sociologist at the oddness of moments

( Unrelated to the rest of the entry, I called Brassard's office )

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

( My latest rant on the tired topic )

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).
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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. [...]
( Read more... )

I have recently been informed by multiple monolingual anglophones that discrimination based on language is not racism. At best, I am conceeded that it is discrimination but racism, many have asserted, is skin deep and skin pigmentation alone. In the interest of giving this due consideration, if I am to accept this, I then need a vocabulary to precise discrimination based on language apart from non-specific discrimination or those already defined by their own specific vocabulary (e.g. sexism, heterosexism, etc.)

Also, from the get go, I want to be clear on where I stand on racism as I understand it. For the last ~6-7 years, I have been of the school thought that by virtue of my whiteness, I am racist. There is no qualifer to my whiteness, I am white. If you are suddendly frightened that I secretly have a white hood in my closet, you are probably equating racism to xenophobia. (Yes, yes, it's true. I'm making a generalization. I do them all the time despite knowing better. Culpa mia.)( Read more... )