Aram Gershuni, Bread And Water ( ), Oil On Canvas On Wood, 2005.

Aram Gershuni, Bread and Water (לחם ומים), Oil on Canvas on Wood, 2005.

Y'all I can't believe I missed Theodor Herzl's Birthday (May 2, 1860). Happy belated birthday to Chozeh HaMedinah

I want to take a whack at "Your ethnicity doesn't colorize your race", actually.

Colorism is a poisonous part of white supremacy. The whole point of colorism is that you can't hide from it: people look at you, make a determination of your social rank, and go on to treat you better/worse because of it. That is terrifying. It impacts most of the world at this point, and white European colonizers (from whom white Americans descend) were responsible for its memetic spread. It is something we'll all have to continue to unlearn, for healing and for justice.

Nothing I am about to write contradicts what I've just written.

Colorism is not the only determining factor of race, and possessing a paler skin tone does not determine if someone is white.

When I was a kiddo, there was a category of people we called WASPs--White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. It seemed a strange division, separating these white people from all the other white people. But it began to make sense once I realized that, originally, in the US, not long before I was born, they were the only people actually considered to be white.

The "Anglo-Saxon" part? That excludes everyone not of English descent. The "Protestant" part? That excludes all non-Protestants, including most new USian religious movements which appear to be Protestant (LDS, Seventh-Day Adventist, Jehovah's Witnesses, etc.).

If that sounds to you like only a small category is left over of True Whites, congratulations, you have found The Point Of Whiteness.

Italians and the Irish were famously considered to be not white in the US, because a) they weren't English and b) they were Catholic. Leaving the non-English aspect aside, a lot of Scandinavian peoples were treated as not white, because Scandinavian nations converted to Christianity later than any other part of Europe. The Spanish were not white because they were Catholic, and because, for several hundred years, they were colonized by Arabic Muslims. And Jews, regardless of where they were from, were never white because they were Jews.

"But Fire," my imaginary audience says, "they weren't treated like Black people!"

True. Because "not white" wasn't the same as being Black.

One of the impacts of colorism relates to the concept of white-passing. (White-passing people, by the way, are not white, just like cis-passing trans people don't magically become cis--a fact which we really should acknowledge more when discussing "passing privileges".) White-passing grants you some nominal privileges in a white supremacist society, at the cost of surrendering the things that made you not white.

You're pale enough. Want to be white? All you have to do is give up everything. Stop speaking that non-English language your grandparents taught you in their home. Practice hard to flatten your accent, or else everyone will know you're not white when you speak. Better hide any religious icons, Protestants don't like those! In fact, throw them away. You're Methodist now. You don't need those anymore. Change your name if your family wasn't forced to already. Burn your prayer books. Stop talking about the Old Country. Give it up.

Give it all up. We have something better for you: privileges which we will revoke if you ever step out of line, if you ever complain on behalf of people you should have left behind by now, or if you're less than pluperfect at faking being Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.

Obviously, this experience is not the same as being Black. But "not the same" and "good" are two separate concepts for a reason.

The joke here, which isn't funny, is that if your entire perception of race, racism, and racist politics internationally and in the US begins and ends with skin tone cards, and you fancy yourself an anti-racist, you most often simply reverse who you despise. You think of "white" people as being a safe, acceptable category of human to shit on. And you flatten the category of "white" to include all white-passing people, and then, here's the kicker, you spend all your time online only harassing and sui-baiting people who are not white and do not reliably benefit from white privilege!

Do you see these anons trolling folks who are actual, open, out-and-proud white supremacists? Those people exist! They are on Tumblr! They can be trolled! But no, those people are largely left alone by anons like this. Almost as though actual Nazis and skinheads and white supremacists have some sort of privilege that sets them apart and makes them too special for such harassment.

Instead, we see them and cowardly anons like them, time and time again, going after folks who they assume are white-passing IRL because they disagree with those folks politically. Mocking ethnic foods as being weird and gross and disgusting, making fun of body types and presumed nose size and hair quality, mocking religious languages as being gibberish (or, in a fit of paranoia, framing it as a secret untranslatable code), all of this and more, these are not things these racists do towards people who they perceive as actually white. They are literally attacking and mocking and denigrating non-white people for not being white, all while acting as though they're battling white supremacy.

It is the definition of chutzpah, and it convinces me that this anon must be a WASP, because nobody else would have the fucking gall.

Ethnic whites when you tell them they're white:

girl what

Lobmeyr champagne bowl, ca. 1900

Greetings from Clamart, southwestern suburbs of Paris

French vintage postcard, mailed to Fresney-Voltaire