...]
No one is free of the burden of definition in a political society that operates through rights claims that assert an intrinsic quality of identity. This aspect of the liberal, democratic state plaques the feminist theorist who adheres both to post-structuralist concepts of the social construction of categories and to activist agendas for social change. But some categories are less marked by ambiguity or angst for me than others and that can't be accidental. Rather, such certainties and uncertainties can be read as maps of power, privilege, and discrimination inscribed on the body as each person's social text. In my own case, it is my understanding of myself as a Jew that tends to throw the limits of identity politics into sharp relief .... I have experienced the cognitive, if not political, dissonance of access to the privileges of whiteness accompanied by the threat of racist violence and discrimination expressed as anti-semitism. It's confusing but instructive. Such points of complication can serve as sites of investigation: they are the signs of ideology at work. [...]
In calling attention to the cognitive dissonance of whites experiencing racism directed against them I am not claiming that anti-semitism, even when it is expressed in unremittingly biological or essentialized terms, renders Jew of European origin non-white. [...] As James Baldwin points out in this essay, "on Being 'White' ... And Other Lies," to be white prevents a full alliance with those of African origin who came to the same land as slaves. Thus there is no simple rejection of an identity and set of benefits that took several generations and a "vast amount of coercion" to consolidate. The ascription of whiteness for Jews of European origin has required a series of costs and benefits that are most often shrouded in misty romanticism or stirring sentiment. Unlike Sephardic, Asian, and African Jews who are linked to nationalities or ethnicities of color, Jews of European origin in the United States are incontrovertibly "white" in the legal and social context of the nineties.
Thus, rather than argue that Jews of European origin are not really white by virtue of a history of anti-semitism, and therefore always already available for anti-racist alliances, I am arguing that regardless of the nature of one's relationship to the term "Jew," it is possible to use that term as a point of entry into a complicated history of race, gender, sexuality, and class, among other categories. Richard Dyer has written that the representational power of whiteness is based on its normalizing properties, its ability to appear to be "everything and nothing." .... Examining the construction of Jews of European origin as "white" in the history of the United States necessitates a destabilization of both ethnicity and race. The homogenizing and normalizing powers of representations generated by and about Jews of European origin in the United States can be demystified by histories attentive to diasporic links across transnational circuits of immigration in modernity as well as to those social relations in the United States that form and reform ethnicities out of such diverse factors as class, nationality, and citizenship. Thus, the term "Jew" has to be contextualize not only in terms of time and place but in a myriad of ways. What is the history of its use, who has the power to influence and determine this usage, and what is lost or elided through such usage?
[...]
I would like to begin to explore my sense of cognitive dissonance, my confusion, and my learned ignorance about the links between Jews of European origin, whiteness, and national agendas of racialization through class and property relations. As a feminist I am curious about the gendered versions of these histories and I have a heightened awareness of how easily a substitution effect limits the arithmetic of identity in my culture. When I write about ethnicity, considerations of gender and class can fall away. When I turn my attention to gender, the universalizing force of the conventions of Western feminist analysis can suppress considerations of race, ethnicity, and class. Just as distressing, all these categories seem to love to dwell in the United States, as if an entire world is too distant and ex-centric to the crucible of race and class to count in any meaningful way. The ascription of a single, primary identity as the locus of selfhood, pride, and agency arises in the midst of agitation against discrimination and oppression, yet our lives are never determined solely by one quality. Gender always mediates ethnicity and race, just as sexual practices differentiate the multiples of identity. Economic class and ethnicity invariably have an impact on categories of gender and sexuality. Citizenship and nationality, as well as access to state benefits, to housing and employment, and to a family system, affect people's identities and cultures in profound ways. All these elements of social relations are produced and not simply found.
[...]
Exploring my own ethnic and racial construction seems useful only if I can use it to learn more about what motivates legislation such as Proposition 187, anti-affirmative action initiatives, and other attacks on education, jobs, and health care in the context of globalized and segmented markets under transnational conditions. The project of deconstructing identity politics and rearticulating identities has to be collaborative, multilayered, and not simply personal.
[...]
