I know most of us have pretty much said what we need to say about the Feministe debacle, but there’s one more thing I want to address before I try to put it behind me.
There were a few bloggers and commenters who, when responding to David’s reference to gentile privilege (a concept that immediately made sense to me), stated, explicitly or implicitly, that they didn’t believe it exists. In doing so, they broke one of the fundamental rules of anti-oppression work: you never, ever dictate to a group what its own experience looks like. If you haven’t lived as a member of that group, you simply do not have the right to tell them how they are or aren’t oppressed. This, for me, was the most hurtful aspect of the whole debate. If you don’t think you need to understand anti-Semitism in order to understand why Israel launched an outrageous and inexcusable attack on Gaza – fine, I’m glad you’ve got it figured out. If you feel you have the energy to learn about Palestinian oppression or Jewish oppression, but not both – fine, I’ll see you at half the meetings. But I think it’s clear here that if you’re not acknowledging the existence of gentile privilege, then you’re not acknowledging the existence of anti-Semitism. Oppression cannot exist without corresponding privilege. It’s just not possible, folks.
I feel like I should be inured to it – after all, it’s not like it hasn’t happened to WOC, the disabled, Muslims, and countless other groups who thought that social justice meant justice for them, too – but it’s been bothering me for days. Indeed, looking over my last post on the subject, I’m reminded that I mentioned it there, too. I didn’t think for a second that the concept of gentile privilege would, in a feminist, anti-racist space, be controversial. I should have, though. (No wonder so many activists I know just don’t read comment threads at all.)
So: a checklist. I wrote this based on my own experiences, so what you’re seeing is gentile privilege among American liberals and radicals from a white Ashkenazi point of view. That obviously means that it’s a work-in-progress and hopefully a collaborative effort, since I lack the expertise to write about Jews in conservative or apolitical communities, Jews in other countries, and American Jews of color. (I also think it’d be very useful to write up checklists on Ashkenazi privilege and male privilege within Jewish communities. UPDATE: Whit has linked to an Ashkenazi privilege list here.) Because gentile privilege often operates in tandem with white and Christian privilege, I’ve included a sort of “prologue” of instances of white and Christian privilege that happen to apply to Diaspora Jews (items i-vii). It doesn’t make sense to look at complete lists of white or Christian privilege when talking about Jews, since most European Jews have white privilege and many Jews identify as secular or even Christian, so I’ve only included instances relevant to the intersection of the various identities that comprise Jewishness.
There were certain aspects of anti-Semitism that I couldn’t quite articulate as a form of privilege. Does that mean that they fit into one of the items I’ve already written? Take, for instance, the non-Jews who insist that since anti-Semitism is an inaccurate term, we Jews shouldn’t have a specific word for our oppression at all. Is that a function of denial (8)? Of mistrust (11)? Is it a separate kind of privilege that I’m not getting at yet – or does it happen simply because people don’t know that anti-Semitism operates differently than other types of oppression? Also, how do Jewish women factor into this list? Everything I wrote resonates with me – but at the same time, I’ve been keenly aware of the fact that, with the notable exceptions of the JAP and the Jewish Mother, Jewish women remain largely invisible in both Jews’ and non-Jews’ perceptions of Jewishness. Does what I wrote resonate with me because I genuinely feel it, or because, lacking my own solid identity, I’m forced to siphon it off of Jewish men?
If a “final” draft of this list is ever produced, it’ll probably be very messy and complicated – more like multiple lists connected under the umbrella category of gentile privilege. I think this is the only way it’ll accurately reflect the various interconnections and distinctions of Jewish cultures around the globe. Or maybe this list will just serve as a brief and limited addendum to David’s essay. I’d be happy with that, too.
Quick note: I’m one person with a short history of anti-oppression work and an even shorter history of Jewish activism, so constructive criticism and collaboration will make the list better. But I’d like non-Jews to please remember that you are not an expert on Jewishness. If you see an item in the proper list that would be better placed in the prologue – awesome, thanks. But what I do not want to see is people who have never walked around as a Jew, never opened a book on Jewish history, or never heard of terms like “blood libel” lecturing me on how I’m whining and how a disagreement about Zionism or Gaza or the rhetoric in an essay excuses everything they said in the Feministe threads and how I obviously misunderstood what they meant in this thread or that post. If you’re not familiar with one or more of these items – some of them are pretty esoteric – April Rosenblum’s The Past Didn’t Go Anywhere is a great place to start, and has a good bibliography. If you read it and still have a question about one of the items, I’ll gladly answer it, but don’t start from the assumption that I pulled it out of thin air.
The Gentile Privilege Checklist (Liberal and Radical Edition)
White/Christian Privilege
i. My religious and cultural holidays are national holidays. Even if my job requires me to work on some holidays, generally speaking, I and my community members don’t have to explain ourselves to employers and teachers, request time off to celebrate and/or worship, and risk falling behind or losing pay when we take that time.
ii. Even if I “pass” for a member of another group, I can advertise my identity through my appearance, language, or other markers without fear of discrimination, harassment, or assault. Revealing my group identity has never felt like “outing” myself.
iii. I have never felt pressure to alter my body – chemically, surgically or otherwise – or engage in displays of strength or violence to compensate for perceptions of my group as ugly or weak.
iv. I can visit my place of worship or a community building without fear of injury or death.
v. Even if I’m in a sparsely populated area, it is never difficult to find other members of my group.
vi. Generally speaking, my community is not targeted for hate crimes or threats.
vii. When other members of my group commit violent crimes, I will not be held personally responsible for it, expected to explain or condemn their actions to members of other groups, or punished for continuing to identify as a member of my group. Others do not use those crimes to justify instigating or ignoring assault and harassment against me.
Gentile Privilege
1. If I achieve success in my career, it will not be attributed to a predisposition to cunning and greed, or my group’s supposed control of the field, community, government, or world.
2. If I save money, accept money, or don’t spend as much as others think I should, it will not be attributed to a predisposition to stinginess or miserliness.
3. If I am angry, upset, or worried, my emotions are not attributed to my group’s supposed neurotic or infantile tendencies.
4. If my group suffers a monumental, culture-altering tragedy, no one speculates or tries to prove that I have exaggerated or fabricated the tragedy for material gain.
5. If I am robbed, it is not because the thief assumes, based on my group identity, that I am unusually rich.
6. When other members of my group commit violent crimes, I am not regularly portrayed as a monster that engages in demonic, inhuman acts.
7. In liberal and radical circles, It is not widely believed that my group has caused its own oppression, and I am not viewed as selfish or hypocritical for speaking about my oppression. It is generally accepted that fighting my oppression is not tantamount to endorsing the oppression of another group.
8. In liberal and radical circles, the very existence of my oppression – in any form or in any part of the world – is not routinely called into question or denied.
9. If, within a liberal or radical discussion, I feel that an individual’s criticism of members of my group is problematic, it is not immediately and universally assumed that my objection is delusional or a deliberate attempt to halt discussion. While it is acknowledged that one can “play the X-card,” legitimate instances of my oppression are given more attention than false accusations.
10. When economically oppressed groups organize to fight poverty, racism, and other injustices, they do not scapegoat me for those injustices.
11. When I work with liberals and radicals who are not members of my group, they do not view me with suspicion, require that I prove my loyalty to their cause, or wait for me to distinguish myself from the “bad” members of my group before they decide to trust me.
