• beardown@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    Yeah we’re saying the same thing. I recognize that there is a long history of denying Whiteness to people who have white skin. As I said, Irish, Italian, Slavic, and other catholic/orthodox peoples have been denied Whiteness at various points in history, in the US and elsewhere, in addition to people who are Jewish or Roma.

    My point though is clearly the typical Irish person is white even if they are not seen as “White.” The typical Bosniak is white, even if they are not seen as “White.” And yes, clearly the typical Jewish person is white, even if they have not historically been seen as “White.” But that’s because really only White Anglo-Saxon Protestants are reliably considered to be White in the United States - which is a 3-part conjunctive test, of which people who are Jewish only satisfy, at most, the first two parts.

    The point is that Whiteness doesn’t even objectively exist, and is a socially constructed tool used to maintain the historical/current superstructure of Anglo Bourgeois hegemony in the West. So we should reject the classification of anyone as White rather than merely try to expand its definition to include historically oppressed peoples with white skin

    Nevertheless, my point originally was that you don’t need white skin to be Jewish. And because there are Ethiopian and Polish and Arab jews, it seems difficult to believe that there could be a Jewish ethnicity like the Zionists claim. And it seems that claiming that Jews are a distinct ethnic group is itself highly othering - and that othering is the intentional goal not only of White supremacist bigots, but also, for different reasons, is the goal of Zionist ethnostates such as Israel