[I]n the United States, how does "Jewish whiteness" come about? That is, when and where to do some Jews and not others become "white" in the specific context of U.S. white supremacy as it interacts with Euro-American anti-semitism? What is the relationship between whiteness and Jewishness across histories of immigration, geopolitics, economies, as well as genders and sexualities? How do these histories subvert or consolidate contemporary identities and affiliations? How do I rearticulate my own shifting and complex sense of Euro-American, Jewish, female, whiteness in the face of these histories?
[...]
Each innocuous, brief, bland, Americanized (Anglicized?) name signifies a history of betrayal or renunciation that is supposed to warn the rest of us. You can change your name but you can't hide from Molky Smoodin! Her method for ferreting this information out makes me wonder: do you have to be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you were "born" Jewish? Are these modes of policing this? More seriously, these name changes and elisions of ethnic identity are markers of a second order, more nuanced anti-semitism. No one wants to be Jewish; or, no one can afford to be?
[...]
How did a group that many believed to be a hygienic and moral danger to the nation by virtue of racial characteristics at the turn of the century arrive at the status of "white" by mid-century? How did European Jewish immigrants' whiteness become consolidated during this time period?
[...]
According to the narrative conventions of the myth, poverty and religious persecution drove Jews to leave a tradition bound life as peasants or small urban traders behind and to enter modernity in the metropoles of the United States and Canada. THe myth further dictates that once eastern European Jews arrived in the United States, cultural values that stressed education (for males) and a work ethic ensured material success and ethnic survival. Inherent to the myth is the belief that other immigrant groups could achieve as much in a short period of time if they adhered to the same values and cultural beliefs. Questioning the mystified notion of a teleological development from a level playing field amount immigrants to Jewish assimilation and "success," John Bodnar's research on European immigration argues that Jewish immigrants during this period were neither the poorest nor the wealthiest of their communities and that their travels were complicated, motivated not simply through a desire to change countries and citizenship to escape anti-semitism but through rational attempts to improve the lives of family members. Bodnar argues that these immigrants did not leave tradition-bound "preindustrial worlds" for the modernity of metropolitan locations. Rather, they left "worlds which were already encountering capitalism and experimenting with ways to deal with its realities."
[...]
Andrew Heinz argues that eastern European Jews "sought important elements of American identity more quickly and thoroughly than other groups of newcomers" through acts as consumers: women, in particular, "assumed a new power over the social adjustment of their families," and as entrepreneurs, eastern European Jews could become "magnates in the province of mass consumption."
[...]
Sacks makes her argument by tracing the changes in the U.S. social policy and national politics that contributed to a shift in racialization of Jews of European origin in the periods during and after World War II. Referring to this shift as "the biggest and best affirmative action program in the history of our nation" in its consequences for "Euromales," Sacks argues that benefits such as the GI bill and government sponsored home loans were differentially allocated in ways that distinctly favored European ethnics including large numbers of Jews of eastern and western European origins over and against groups such as African-Americans. Making a related argument in his essay "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness." George Lipsitz points out that the absolute value of being white in the United States has only risen throughout the century as structured benefits in loan policies, tax "reforms," the middle and upper class to continue to favor particular groups over others, enabling and constructing "whiteness."
[...]
[T]he majority of European immigrants, including Jews, embraced the property rights of whiteness, in effect viewing whiteness as a quality of "American" citizenship that has been obstructed by anti-semitism but was now more fully restored. As Cheryl Harris has so powerfully demonstrated in her essay "white as Property," whites have come to "expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law." The upward mobility of some immigrants and not others, of some people of color and not others, has resulted in what Sacks refers to as "racially skewed gains" that have been "passed across the generations so that racial inequality seems to maintain itself 'naturally' even after legal segregation ended."
[...]
As a growing civil rights movement intensified the politics of anti-racist activism in the United States and laws set limits on non-white immigration, the construction of "whiteness" in the U.S. appeared to embrace the nation's Jews, very much to their benefit. Thus, Sacks writes, "By the time I was an adolescent, Jews were just as white as the next white person." This metropolitan phenomenon of ethnicized "whiteness" had to be seen as a form of triumph by many people who remembered harsher forms of discrimination as well as the very real threat of genocide. Yet, it also signifies a shift from the marginal and contested status of outsider to a new nativism that celebrated nationalism and claimed whiteness over and against newer, non-European immigrants and people of color. As Harris writes, "[W]hiteness and property share a common premise - a conceptual nucleus - of a right to exclude."