12. I can speak out against, or work to put a stop to, activities that promote hatred of my group without confirming beliefs that I am controlling the media or using a position of uncanny power over the community, government, or world to quell freedom of speech.
13. If the country in which I happen to live – or a country that is an ally to my country – goes to war, I will not be blamed for starting it.
14. If the country in which I happen to live – or a country that is an ally to my country – loses a war, I will not be blamed for sabotaging it.
15. No one assumes, based on my group identity, that I am physically deformed. Upon meeting me, no one violates my privacy by asking to see that deformity, nor do they violate my bodily autonomy to search for it.
Thoughts?
(Cross-posted at Modern Mitzvot.)
iv. I can visit my place of worship or a community building without fear of injury or death.
This is totally overblown, at least in America. Perhaps things are different in the rest of the world, but there just haven’t been a large number of attacks on synagogues here ever. A few, sure, but there have also been plenty of attacks on churches.
The rest sounds about right to me.
I’ve a feeling that #4 on the Gentile Privilege part of the list covers a lot of oppressed groups; people with privilege have claimed that slavery, rape culture, and virtually every act of violent oppression is an exaggeration that the oppressed put about in the hope of gaining via guilt. That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be on the list, though.
This is something I have only (as a gentile) discovered as an adult (I’m 27). When a close friend (who is about a decade older than I am) told me that her college roommate asked if she had horns, I was FLOORED.
Most of these seem to be negatives. I suppose that’s natural enough if gentile privilege is the same phenomenon as antisemitism, looked at from the other side. For every form that antisemitism takes, there is a privilege for gentiles that is simply the absence of that form of antisemitism. Fair enough. But are there forms of gentile privilege that are not naturally negatives?
You can of course turn it around: any instance of gentile privilege can be interpreted as antisemitically denying Jews a privilege. But are there examples that are easier to see? The business of Christian holidays is an example of what I mean – it’s simpler to express that as a privilege Christians have than as something denied to Jews. Are there other examples like that?
This is sort of awkward because I am writing quickly, but it’s an idea that belongs on this list. (And, Julie, very well done!)
“The fact of my group identity does not lead people to assume that my sexuality is diseased or abnormal in any way.”
And now that I have written this, I am thinking that perhaps it belongs in the prologue, rather than in the Gentile Privilege List proper.
I had a very vivid reminder of this back in the fall. For my work, I was involved in contacting candidates for local office and sending out candidate questionnaires that were going to be published. The questionnaires, which I was not involved in developing AT ALL, included a number of biographical questions, including religion. Now, I object to this in a much broader sense, but as a Jewish person, I had this visceral “oh shit” moment reading that. And sure enough, every candidate who was Jewish called me after receiving the questionnaire to express concern over that question. All I could tell them was that I understood their concerns, that I had expressed my concerns but had been ignored, and they could leave the question blank if they wanted to. And that of course put them in a bind: answer and risk people not voting for them because they’re Jewish or don’t answer and look like you have something to hide. In the end, they all left it blank. None of the Methodists or Presbyterians or Catholics or even Mormons (there was one) called me and all of them answered the question and most, I suspect, didn’t waste a minute even thinking about it. Of course, there is no way to know if their answer would have made any difference in any of their races, but the mere fact of not having to think about it is a form of privilege.
I think that Muslims would probably not agree that number 6 applies to all gentiles.
I went to a university in the south, and there were a lot of Pentecostals and Southern Baptists there. Many of them had a tendency to treat Judaism as a “root” religion — like, if they wanted to know what something was like in Jesus’ time, they’d ask me how Jews did whatever it was. It almost seemed like something weirdly analogous to the Noble Savage — that Jews were the “pure” form of religion. I tried, many times, to explain that Judaism had progressed a whole lot since then, but they seemed stuck on “Jesus was a Jew, Ruchama is a Jew, thus what Ruchama does is the same as what Jesus did.”
I was reminded of this a few weeks ago when I was having a conversation with a Muslim classmate who insisted that she believes in everything Judaism believes in and everything Christianity believes in because she accepts Moses and Jesus as prophets. A Catholic classmate and I both protested that Judaism is more than the Torah and Christianity is more than just what Jesus said, but she insisted that everything that came beyond Moses and Jesus are “culture, not real parts of the religion.”
I’m not really sure how to put this into the form of a privilege list, but it’s just the “I’m not your ancestor! Ancestors are dead! I’m standing right here!” feeling that I got in all these conversations was the same.
I live in New York, which in discussions of American politics and culture may as well be Mars, which could be why my reaction to several of these (including RJN’s addendum) was “that doesn’t relate to or describe my observations and experiences at all.” In some cases I recognized it as an issue historically but didn’t realize it was one still.
Anonyme, I may be wrong, but I think that’s what privilege checklists are about: it’s a way of showing people in the majority group that their experiences are not universal. The thing is that “privilege” in this context means a few different things, and one of them is pretty similar to “basic rights”– no one should have to worry that they will be targeted for a hate crime because of their group identity. But people who aren’t members of a targeted group have the privilege of not having to deal with, or think about, that particular oppression.
The privilege IS the absence of discrimination.
Also, #15 OMFGWTF. This is a list where I assumed that, while I am on the privileged side, I have enough friends and family members on the not-privileged side that I’d at least be aware of everything on the list, even if it didn’t spring to mind right away, or I hadn’t witnessed it myself. Nope. I can’t believe there are people who believe this. Except, of course, that I can…
This one drifts geographically. You are allowed to be a redneck in the south, but nowhere else. Including the net. ;) (Slip up and use the wrong word, or even worse, come right out and admit it, and the people at Pharyngula will feel perfectly fine accusing you of having babies with your brother.)
Otherwise, very good list.
Gentile privilege
16. When in center-left / liberal / “progressive”company, I am not expected to be the most generous with time or money, and I am not expected to take the most radical possible position. I am assumed to be average and not a saint.
17. (related to #3.) If I am angry, upset, or worried, I am not expected to make self-deprecating jokes about it.
18. People don’t pay attention to what I eat when I go out. (OK, gentile privilege in non-vegan, non-vegetarian, non-dieting setting) The corollary: Most home and restaurant menus have the “average Gentile” in mind, and I am less likely to get stuck with something I can’t eat.
Emily: someone’s college roommate asked only 8 to 10 years ago about Do Jews Have Horns? In seriousness? Where was this roommate from, and why was she considered qualified for college if she didn’t have minimal common sense? (Another blog I visit, http://www.talk2action.org , was discussing this horns myth with regards to some Christian proselytizing material handed out in Uganda, “Manga Messiah”, which makes the Gospel of John look like sweetness and light by comparison. Turns out that the “horns” were derived from a mistranslation of a Hebrew word meaning “halo” with the proper set of vowels. In the standard Latin Bible used as the only complete Western Bible for 1250 years, Jerome (c. 300 CE) made this mistranslation in the passage where Moses comes down from Mount Sinai “with horns” rather than “with his face shining”. In Christian medieval and Renaissance/ early Modern art, Moses is indeed portrayed with tiny ram’s horns peeking out of a shaggy head of hair. The Protestants did better with the passage – no horns.
I saw this post and dedcided to stay far away from it, not because I didn’t believe in the premise of the post but because of where it was posted. The bloggers at Feministe normally do a pretty good job of dealing with issues from various view points however their commenters are particularly hostile towards guest bloggers. I say this from experience. It seems that when someone dares to speak truth to power the pearl clutching begins. It is my position that many give lip service to anti-oppression work but the minute it makes them slightly uncomfortable i,e hits to close to home defensiveness begins.
I was hardly surprised to see this thread take this path, after all someone dared to speak about their own oppression. We only to hear truth when it does no challenge our own unearned privielge.
I could see #6 moving to the prologue of a more general list but might belong better in the gentile privilege list if we’re talking specifically the liberal and radical edition. And I’m not sure Richard’s suggestion applies to Jewish women (which doesn’t mean it can’t go on the list, just asking). I’m obviously familiar with the image of the JAP and the Jewish Mother, but I’m not really aware of stereotypes about Jewish female sexuality. Are there?
In a larger sense, though, I don’t think everything on the list needs to be something that could never apply to someone else/another group or that something needs to come off the list if we can conceive of one or two situations in which it might not apply.
As for Ruchama’s story, I’m definitely familiar with the phenomenon she describes coming from religious Christians, though I’m not quite sure how to phrase it. My religious practices are not exoticized and treated as relics of antiquity or a means to fulfill prophecies?
But when it’s coming from a Muslim in America, it’s hard for me to read this as privilege. I’ve heard that framing a lot from American Muslims, and I’ve always read it as an attempt to be “normal” in a culture that sees their religion as equal to terrorism, a way to latch on to the “Judeo-Christian” label.
“But when it’s coming from a Muslim in America, it’s hard for me to read this as privilege. I’ve heard that framing a lot from American Muslims, and I’ve always read it as an attempt to be “normal” in a culture that sees their religion as equal to terrorism, a way to latch on to the “Judeo-Christian” label.”
Well, the person that this came from wasn’t an American Muslim, she’s Egyptian and just here for grad school for a few years. I’m not really sure how to read it, but it wasn’t really the main point of what I was saying.
“My religious practices are not exoticized and treated as relics of antiquity or a means to fulfill prophecies?”
This phrasing works, I think.
“stereotypes about Jewish female sexuality.”
There are some old ones about the Jewish temptress, but I’m not sure how salient they are. Two that I think do sort of fall in this category are
1) “The nice Jewish girl”. I got called out on this one hardcore by Phoebe Maltz a few months ago — I used it in passing in an email, and she nailed me. I had always kind of taken at as the Jewish equivalent of “girl next door”, she interpreted it as “homely and virginal”.
2) Jewish men fleeing from Jewish women because they’re frigid, shrewish, and remind them of their mother (I saw a comedy group do a bit on Botox leaving you “totally expressionless/like a Jewish princess having sex”). I think this straddles the line of being both a Jewish male and female putative pathology, but anyway, listworthy.
Also — as I said on Modern Mitzvot — fabulous post.
I’m wondering if some of the discussions about whether various bullet points would apply to particular classes of Gentiles is related to different understandings of privilege checklists. I think nearly every item works if the privilege checklist is understood as discussing privileges that exist on the basis of that particular status (in this case, being Gentile), but that it is understood that the privilege might not apply to an individual due to some other status. For example, Thene points out that other groups get accused of exploiting/exaggerating tragedy (slavery, etc) for the sake of profit, but Gentiles as a group do not get accused of exploiting/exaggerating tragedy for the sake of profit, making this a privilege that Gentiles as a group experience, but that some individual Gentiles might not experience because of some other status.
In general, I think this list is a great opportunity for consciousness-raising, and I hope people will continue to add to it.
Speaking personally, this list, and some of the prior discussions on the topic of antisemitism, have been immensely helpful to me in reminding me of the privilege that I experienced growing up and living in times and places where I’ve been sheltered from the most blatant antisemitism even as compared to folks who grew up in only slightly different times/places, and the privilege I’ve experienced as someone who often passes as non-ethnically Jewish in predominately-Gentile settings and ethnically Jewish (albeit non-practicing) in other settings.
In regards to horns, my grandmother likes to talk about how when she moved to DC during WWII to take a government job the other secretaries didn’t believe that she was Jewish because she “didn’t have horns.” That was the first time, and only time until these recent online discussions, that I had heard of this myth.
I’m obviously familiar with the image of the JAP and the Jewish Mother, but I’m not really aware of stereotypes about Jewish female sexuality. Are there?
One ‘traditional’ image I’m familiar with is the hyper sexualized ‘Jewess’, busty, lustful and animalistic.
My mother has also told me that someone at college asked her if she had horns. That would have been in the late sixties. When we were in Rome a few years ago, my parents hired a private tour guide for a day, and after he found out we were Jewish (when we asked to go see the historic synagogue), he told us that there was something that we had to see, that we would love it, that we couldn’t miss it. He took us the the church of St. Peter in Chains where Michelangelo’s statue of Moses with horns is displayed.
One I’d add:
I can decide what kind of tip I’d like to leave without worrying about how it’ll reflect on other members of my group.
Tara, that’s covered under #2
Persuant to the discussion of JAPs and Jewish mothers:
I am not assumed, based upon my religious background, to be spoiled or unwilling to work.
If I am maternal towards my child, or worried about him, it is not immediately placed into a stereotypical box about my religious background.
Based upon my background, it is not assumed that I can cook, nor that I will refuse to cook.
In other news:
People don’t assume, based upon my background, that I can bargain or know where to get a good deal.
Men of my background are often portrayed in movies and television as romantic and attractive.
He took us the the church of St. Peter in Chains where Michelangelo’s statue of Moses with horns is displayed.
My grandparents actually have a foot-high replica of that statue in their house. They have a lot of imitation fine art – that’s how their taste runs. Because it’s been there my entire life, I never thought it was strange. Once when I asked about the horns, my grandfather explained about the mistranslation, but I honestly thought that was something from the Middle Ages. I was pretty shocked how many people said they’ve experienced the horns thing in recent decades.
Julie: This post makes a lot of sense to me. Glad you wrote it.
to Renee at #12: I am a regular Feministe reader, occasional commenter, and I think from now on I’ll make a point of speaking up to be welcoming and positive towards guest bloggers there. Because I think you’re right, and it’s a sad thing to acknowledge about a place one values.
General comment:
This is a great list.
I think in America there’s a feeling, acknowledged or subconscious, that anti-semitism is ‘done.’ Like the Holocaust showed everyone the error of their ways and it’s just magically…POOF…over. In that way, anti-semitism is at the forefront of oppressions that the mainstream has realized are socially unacceptable but has no real investment or interest in digging it out by the roots. Maybe Joe and Jane Liberal think they’re innocent of overlooking and propagating anti-semitism, but I wonder if at some point, as they chafe under the increasing doublespeak of ‘postracial America’ and ‘postfeminism,’ they’ll figure it out.
At any rate, good posts like this have a chance of getting through even to the happily delusional. Thanks for this.
Another data point on the horns thing: a friend told me he’d gotten checked for horns by an incredulous fellow student (this happened maybe 5 years ago, at a liberal college with a large Jewish community). IIRC my friend hadn’t ever heard of the horns thing prior to this incident, so he was quite baffled.
I first learned about the horns thing from a lifelong-secular college friend who, whenever he would encounter a Bible (e.g. in a hotel room), would make a point of checking to see if it was one of the ones with the horns mistranslation, because he found that hilarious and wanted to see it for himself (I don’t think he ever succeeded).