[...]
Yudice argues that "declaring nonwhiteness" is not really an option for many whites who are poor, unemployed, or disenfranchised. In addition, explorations of identities such as "Latino" and "jew" in the context of U.S. immigration and social history underscore the contingent and constructed nature of "whiteness." ... Rearticulating whiteness can mean a number of things in current times. Rearticulating whiteness deconstructs not only the primacy or supremacy of a racial categorization but calls into question the ontological status of the categories themselves to reveal the political stakes in these construction. That is, rearticulating whiteness queries the conventions of ethnic studies as well as racist critical practices. Rather than focus on the history of discrete terms of identity, rearticulating whiteness can problematize the erause of the state in discussions of identity. Thus, Jewish identity can no longer be divorced from the history of other immigrations and diasporas or from U.S. Foreign policy, First World geopolitics, or transnational market restructuring. .... Yudice warns that when identity politics do not allow for a look at the "larger picture." the "relationship between identity groups and institutions - e.g., the academic and business institutions, the relationship between these institutions, the state - the military and welfare bureaucracy - and the economy, and the articulation of all these relationships in a global context" are all supressed.
[...]
Although I knew that my grandmother and my parents would try to protect me, most of the time I had to face this kind of attack alone. I was the only Jew in my year at school and one of only four in the entire school. How did everyone know what I was? How could they tell? It was easy - I was marked in a million ways. My parents would not allow me to say the Lord's Prayer at school (before the law was changed and relieved me from this daily torture of open, principled resistance). My parents also forbade me from saying the CHrsitian prayer that opened the BRownie and Girl Scout meetings. Most crushing and, to me, most obviously, I was the only person in my ballet school who could not participate in the December performance - a Christmas "Cortege." How I wanted to play the part of Mary! ... Even a shepherd would have been fine. But my parents were adamant about the appearance of assimilation. Our house had no Christmas tree or holiday decorations. Beyond the realm of such acts, I was marked most overtly by my physical characteristics - my dark hair and eyes, what I thought was a prominent nose - it seemed immense and not at all right for a "girl." ... When the librarian confused my name regularly with that of one of the other two jewish girls in school, a girl who did not resemble me in height or facial characteristics, she was saying, in effect, "You're only a Jew to me." "you're a dirty Jew," the bully whispered in my ear at school or yelled from the path through the field to our homes. "Dirty, dirty, dirty." "What does that make you?" I yelled back, trying not to cry. "What does that make you?"
[...]
The power of witness, of testifying to the vicious inhumanity of discrimination, reinforces the belief that one can not only survive this system but change it. Although there is almost no other possible response to racism or to any other form of hate-filled expression than fighting back, our strategies invariably mirror the terms of our oppression. Thus, identity politics can engender a response that naturalizes and homogenizes the categories of resistance. In the scenario of my "hometown." for example, I find it challenging to understand my experience of anti-semitism beyond the familiar terms of ethnicity and race. If I heard or was hailed by racist epithets as a child, what did that make me? That is, how did I construct an identity over and against such information? I was told that my family emigrated to escape anti-semitic persecution in eastern Europe, a historical phenomenon that was underscored by the loss of contact with anyone who did not immigrate. ... I was very conscious of the fact that people could be singled out and killed in modern times because they were Jews. To not assert my Jewishness - and not assert it proudly and loudly - was to collude with those I was taught to see as enemies not only of Jews but all darker peoples (in my childhood Jews were always "dark" and always from eastern Europe - I had no other frame of reference). Anything else, I was instructed by my family, was a kind of treason. And every small act of principle mattered.
[...]
In my town, as in thousands of others in the United States, it was best to be considered white, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and middle-class. In addition to the "towngown" divisions inherent to most small university towns, ethnic, racial, and class divides (very often articulated as religious ones) sharply demarcated this locale. Catholics, especially French-Canadians, were treated with disdain and a French-Canadian surname insured discrimination and name-calling. South Asians and Middle Easterners met with problems similar to ours (and if their skin tones happened to be darker, it ensured more abuse). The Native Americans who were the earliest inhabitants of the land we occupied had been relegated by the government to a reservation about three miles away. It is almost impossible to describe the virulent climate of bias against this population; generally living in extreme poverty, the object of invectives and insults, Native Americans were at the very bottom of the hierarchy of discrimination in the locale I called "home." ... That Maine has a long history of anti-semitic and anti-Catholic movements came as no surprise to me when I was doing research in the Unviersity of Maine library for a high school assignment and discovered that the state's enrollments in the Ku Klux Klan during the twenties rivaled anything found in Alabama or Mississippi. As a child, I found it a frightening and generally unwelcoming place to live.
Thus, I grew up feeling preoccupied by my own marginalization and I took for granted many of the considerably privileges I enjoyed as the middle-class child of a cosmopolitan parents who valued education and travel. But I was always looking for allies or searching for subjects with whom I felt an affinity. Although I deeply desired the bright, light hair of the mos popular girls in my school, in my make-believe play I always chose the dramatic roles of people I associated with dark skin or hair. I pretended that I was the Indian princess Morningstar (inspired by a TV show I liked) and I conspired against the cowboys and soldiers.
[...]
Yet, these romanticized,imaginary alliances never brought me to recognize just what kinds of differences and similarities might have existed between myself and "others." For example, the Penobscot Indian residents of the neighboring reservation, people who lived in extreme poverty and who experienced tremendous discrimination were not the "noble savages" of my half-baked imagination (heavily influenced by racist children's books and mainstream TV show). ... And I never thought carefully about how Native American alterity in my community made me "white"" if not white enough than whiter than others.
At that time I was not able to understand that my sympathies and imagination were not palliatives for structural inequities. My own deeply rooted, child-like essentialism used lightness and darkness as symbols of something real rather than as signs of ideology at work. And in a kind of complicity that signals privilege (in this location it was a privilege of race and class), I came to depend upon my sense of otehrness: it made me distinct and it gave me something around which to organize my sense of self. My "darkness" was something I could learn to use and cherish instead of only regretting and resenting. But I did not know how to demystify my imaginary alliances and I was often guilty of appropriating the signs of other people's cultures and assuming similarity when there was no historical or structural basis for it.
Why do we have such an absurd need for a solid, deep-rooted, robust, and pink-cheeked identity, a peasant identity anchored for centuries to the same land? Why not embrace an empty self? I have no roots. It's a fact .... I am a crowd, a one-woman march, procession, parade, masquerade .... To be a crowd, what a marvelous gift!
-Alicia Dujovne Ortiz
The history of which French people came over to New-France/Lower-Canada/Québec (rather than the colonies in Africa or South-East Asia), what happened once they got here and then after the battle on the Plain of Abraham is drastically different from the history of Eastern European Jewish immigration at the end of the 19th/early 20th century either to the US or Canada. It would be ridiculous to try and compare the Holocaust to the Durham Report (and the policies that followed from it), the decades of "survivance" until the Quiet Revolution with the Property legislations in the USA during and post-WW II, etc. etc. It simply can't be done. I relate to the spirit, so to speak, of the text. The "I'm white and yet not white 'enough' for some people." French-Canadians/Québécois did not experience the upward socioeconomic mobility that (anglophone) European Jewish immigrants both in the US and in Canada. Historical artifacts show that (anglophone) European Jews in Québec had a socio-economic advantage over Québécois in Québec up to the Quiet Revolution. I am not as familiar with what's happened since, certainly anti-semitism is still prevalent in all "reasonable accommodation" discourse in Québec today. But the author's disconnected relationship to one's race/ethnicity, the awareness that she is white, without question, and yet her name and other things that mark the social text of her racialized body making her aware that she is still in some ways at odds with white (anglophone) Christian USians, that I can relate to. And really, I am happy to learn about other white but not WASP history and experience (okay, I already knew most of this but no harm in reviewing and expanding on the knowledge!)