On images of Jewish female sexuality: I was not so much thinking of the “Jewess as temptress” trope that David pointed out, but of the the sexuality of the JAP. A joke I heard a long time ago, as one example: Why do JAPS use gold diaphragms (insist their boyfriends/husbands use gold condoms)? Because they want to know their men are coming into money.
On reason I suggested that my item about sexuality belongs properly in the prologue is that I think all oppressed groups are said by the privileged to be tainted with some kind of diseased/abnormal/hyper/etc. sexuality.
Here’s another: My ethnicity is not assumed to mean that I am less loyal to the country of my birth than to the country where that ethnicity is a/the national identity; my ethnicity is not assumed to make me as an individual, or the members of my group collectively, a proxy for that country.
I have never heard of the “lusty Jewess” stereotype; the one I know involves a number of jokes I won’t repeat, but the upshot of which is that Jewish women don’t like sex and only use it to get money out of their husbands.
And anon at #1, there may not be very many attacks on synagogues in the US, but the fear is alive and well. My shul meets at a JCC and we are required by the terms of our lease to hire an armed guard for High Holiday services. About 10 years ago, an unexploded Molotov cocktail was found on the playground behind the building.
After 9/11, my non-Jewish sister-in-law went on and on about how she no longer felt safe, and wasn’t it awful to no longer feel safe, and didn’t I agree that suddenly we weren’t safe any more? I told her that the last day I felt safe was the day before the Munich Olympic massacre (I was 12 at the time). Her sense of safety was gentile privilege.
With regards to iv: Just because there aren’t a loarge number of synagogue attacks doesn’t mean attacks on individuals don’t occur. I know lots of people who remove identifiable Jewish markers, even their kippot (or put another hat on top) to avoid being robbed/beaten up/harrassed when walking to or from their synagogues, so I think this one can safely be left in, even in the US.
With regards to #15: When I was in high school (in the 90’s) I went to Space Camp in Huntsville, AL. I was the first Jew several of the attendees had ever met, and 2 of them expressed surprise that I didn’t look any different from “normal people”.
I want to second NancyP’s (#11) comments about people paying excessive attention to what I am eating once they find out I am Jewish and/or hear about the laws of kashrut. It is really annoying to have this be an acceptable topic of conversation (as in “are you sure you want to order that–I think it has shrimp/meat/cheese in it?”) Thanks, but as an adult I can make my own choices about how kosher I want to be, and either way it is my business not your how I practice my religion.
Julie – Thank You.
Very good, very helpful.
A request to posters in general (or moderator?) to stop giving examples of mysogynist jokes about Jewish women, as I think the point has now been made about Jewish women being included in the example RJN gave regarding sexuality as legit for inclusion (prologue or otherwise) in the gentile priviledge list.
Ideas? They are painful to read, for some reason, in a way reading antisemitic experiences hasn’t been.
Eva:
I actually thought twice about including the joke that I did–and I am sorry I did not include some kind qualifier acknowledging how painful the jokes might be to Jewish women–but I decided to post it because one thing that has become apparent to me in this whole discussion has been generational difference. “JAP” jokes like the one I included were very common, say, 15-20 years ago; when I first started teaching, my students would make disparaging remarks about “JAPS” all the time. I don’t think I have heard a single such comment in the last 8 years at least, and so when chingona wondered if my point about Jewish sexuality would apply to women, I thought it useful to include. And in the event that anyone thinks the stereotype of the “JAP” is not alive and well in popular culture, check out the character of David’s fiancee in the movie David & Layla, which is one of the more nakedly offensive portrayals of that stereotype that I have seen in a long time. (I have a little more to say about that movie, though not much more, in the fourth and, I think, final post in the antisemitism series I have been writing, which should be up soon.)
Richard – thanks for your reply.
Yes, it seems popular culture is keeping antisemitic mysogyny alive and well, even if it is dying out (or is much weaker than it used to be) in daily life.
I haven’t heard references to Jewish American Princesses (the acronym handily doubles as an insult to the Japanese), Jewish Mothers, Jewish Temptresses or Nice Jewish Girls in direct conversation in a really long time. Maybe that’s why it hurt more…I didn’t see it coming.
Here’s another that bothers me quite a lot:
I do not have my identification with my ethnic or religious group challenged by people who are not members of that group.
I am so sick of gentiles saying, how dare I identify as Jewish when I am Wiccan/am tattooed/don’t fast on Yom Kippur. How dare I identify my Judaism ethnically or culturally or even as a family thing.
And I don’t even know how to describe this in terms of privilege, but I am profoundly sick of any mention of antisemitism being derailed by some wag who is compelled to point out that Arabs are also Semites.
With regards to iv: Just because there aren’t a loarge number of synagogue attacks doesn’t mean attacks on individuals don’t occur.
I just want to note that I think Julie properly included it in the prologue, as a white/Christian privilege, not as a broader gentile privilege. We’re not talking just attacks or threats on synagogues, but on houses of worship of minority religions, including on mosques. I think it’s completely appropriate.
And I apologize that my question resulted in things getting said that were painful. If this makes any sense, I never associated the JAP stereotype with sexuality, and it’s not something that I’ve ever had to deal with personally. Some of that’s my age – I really do think those stereotypes are dying out – and part of it is that I don’t obviously “look Jewish.”
Honestly, my reaction to the Gentile Privilege Checklist is to wonder whether you ever actually read your own blog. Because many of the items on that list strongly remind me of the way I and people like me are treated and spoken about by many of the regular bloggers and commenters here, and by leftists in general.
I’ve always thought there was an uncanny similarity between left-wing rhetoric and antisemitic rhetoric—just cross out “Jews” and replace it with “affluent white males,” and you’re good to go. But this really seals the deal.
Brandon,
As someone who is reasonably sympathetic to affluent white males (the majority group with which I work and live), I still am amused by the thought of 2, 4, 14, or 15 ever being applied to those groups. Also, by defining yourself partly economically (as “affluent”), doesn’t 5 become an accurate choice on the part of the thief, instead of a stereotyping assumption? Similarly, 10 — the affluent are a natural target of suspicion for the woes of non-affluent; a particular religious/ethnic group is not.
I’m afraid that you might be missing the point of this exercise.
Thank you for this list. First off, I want to second “I do not have my identification with my ethnic or religious group challenged.” Here are a few more that could possibly be added:
– It is not assumed that I enjoy or participate in the practices of another religion.
– My religious text is referred to by the appropriate name.
(Not sure about that wording, but using “Jewish Bible” or “Old Testament” when referring to the Torah is sort of a pet peeve of mine.)
– I am not singled out for conversion.
(I’m not sure if this qualifies as a gentile privilege, or more specifically a Christian one.)
My first impression is that this seems a rather clumsy project. Firstly the term Gentile is itself offensive to many. Secondly, it appears that by Gentile the writer has white people in mind or else seriously underestimates the suffering of the translatlantic slave trade, the disadvantaging of African people in the Western world and beyond and the rise of Islamaphobia to name just a few of the most obvious ones. It appears that the writer is attempting to claim that people who identify as Jewish do not share all of the White privileges listed by Peggy McIntosh. (A list of those thought not to extend to Jews or a discussion of the extent to which Jews have or hav not attained Whiteness might be more fruitful.) This may be true in the US or UK but the writer does not seem to specify. It is certainly not the case in Israel where the law privileges Jews over other ethnic/religous groups. So, for Israel we may need to consider a list of Jewish privilege. We might then consider whether, and to what extent, these privileges are extended to non-Israeli Jews, who regardless have nationality, have the privilege of attaining Israeli citizenship – a privilege not extended to non-Jews regardless of their family histories.
darren,
“We might then consider whether, and to what extent, these privileges are extended to non-Israeli Jews, who regardless have nationality, have the privilege of attaining Israeli citizenship – a privilege not extended to non-Jews regardless of their family histories.”
I don’t think this is correct. See Acquisition of Citizenship by Residence (http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/MFAArchive/2000_2009/2001/8/Acquisition%20of%20Israeli%20Nationality).
“Special provision is made in the Nationality Law for former citizens of British Mandatory Palestine. Those who remained in Israel from the establishment of the State in 1948 until the enactment of the Nationality Law of 1952 became Israeli citizens by residence or by return.”
Also, “Persons born outside Israel, if their father or mother holds Israeli citizenship, acquired either by birth in Israel, according to the Law of Return, by residence, or by naturalization.”
It’s perhaps less serious, but it bothered me a lot when I was little (this would be for the Christian privilege list.):
Characters in books and movies have your religion by default.
Every time there was a new Christmas special with my favorite characters (Belle from Beauty and the Beast, for example, or all of the American Girl Dolls), I felt a little bit rejected.
I find it interesting that, in a discussion focused on the overall status of Jews, Darren feels it necessary that we include a list talking about all the ways Jews are privileged (in, specifically, Israel).* Not only does it ratify the feeling of many Jews that all anti-Semitism talk leads to Israel eventually, but it is one the clearest examples I can imagine of #7 and #9.
I don’t view what Julie is doing as trying to say that (White) Jews in America don’t enjoy White privilege (I think the way Jewishness intersects with Whiteness is interesting — a “White but not quite” dynamic — but I don’t think we’re barred from most incidents of White privilege). I think she’s saying that in tandem with the privileges White Jews get on account of race, they are also disadvantaged vis-a-vis the privileges non-Jews get on account of their non-Jewishness. And I think many of those privileges do apply to non-White non-Jews, that is to say, they’re a privilege non-Jews can assert against Jews (1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14).
* I certainly agree that, if it could be hermetically sealed, Jews in Israel would enjoy many privileges (many of which themselves are due for heavy criticism) vis-a-vis non-Jews, both de facto and de jure. But in terms of how Jews in Israel are perceived and treated by others outside the context of the state itself (when they travel abroad, when they are the subject of discussion of the international community), the gentile privileges mentioned reassert themselves quite dramatically. Which is to say, the privilege Jews enjoy in Israel (and I don’t deny they enjoy it) does not really dissipate that much the subordination the experience in locations where they are not in the superordinate position — including “the world” writ large.
PG
Thank you for this clarification. With regards to the first passage, I was aware of this but perhaps was not clear enough in my post. Of course many Palestinians were driving out of Israel in 1948 and remain refugees. I’m not sure whether this is something that you would deny (which takes us back to our list and how Gentiles too have their suffering denied by some as indeed do Jews.) Those who Israel terms Israeli Arabs do not have equality/ the same privileges on issues such as land purchase – at least this is what I read in Haaretz when last I was in Israel – I confess to not knowing the exact details. I recall reading about Arab Israeli political parties not being allowed to stand in the next elections as well – you may well know more about this than I.
Similarly, your second point (quite rightly) addresses my use of imprecise language – however would you agree with my more general point, that Israel privileges 1) Jews living there and 2)to a lesser and not yet well-defined extent many or possibly all Jews whilst mindful that many choose not to utilise this privilege?
David Schraub – I do indeed raise the idea of Jewish privilege. This is not to deny Jewish oppression but rather because the discussion as you point out is on the ‘overall status of Jews’. As such I would hope I am not alone here in trying to look at as many aspects of Jewish status as possible.
Whilst the stereotype of “cunning, moneygrabber” is not extended to other groups, those concerning violence and victimhood certainly are – this lead me to conclude that Julie had only White Gentiles in mind.
I think that Julie’s appellation of “in liberal or radical circles” is important here: I think that it’s far, far rarer for a radical circle to dismiss, say, Black oppression is meaningful or “real” in the way that typically happens with anti-Semitism. I also think that non-Whites are rarely seen as pulling the strings of the entire world when they mobilize and advocate (there’s kind of a parallel with the whole “PC silencing” trope, but I think it’s qualitatively distinct: PC silencing is supposed to work due to guilt, Jewish silencing is presumed to work due to all-encompassing Jewish power).
I agree with you, though, that non-White non-Jews do often get hit with the “one member commits a crime, and now we’re all monsters” bit.
As to Israel … it’s not that I don’t think the relationship of Jews vis-a-vis non-Jews there doesn’t need interrogation. It’s more like … it feels like people are saying “no discussion of Jews is complete unless we seal off and talk about how rockin’ they have it in a state the size of New Jersey”. That, to me, is like demanding that we create a separate checklist for what privileges Black people get at HBCUs. It’s not that they don’t get any or that this should be beyond discussion, as much as (a) it’s really complicated the degree to which those privileges are justified and (b) those “privileges” don’t in any way obviate the broader-level disadvantages. So it feels like a derailment.
darren,
I am aware that the Israeli legislature occasionally takes measures to try to limit the rights of the minority — as is characteristic of legislatures in a democracy — but my understanding is that the Israeli Supreme Court counteracts that tendency. For example, the Court unanimously reversed the legislative panel that attempted to bar the Arab parties.
What do you consider to be the “driving out” of non-Jews from Israel? I understand that the establishment of a Jewish state likely made non-Jews feel unwelcome and that there were violent factions within the Zionist movement whom such non-Jews reasonably feared. But what precisely was done to the non-Jews?
My paradigm for this was another state established around the same time after being under British colonial rule, i.e. India. In the Partition from Pakistan, there was horrific violence on both sides; Hindus were physically forced from Pakistan and Muslims from India, and even those who voluntarily attempted to leave and join their majority group in the other new state were massacred. On both sides of the border, trains would arrive from the other side with the passengers dead and mutilated (in particular, women were raped and then their breasts hacked off so they would bleed to death). In a situation like that, it seems unambiguous that people were being “driven out,” but I am not sure what you mean by that phrase.
Darren, I don’t think you can have read Julie’s post very carefully. She quite explicitly states at the beginning that
Darren:
Actually, the discussion is about non-Jewish privilege, not about the overall status of the Jews. One may wish to deny that such privilege exists–I am assuming, based on what you wrote, that you do not deny this–one may wish to point out that there are cases in which Jews share in the privileges of other privileged groups (of course there are cases, if we are white, among other possibilities, in which we do); one may wish to point out that, locally, in Israel, where Jews are the dominant group, the items on this list do not hold the same weight as they do in the US (but that would be true of any localized situation: in the school where my wife teaches, she is the only non-Black faculty member in her building (she is a woman of color but can pass for white in at least some cases), and much of the white privilege that would be hers in the larger society “disappears”–it’s the wrong word, but I am writing quickly–in that localized context); one may even wish to point out that the privileges in Julie’s list that are assigned to non-Jews are interchangeable with the privileges that are listed in other privilege checklists; and all of those assertions may be true/have real validity, but to derail a discussion of non-Jewish privilege–and what you are doing here is a derailment whether you realize it or not–by asserting that a consideration of non-Jewish privilege needs to account for all of the ways in which, to put it simply, questions of privilege and accountability for that privilege are complex and render the status of Jews complex, is an antisemitic tactic.