I am white, not once in the epic dramatic flame war in
feminist did I dispute that. I even own up to the fact that by virtue of having traded accents when speaking English, I acquired additional privilege to that of someone who is fluent in English. But my name, the lingering switcheroos in my franglish grammar and/or when someone learns through another mean that I am French-Canadian, I have lived too many day to day experiences when I live in English Canada to be told my cultural background is irrelevant in this day and age. No, it is not like being of African/Carribean descent nor the history and present day realities of being 1st Nations/Inuit. But I am growing tired of affirmations that someone can be accent deaf, especially by those who know they are not colour blind. I am fed up with an inability to inspect the privilege that comes with changing one's name (be it legally or not, just the 1st or both names, etc.) Yes, this has historically been largely done against people's will rather than internalized racism. That doesn't change the result. The acquired privilege if one becomes fluent in English or is an anglophone regardless of one's skin colour, etc. etc. It does shift the social positioning that one body would have. I am tired of the racism in oversimplifying what race/culture/ethnicity is and isn't. It is racist. It is racist to decontextualize present day manifestation of racism on Turtle Island as though it occurs in a vacuum separated from the rest of the world. It is racist to project the manifestations of systemic racism from Turtle Island onto the rest of the globe.The following excerpts are from "Beyond the Pale": Rearticulating U.S. Jewish Whiteness by Caren Kaplan. It was written in the 1990's and although it is US-centric this author is one of the most aware ones I've come across who does locate her experience and theories with an awareness for the rest of the globe (not just Europe or Canada).
---
Internalized anti-semitism? Insufficient ethnic identification? Classism? Racism? The list of possible crimes again "my people" is as long as my propensity for self-flagellation can support. Betrayal is at the end of the road for such a journey away from home base. But what is "home base" in the current climate of identity politics in the United States, when so many subjects express contradictory, ambivalent, or multiple affiliations? Between the demand for singular adherence to a modern identity script and the homogenization of assimilation there lies a zone that could be described as "beyond the Pale." The literal meaning of pale is a stake driven into the ground to mark a boundary. The word also connotes a limit of restriction. Thus, to be beyond the pale suggests a transgression, a movement beyond the boundaries of civilization, beyond the reach of a community or collective sense of values and identities. [...]
No one is free of the burden of definition in a political society that operates through rights claims that assert an intrinsic quality of identity. This aspect of the liberal, democratic state plaques the feminist theorist who adheres both to post-structuralist concepts of the social construction of categories and to activist agendas for social change. But some categories are less marked by ambiguity or angst for me than others and that can't be accidental. Rather, such certainties and uncertainties can be read as maps of power, privilege, and discrimination inscribed on the body as each person's social text. In my own case, it is my understanding of myself as a Jew that tends to throw the limits of identity politics into sharp relief .... I have experienced the cognitive, if not political, dissonance of access to the privileges of whiteness accompanied by the threat of racist violence and discrimination expressed as anti-semitism. It's confusing but instructive. Such points of complication can serve as sites of investigation: they are the signs of ideology at work. [...]
In calling attention to the cognitive dissonance of whites experiencing racism directed against them I am not claiming that anti-semitism, even when it is expressed in unremittingly biological or essentialized terms, renders Jew of European origin non-white. [...] As James Baldwin points out in this essay, "on Being 'White' ... And Other Lies," to be white prevents a full alliance with those of African origin who came to the same land as slaves. Thus there is no simple rejection of an identity and set of benefits that took several generations and a "vast amount of coercion" to consolidate. The ascription of whiteness for Jews of European origin has required a series of costs and benefits that are most often shrouded in misty romanticism or stirring sentiment. Unlike Sephardic, Asian, and African Jews who are linked to nationalities or ethnicities of color, Jews of European origin in the United States are incontrovertibly "white" in the legal and social context of the nineties.
Thus, rather than argue that Jews of European origin are not really white by virtue of a history of anti-semitism, and therefore always already available for anti-racist alliances, I am arguing that regardless of the nature of one's relationship to the term "Jew," it is possible to use that term as a point of entry into a complicated history of race, gender, sexuality, and class, among other categories. Richard Dyer has written that the representational power of whiteness is based on its normalizing properties, its ability to appear to be "everything and nothing." .... Examining the construction of Jews of European origin as "white" in the history of the United States necessitates a destabilization of both ethnicity and race. The homogenizing and normalizing powers of representations generated by and about Jews of European origin in the United States can be demystified by histories attentive to diasporic links across transnational circuits of immigration in modernity as well as to those social relations in the United States that form and reform ethnicities out of such diverse factors as class, nationality, and citizenship. Thus, the term "Jew" has to be contextualize not only in terms of time and place but in a myriad of ways. What is the history of its use, who has the power to influence and determine this usage, and what is lost or elided through such usage?