Please note:I am not labeling you an antisemite; I don’t know you; I have, as far as I can tell, never interacted with you online. I am describing what your entry into this conversation looks and feels like to me.
Consider how fundamentally it would derail a conversation about white privilege in the US if someone entered that conversation and claimed that really to talk about white privilege, you need to account for countries where Black people hold power and how white people are treated in those countries.
I am not saying that there is a one-to-one correspondence between Israel and any country where Black people are the majority/hold the reins of political power; I am not interested in discussing whether there are countries in which Black people hold the power and discriminate against white people. My point is that introducing that question into a discussion of white privilege in the US would have the effect of derailing the conversation, and if the question were asked by a white person (and I have no idea whether or not you are Jewish; this is not about you, but about the dynamic), no matter what that person’s intention would have been, the very act of asking would have been an expression of white privilege.
Please keep your points–some of which I would agree need to be discussed–for a more appropriate post.
David Schraub,
It’s useful for me to know what it feels to you people are saying. It was not what I was/am saying. I am saying that in looking at power relations, it is important to take a broad perspective, lest we focus too narrowly on a partial view.
I don’t think HBCUs offer a strong analogy to Israel. I’d urge you to reconsider this. The idea of Black privilege in the US will not be taken seriously by many – or are you arguing that any notions of Jewish privilege are equally absurd? In which case we’d need to look at the indicators – education, employment, political representation, prison etc to get some more tangible evidence.
Darren,
See the way people are responding to you rather than to Julie’s post? That makes it a derailment. And see the way you’re defining what we’re allowed to talk about – “it is important to take a broad perspective…” and “we’d need to look at the indicators”. It may be important to you. If it were important to Julie, I suspect she’d have written about it.
When someone speaks of her experience of oppression, you don’t get to sit in judgment of her experience. You are the one who thinks we are talking about the general status of the Jews. You don’t get to make that decision.
Darren, as a moderator, I’m banning you from this thread. The ban will be undone only if Julie (the writer of the OP) decides that she’d rather that you not be banned.
You remain welcome to post elsewhere on “Alas” if you want.
If you want to post to contest or criticize my decision to ban you from this thread, you may do so in the open thread.
Richard Jeffrey Newman
I am deeply sorry that you find my contributions to be ‘an anti semitic tactic’.. I realise that in attempting to problematise the notion of privilege, I have taken this forum away from a place you, and possibly others, would like to see it go. I disagree with your analogy of ‘Black countries’ but feel further dialogue with you might prove to be less than fruitful.
Whilst I have no idea of the authority you hold on this forum I shall abide by your directive and cease to engage in dialogue here. Consider me silenced.
Hey everyone – sorry for the long silence (late night class prep followed by early morning class).
Thank you for all the comments and suggestions! I’ll start revising the list over the next few days. A quick note on #6 (“When other members of my group commit violent crimes, I am not regularly portrayed as a monster that engages in demonic, inhuman acts”) – I was thinking specifically of the blood libel when I wrote this one, but it’s true that other groups have been saddled with dehumanizing myths, too. I’ll move it to the prologue.
I know we’ve already gotten back on track (thanks, Amp) but do please limit this discussion to Diaspora Jews’ experiences and the checklist itself.
I have two questions that I hope will get this discussion back to where it was:
1. Regarding #4: “If my group suffers a monumental, culture-altering tragedy, no one speculates or tries to prove that I have exaggerated or fabricated the tragedy for material gain.” I believe that this would be true of the Armenians and Turkey’s stance towards the Armenian genocide. So here’s my question: Is Julie’s formulation pointing towards a phenomenon that is true when dealing with genocides in general, or is there something about the ways that non-Jews respond when Jews talk about culture-altering tragedies that is specifically a manifestation of non-Jewish privilege?
2. While darren’s post was clearly a derailment, I’d like to think a bit on his questioning of the term Gentile. This is the etymology that came up on Dictionary.com:
I am just wondering: we (Jews; about non-Jews, I don’t know) associate the word so closely with Christians. Is there a better term?
Richard,
To what extent are we containing this to Gentile privilege in the U.S.? Because in the U.S., I don’t think I’ve encountered anyone who isn’t Turkish (the nation that perpetrated the genocide against the Armenians) who takes the Turkish “side” wrt the Armenian genocide, whereas loads of people who aren’t German (the side that perpetrated the largest unified genocidal incident against the Jews) will contest the significance of the Holocaust.
What is this horns thing about? The town I grew up in was like, 80% Jewish and I swear to god I have never heard of this in my life. Who would think that? I mean, I joke that when I was a kid I thought Republicans had them… but really? Horns? Is that honestly a thing that people think? I cannot get over this.
So I was writing this long thing on Armenians, and PG just said it less than half the space. Also, it seems to me that Holocaust denial grows more widespread as WWII recedes into history and survivors (both victims and perpetrators) die off. I don’t know what claims will be made about Rwanda or Sudan or the Balkans 50 years from now. I tend to think the denial will come from the descendants of the perpetrators, rather than from people who have no connection at all to the events, but I could just have a limited imagination.
As for the Holocaust, I think it gets used in a couple different ways. There’s outright Holocaust denial, which most people (I think, I hope) find repugnant. I’ve also heard a number of Holocaust-related jokes that have as their basic premise that the Jews were so awful that it’s no wonder people wanted to do them in. Sometimes the joke is aimed at some other group. (If only Hitler had known about such-and-such a group, he would have got them first. They’re worse than the Jews!)
But the Holocaust also gets used to set the bar so low in defining antisemitism that almost nothing else could possibly qualify. I don’t know if that needs its own place in the list or is covered indirectly by some of the other points.
I think this post with the long quote from Sudy would be good review for some people who are having trouble with this list or the project of this list:
Kyriarchy, not patriarchy
Particularly points like this:
Privilege checklists often have items that don’t apply universally to non-members. For example, many male privilege checklists have individual items which don’t apply to gay men. Privilege checklists are not an indictment or accusation of those with privilege, but a way for them to realize how different their experience is from others’: if a point doesn’t apply to you, it isn’t helping you make realizations, so you should try the next point. That’s just my feeling on it.
Sorry if someone’s linked this before, but I thought this was relevant http://thisisbabylon.net/2009/01/08/white-privilege-in-a-jewish-context/
Hmmm…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_mother_stereotype
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-American_princess
How about, “If I am arrested, I am granted bail because it is not assumed that I will escape to the country of my culture/religion/forebears.”
See, e.g., Rubashkin.
Okay, I think I have a clearer idea of what I want to ask about #4
As this is worded, it implies that Holocaust denial is regularly applied–or would likely be applied–to other culture-altering tragedies that have befallen–or might in the future befall–the Jews. My question is: Do we think this is the case? (And maybe there are examples I just am not thinking of right now.) Is the denial of this kind of tragedy a feature of antisemitism, or is Holocaust denial a discrete thing? If the latter, why not just name it Holocaust denial (or something wording that names genocide in some form) in the list itself?
As a woman with a very jewish name and very stereotypical ashkenazi appearance, I have experienced both the JAP stereotype *and* the hypersexual exotic one. Usually the later occurs more with people who have come from areas of the country/world where there aren’t a lot of jews, whereas the former is more prevalent in areas with large, visible, jewish minorities.
And I also have experienced situations where a number of synagogues and community centers in my liberal, blue state where attacked when I was a child and everyone was freaked out about going there and hiring extra security etc.
RJN,
Arguably within the U.S., there’s a certain amount of denial about the genocide suffered by various Native American groups at the hands of European settlers. It’s accepted among many conservatives and libertarians (see, e.g., Ayn Rand on the topic) that:
a) what was done to these groups by Europeans was no worse than their warfare amongst themselves; and
b) because their culture was inferior, they had no right to preserve it; relatedly, because they did not have precisely the same concepts of real property ownership that had developed in Anglo and Continental law, there could be no theft of their land.
In one of Rush Limbaugh’s books, he cites some statistic about the number of people who identify as Native American today compared to the number estimated to have inhabited North America at the time of Columbus to say, “See, there was no genocide!”
Conservatives and libertarians often do not support reservations or any other government “assistance” to Native Americans, and will attack such things in part by engaging in denial or justification of the both literal and cultural genocide of Native Americans by European settlers.
—–
That doesn’t answer your question, really, but it just occurred to me as an example of a fairly widespread, American action of “privilege,” though presumably as non-Jews, Native Americans are Gentiles of a sort.
Thanks, PG. I did not know about what you describe, though I am not surprised by it.
I think in the case of indigenous people, we are rather in the position of the Turks, either the direct descendants of or the inheritors of the political system wrought by that genocide, with a lot invested in downplaying the violence of what happened (see also, slavery). That makes me think that Holocaust denial is its own thing. Holocaust denial isn’t centered in Germany. As for whether it would happen again if another genocidal event happened to the Jewish people, I’m inclined to say yes, because it seems to arise from antisemitism as opposed to an attempt to preserve a tangible advantage, though I have a very hard time imagining another genocide-level event happening to Jews.
I have no idea how to rewrite it to reflect that distinction, because PG is right that there are several pretty large groups of gentiles who don’t have that privilege.
Chingona:
This seems a very worthwhile point to try to articulate further. How do you see this distinction at work?
In one of Rush Limbaugh’s books, he cites some statistic about the number of people who identify as Native American today compared to the number estimated to have inhabited North America at the time of Columbus to say, “See, there was no genocide!”
Forgive me a tangent. I think this is pure unadulterated bullshit. The estimates of the number of indigenous people who were killed by disease spreading within and between indigenous communities after first contact but before actual European settlers moved into their area is in the tens of millions, perhaps in the hundreds if you consider all of the Americas. This may not have been an intentional genocide, but whatever the exact numbers, the death toll was staggering, and the populations have never recovered pre-Columbian numbers.
I have heard that in the 2000 census Native American was the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group. I don’t have a cite, but what I recall is they attribute it to more people who have a small percentage of Indian blood claiming to be Native American, including many people aren’t tribal members or who wouldn’t even qualify, because now it’s cool to have a little Indian in you. (When my friend who is Apache gets this line, he asks them if they’d like a little more.)
The word “gentile” is also used by certain Christians to refer to OTHER Gentiles that do not share their beliefs… notably the Mormons. Jehovah’s Witnesses also refer to “gentiles” from time to time; not sure of their usage, but I don’t think they refer to themselves!
In some Christian texts, “Israel” means the Church, which was Paul’s usage in the NT. Notably, Paul was also Jewish, and sought to change the meaning for his own reasons. Also, that was the terminology people understood at the time; I have still heard the term “Israel” used that way in sermons, both Catholic and Protestant. The creation of an actual country with that name, cut down on the confusion. But the word “gentile” to refer to non-believers is still in use.
Thus, some Christians don’t particularly like being called “gentiles”–as some Protestants don’t like to be called Protestant (root word: protest, and they say they aren’t protesting anything).
I brought this thread up with my born-again friend today, and he was adamant that he is NOT a gentile OR a Protestant, when he is assuredly both.
So, there you go.
I can’t really say I have any idea what goes on in the head of someone who denies the Holocaust. It just seems different to me than other types of genocide denial. With PG bringing up Native Americans, it seems that denying genocide is a pretty common thing, with Germany being an exception because it was defeated by an occupying foreign power that forced it to face what it had done. What seems weird or particular to me about Holocaust denial is the denial isn’t being engaged in by the perpetrators, so it seems to come from some other source than “standard” or “normal” genocide denial (words I never thought I’d write).
So I guess the question becomes whether they find the Holocaust unbelievable because of how it was carried out or because of who it happened to or both. It certainly sounds unbelievable that a government would build factories for killing people. If I didn’t know it had happened, I would have a very difficult time believing it could happen. Given the percentage of people who believe the moon landing was faked, I expect Holocaust denial to grow more widespread over time. But a lot of Holocaust deniers also downplay the Jewishness of the Holocaust. It becomes “a lot of people died in the war and some of them were Jewish.” They very much target the idea that Jews were persecuted as a group and targeted for extermination as a group.
I assume they also are targeting whatever sympathy Jews might get from having gone through the event. I suppose part of their motivation might be that having six million of some ethnic group murdered makes it hard to claim that ethnic group actually runs the show. That the Jews control everything for their own purposes is a very old antisemitic idea with a very long half-life.
Virulent antisemitism certainly seems to be on the decline in the United States, and none of us on that thread could tell stories like the stories our grandparents could tell. But if antisemitism were to revive to the point that another genocide could be committed against the Jews, I can’t really see why that same antisemitism wouldn’t result in denial coming not just from the perpetrators but from other sources as well. Unless it really is just that gas chambers are so hard to conceive of.
I don’t have a crystal ball. I’m not making a prediction. It just seems to me that it’s different than perpetrator denial, which is pretty easy to understand, and that makes me think it’s sort of free-floating, not connected to the actual historical events. And I still have no idea how to rewrite that privilege point to account for it.
PG:
Obviously not every item on the list applies, which is why I said “many” and not “all.” Though in the case of #2, while I realize it’s not exactly the same thing, those of us who support lower taxes and less government spending quite frequently see these sentiments dismissed as mere stinginess or miserliness.
Natural in the sense that it’s human nature to scapegoat those who are better off than you for your own misfortunes and/or failures, but the fact that it’s natural doesn’t mean that it’s right, either factually or morally. If the most you can say in defense of left-wing scapegoating is that they scapegoat a socioeconomic class rather than a religious/ethnic group, I’m happy to let it stand at that.
Brandon,
You’re trolling. Stop it. Leave this thread now.
chingona:
(Emphasis added)
You make me think of the story I told in Part 1 of my antisemitism series about my classmate’s father who suggested to me that the Holocaust had not been as bad as people claimed. He was German and, in retrospect, I can imagine that he might simply not have wanted/been able to believe that his own people had been capable of doing such a thing, in the same way that a parent might find it unbelievable that her or his child had committed a murder. While a willful unbelief of that sort, in the face of mountains of evidence to the contrary, is still a big problem, I can at least understand the emotional impulse behind it. That strikes me as very different from people whose denial, as you say elsewhere in your comment, is more free-floating, less connected to having been or being connected to the perpetrators, where it is not unbelief of the sort I just described, but outright denial, and so that leads me to pull out a couple of points you made, which I think are very important (especially given discussions I have had within the contexts of both Jewish and Holocaust Studies about whether the Shoah was unique among genocides–which is different from saying that each genocide has unique characteristics that distinguish it from all others):
Regardless of what motivates this kind of denial–because without asking we can’t really know what the motivations are, and even then we might not get a straight answer–it’s worth thinking about the effect this denial has in terms of the privilege(s) we are trying to define, rhetoric about Jews/of antisemitism, etc. I don’t have much more to say right now; I am going to try today to get the fourth post in my series up, so if I leave this question hanging, forgive me. But I hope other people will take it up.
chingona,
Yes, I think that’s a really valuable distinction: other genocides are routinely denied by the perpetrators/ those descended from or benefiting from the actions of the perpetrators. Turks have an obvious self-interest in denying Armenian genocide; all of us who benefit from European settlement of the Americas have an obvious self-interest in denying genocide of Native Americans.