[...]
I would like to begin to explore my sense of cognitive dissonance, my confusion, and my learned ignorance about the links between Jews of European origin, whiteness, and national agendas of racialization through class and property relations. As a feminist I am curious about the gendered versions of these histories and I have a heightened awareness of how easily a substitution effect limits the arithmetic of identity in my culture. When I write about ethnicity, considerations of gender and class can fall away. When I turn my attention to gender, the universalizing force of the conventions of Western feminist analysis can suppress considerations of race, ethnicity, and class. Just as distressing, all these categories seem to love to dwell in the United States, as if an entire world is too distant and ex-centric to the crucible of race and class to count in any meaningful way. The ascription of a single, primary identity as the locus of selfhood, pride, and agency arises in the midst of agitation against discrimination and oppression, yet our lives are never determined solely by one quality. Gender always mediates ethnicity and race, just as sexual practices differentiate the multiples of identity. Economic class and ethnicity invariably have an impact on categories of gender and sexuality. Citizenship and nationality, as well as access to state benefits, to housing and employment, and to a family system, affect people's identities and cultures in profound ways. All these elements of social relations are produced and not simply found.
[...]
Exploring my own ethnic and racial construction seems useful only if I can use it to learn more about what motivates legislation such as Proposition 187, anti-affirmative action initiatives, and other attacks on education, jobs, and health care in the context of globalized and segmented markets under transnational conditions. The project of deconstructing identity politics and rearticulating identities has to be collaborative, multilayered, and not simply personal.
[...]
[I]n the United States, how does "Jewish whiteness" come about? That is, when and where to do some Jews and not others become "white" in the specific context of U.S. white supremacy as it interacts with Euro-American anti-semitism? What is the relationship between whiteness and Jewishness across histories of immigration, geopolitics, economies, as well as genders and sexualities? How do these histories subvert or consolidate contemporary identities and affiliations? How do I rearticulate my own shifting and complex sense of Euro-American, Jewish, female, whiteness in the face of these histories?
[...]
Each innocuous, brief, bland, Americanized (Anglicized?) name signifies a history of betrayal or renunciation that is supposed to warn the rest of us. You can change your name but you can't hide from Molky Smoodin! Her method for ferreting this information out makes me wonder: do you have to be buried in a Jewish cemetery if you were "born" Jewish? Are these modes of policing this? More seriously, these name changes and elisions of ethnic identity are markers of a second order, more nuanced anti-semitism. No one wants to be Jewish; or, no one can afford to be?
[...]
How did a group that many believed to be a hygienic and moral danger to the nation by virtue of racial characteristics at the turn of the century arrive at the status of "white" by mid-century? How did European Jewish immigrants' whiteness become consolidated during this time period?
[...]
According to the narrative conventions of the myth, poverty and religious persecution drove Jews to leave a tradition bound life as peasants or small urban traders behind and to enter modernity in the metropoles of the United States and Canada. THe myth further dictates that once eastern European Jews arrived in the United States, cultural values that stressed education (for males) and a work ethic ensured material success and ethnic survival. Inherent to the myth is the belief that other immigrant groups could achieve as much in a short period of time if they adhered to the same values and cultural beliefs. Questioning the mystified notion of a teleological development from a level playing field amount immigrants to Jewish assimilation and "success," John Bodnar's research on European immigration argues that Jewish immigrants during this period were neither the poorest nor the wealthiest of their communities and that their travels were complicated, motivated not simply through a desire to change countries and citizenship to escape anti-semitism but through rational attempts to improve the lives of family members. Bodnar argues that these immigrants did not leave tradition-bound "preindustrial worlds" for the modernity of metropolitan locations. Rather, they left "worlds which were already encountering capitalism and experimenting with ways to deal with its realities."
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Andrew Heinz argues that eastern European Jews "sought important elements of American identity more quickly and thoroughly than other groups of newcomers" through acts as consumers: women, in particular, "assumed a new power over the social adjustment of their families," and as entrepreneurs, eastern European Jews could become "magnates in the province of mass consumption."
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Sacks makes her argument by tracing the changes in the U.S. social policy and national politics that contributed to a shift in racialization of Jews of European origin in the periods during and after World War II. Referring to this shift as "the biggest and best affirmative action program in the history of our nation" in its consequences for "Euromales," Sacks argues that benefits such as the GI bill and government sponsored home loans were differentially allocated in ways that distinctly favored European ethnics including large numbers of Jews of eastern and western European origins over and against groups such as African-Americans. Making a related argument in his essay "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness." George Lipsitz points out that the absolute value of being white in the United States has only risen throughout the century as structured benefits in loan policies, tax "reforms," the middle and upper class to continue to favor particular groups over others, enabling and constructing "whiteness."
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[T]he majority of European immigrants, including Jews, embraced the property rights of whiteness, in effect viewing whiteness as a quality of "American" citizenship that has been obstructed by anti-semitism but was now more fully restored. As Cheryl Harris has so powerfully demonstrated in her essay "white as Property," whites have come to "expect and rely on these benefits, and over time these expectations have been affirmed, legitimated, and protected by the law." The upward mobility of some immigrants and not others, of some people of color and not others, has resulted in what Sacks refers to as "racially skewed gains" that have been "passed across the generations so that racial inequality seems to maintain itself 'naturally' even after legal segregation ended."
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As a growing civil rights movement intensified the politics of anti-racist activism in the United States and laws set limits on non-white immigration, the construction of "whiteness" in the U.S. appeared to embrace the nation's Jews, very much to their benefit. Thus, Sacks writes, "By the time I was an adolescent, Jews were just as white as the next white person." This metropolitan phenomenon of ethnicized "whiteness" had to be seen as a form of triumph by many people who remembered harsher forms of discrimination as well as the very real threat of genocide. Yet, it also signifies a shift from the marginal and contested status of outsider to a new nativism that celebrated nationalism and claimed whiteness over and against newer, non-European immigrants and people of color. As Harris writes, "[W]hiteness and property share a common premise - a conceptual nucleus - of a right to exclude."
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Yudice argues that "declaring nonwhiteness" is not really an option for many whites who are poor, unemployed, or disenfranchised. In addition, explorations of identities such as "Latino" and "jew" in the context of U.S. immigration and social history underscore the contingent and constructed nature of "whiteness." ... Rearticulating whiteness can mean a number of things in current times. Rearticulating whiteness deconstructs not only the primacy or supremacy of a racial categorization but calls into question the ontological status of the categories themselves to reveal the political stakes in these construction. That is, rearticulating whiteness queries the conventions of ethnic studies as well as racist critical practices. Rather than focus on the history of discrete terms of identity, rearticulating whiteness can problematize the erause of the state in discussions of identity. Thus, Jewish identity can no longer be divorced from the history of other immigrations and diasporas or from U.S. Foreign policy, First World geopolitics, or transnational market restructuring. .... Yudice warns that when identity politics do not allow for a look at the "larger picture." the "relationship between identity groups and institutions - e.g., the academic and business institutions, the relationship between these institutions, the state - the military and welfare bureaucracy - and the economy, and the articulation of all these relationships in a global context" are all supressed.
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Although I knew that my grandmother and my parents would try to protect me, most of the time I had to face this kind of attack alone. I was the only Jew in my year at school and one of only four in the entire school. How did everyone know what I was? How could they tell? It was easy - I was marked in a million ways. My parents would not allow me to say the Lord's Prayer at school (before the law was changed and relieved me from this daily torture of open, principled resistance). My parents also forbade me from saying the CHrsitian prayer that opened the BRownie and Girl Scout meetings. Most crushing and, to me, most obviously, I was the only person in my ballet school who could not participate in the December performance - a Christmas "Cortege." How I wanted to play the part of Mary! ... Even a shepherd would have been fine. But my parents were adamant about the appearance of assimilation. Our house had no Christmas tree or holiday decorations. Beyond the realm of such acts, I was marked most overtly by my physical characteristics - my dark hair and eyes, what I thought was a prominent nose - it seemed immense and not at all right for a "girl." ... When the librarian confused my name regularly with that of one of the other two jewish girls in school, a girl who did not resemble me in height or facial characteristics, she was saying, in effect, "You're only a Jew to me." "you're a dirty Jew," the bully whispered in my ear at school or yelled from the path through the field to our homes. "Dirty, dirty, dirty." "What does that make you?" I yelled back, trying not to cry. "What does that make you?"
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The power of witness, of testifying to the vicious inhumanity of discrimination, reinforces the belief that one can not only survive this system but change it. Although there is almost no other possible response to racism or to any other form of hate-filled expression than fighting back, our strategies invariably mirror the terms of our oppression. Thus, identity politics can engender a response that naturalizes and homogenizes the categories of resistance. In the scenario of my "hometown." for example, I find it challenging to understand my experience of anti-semitism beyond the familiar terms of ethnicity and race. If I heard or was hailed by racist epithets as a child, what did that make me? That is, how did I construct an identity over and against such information? I was told that my family emigrated to escape anti-semitic persecution in eastern Europe, a historical phenomenon that was underscored by the loss of contact with anyone who did not immigrate. ... I was very conscious of the fact that people could be singled out and killed in modern times because they were Jews. To not assert my Jewishness - and not assert it proudly and loudly - was to collude with those I was taught to see as enemies not only of Jews but all darker peoples (in my childhood Jews were always "dark" and always from eastern Europe - I had no other frame of reference). Anything else, I was instructed by my family, was a kind of treason. And every small act of principle mattered.
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In my town, as in thousands of others in the United States, it was best to be considered white, heterosexual, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, and middle-class. In addition to the "towngown" divisions inherent to most small university towns, ethnic, racial, and class divides (very often articulated as religious ones) sharply demarcated this locale. Catholics, especially French-Canadians, were treated with disdain and a French-Canadian surname insured discrimination and name-calling. South Asians and Middle Easterners met with problems similar to ours (and if their skin tones happened to be darker, it ensured more abuse). The Native Americans who were the earliest inhabitants of the land we occupied had been relegated by the government to a reservation about three miles away. It is almost impossible to describe the virulent climate of bias against this population; generally living in extreme poverty, the object of invectives and insults, Native Americans were at the very bottom of the hierarchy of discrimination in the locale I called "home." ... That Maine has a long history of anti-semitic and anti-Catholic movements came as no surprise to me when I was doing research in the Unviersity of Maine library for a high school assignment and discovered that the state's enrollments in the Ku Klux Klan during the twenties rivaled anything found in Alabama or Mississippi. As a child, I found it a frightening and generally unwelcoming place to live.
Thus, I grew up feeling preoccupied by my own marginalization and I took for granted many of the considerably privileges I enjoyed as the middle-class child of a cosmopolitan parents who valued education and travel. But I was always looking for allies or searching for subjects with whom I felt an affinity. Although I deeply desired the bright, light hair of the mos popular girls in my school, in my make-believe play I always chose the dramatic roles of people I associated with dark skin or hair. I pretended that I was the Indian princess Morningstar (inspired by a TV show I liked) and I conspired against the cowboys and soldiers.
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Yet, these romanticized,imaginary alliances never brought me to recognize just what kinds of differences and similarities might have existed between myself and "others." For example, the Penobscot Indian residents of the neighboring reservation, people who lived in extreme poverty and who experienced tremendous discrimination were not the "noble savages" of my half-baked imagination (heavily influenced by racist children's books and mainstream TV show). ... And I never thought carefully about how Native American alterity in my community made me "white"" if not white enough than whiter than others.
At that time I was not able to understand that my sympathies and imagination were not palliatives for structural inequities. My own deeply rooted, child-like essentialism used lightness and darkness as symbols of something real rather than as signs of ideology at work. And in a kind of complicity that signals privilege (in this location it was a privilege of race and class), I came to depend upon my sense of otehrness: it made me distinct and it gave me something around which to organize my sense of self. My "darkness" was something I could learn to use and cherish instead of only regretting and resenting. But I did not know how to demystify my imaginary alliances and I was often guilty of appropriating the signs of other people's cultures and assuming similarity when there was no historical or structural basis for it.