(Wrt the Rush Limbaugh tangent: I think this has a bit to do with conservative hostility particularly toward the concept of cultural genocide. To Limbaugh, if there are “Native Americans” around, regardless of whether they have a tribal identification or know squat about their culture or anything else, that’s some kind of proof against genocide. With genocide toward Jews as sort of the archetype against which all other claims of genocide are measured, because Jews have maintained a cultural identification so strongly despite the pogroms — and probably also because of the nature of the motivation for pogroms, i.e. the view of Jews as an alien species that *could* not assimilate — genocide gets measured just in body count.)
In contrast, Holocaust denial — both the overtly stupid “this never happened,” and the more subtle forms including denial that Jews were specifically targeted — goes way beyond those who have a self interest in the denial. David Irving, for example, is British and lived through WWII as a small child; his father was in the Navy and barely escaped a ship sunk by a German U-boat. There’s no obvious reason for him to want to minimize Nazi atrocities, yet he does. (I suppose one could come up with a Freudian claim that Irving resents his father’s abandonment of the family after the war, and is striking back at the father who fought for the Allies, by focusing on the Allies’ attacks on civilians and denying that Fascism was genocidal or otherwise bad.)
PG:
This is really interesting. Could you explain what you mean here a little bit more?
I think that as the African American civil rights movement is treated as a kind of archetypal Good Civil Rights Movement by the center and right in America, such that subsequent movements have had a push-pull wrt to positioning themselves as similar to that movement, the Holocaust is treated as the archetypal Yeah That Definitely Counts As Genocide And That Was Bad by the center and right in America.
So if you accept this as true about the conservative mindset regarding genocide, what happened in the Holocaust defines what is Really Genocide. The Holocaust was a deliberate effort by Nazi Germany and its co-opted Vichy-type governments to kill all people they identified as Jews, which identification seems to have been based on government registries of ancestry, as opposed to, say, synagogue attendance. The extent to which an individual Jew might have “assimilated” — e.g. by marrying a non-Jew, or by converting to Christianity in an effort to escape persecution — was irrelevant. Thus in the Holocaust, culture wasn’t a determining factor, which means that if you think of the Holocaust as defining what is Really Genocide, cultural genocide doesn’t count. There was no way out by extinguishing all aspects of Jewish culture in oneself.
In contrast, the conservative denial of a Native American genocide will count all people who identify as Native American as a way to prove there wasn’t a genocide. Those who were willing to assimilate to European life (despite the inherent biological difficulties of coping with a new set of diseases) were subject to less persecution than those who tried to maintain their culture. In this conservative view, if you descend from Native Americans, even if you have no tie whatsoever to Native American culture, then you’re a data point against the claim of genocide.
PG,
I totally agree with you.
I would add, though, that NA genocide wasn’t just cultural genocide. It was straight-up population destroying … My experience is that most people, especially but not exclusively on the center and right, actually have no idea what kinds of atrocities were perpetrated, and would be shocked to learn that, say, the Californian government used to pay for Native American scalps. On the other hand, we have popular access to a great deal of explicit detail about Nazis using Jewish babies for target practice.
So while I agree with you that Rush Limbaugh is using a particular model of genocide and failing to consider cultural genocide, I would also say it’s very likely that he’s in denial/ignorant about basic facts as well.
Having argued it one way, I’m going to turn around and argue it the other way. I’m not sure which way is the “right way” to view it. One reason to deny culpability or downplay the extent of massive violence committed against a people is to get out of whatever indebtedness that creates in you toward the survivors and their descendants (as in reparations for slavery). The people who have shaped our understanding of the Holocaust have done a pretty good job of exposing the broad-based complicity of other countries and governments in its execution, from the people who gladly handed over their Jewish neighbors and cheered as they were shot to the free Allied governments that turned away refugees. That makes the indebtedness toward the victims much more broad-based and extends the motive to deny it far beyond the “perpetrators,” defined as just Germans and active Nazi collaborators. This more broad-based culpability does exist in at least some other genocides (the modern genocide I’ve read the most on is Rwanda, and the blame that extends both to the United States and to France is considerable), but that culpability isn’t part of the mainstream understanding of what happened.
(And “unbelievable” was a poor choice of words. I don’t for a second believe that these people just cannot imagine it. I think they deliberately work to make it appear unbelievable to audiences who are either simply credulous or looking to disbelieve.)
I don’t think US culpability in the Holocaust is mainstream knowledge. I think most mainstream narratives place the US in an unambiguous hero’s position.
Mandolin,
Right, I didn’t meant to downplay the extent to which there was a deliberate mass murder of Native Americans across the United States. But a large part of the genocide was less direct (the spread of disease, the deliberate extermination of buffalo and other food sources for particular groups) or could be framed as warfare or even self-defense (“these savages keep walking onto OUR property, we have to defend it!”), and it is these aspects that are especially denied by some conservatives and libertarians as constituting genocide. Such people will point to government’s taking Native American children from their homes and forcing them into government and church schools as a sign that there *wasn’t* genocide (after all, the Nazis weren’t trying to Christianize the Jews — which of course would be an eternal benefit to them! — they were just killing them). There’s a fundamental disjunction between what you and I would consider to be a wrong done to the Native kids and their families, and what the Rush Limbaughs consider a wrong.
I believe people use the term “ethnicide” to mean the purposeful destruction of a people’s culture without killing the people themselves, at least not more than needed to convince the rest that they really have no choice in abandoning their culture. I suppose you could also call it forced assimilation.
It’s a popular and effective way of creating a self-hating and demoralized slave or wage-slave population to do the dirty work for a privileged group.
My additions to the list:
16. The identity of my group is not publicly and self-righteously, and even in the face of my protests, re-defined for the purposes of self-justification by religious groups who have appropriated my group’s religious heritage, and whose theology calls for our conversion to that appropriation, thereby eliminating our actual religious heritage. (This refers to the behavior of the Egyptian woman mentioned above and countless annoying Christians.)
17. It is assumed that my group has the right to some form of national autonomy or sovreignty due to both a right to cultural self-determination and a need to protect ourselves from historic oppression by other groups. My group’s grassroots movement for national liberation is commended and admired, even though some of its members committed human rights violations or used ethically questionable tactics. My national liberation movement is never condemned as inherently racist, despite having some racist ideas, ideologues and actions within it.
18. I do not need to worry about my group’s movement for national liberation being hijacked by religious groups whose theology calls for the violent destruction of my group’s nation state, and who therefore may encourage my group’s nation state to become ever more belligerent and militarized.
19. I do not need to worry that my group may be scapegoated for any economic, governmental or military disaster that occurs anywhere in the world. I do not worry about having to flee the country of my birth, leaving behind all my assets due to violence, looting and/or expropriations involved in such scapegoating. My family wisdom does not include the insight born of personal experience that “at any time everything can be taken away from you–except education.”
Ruth,
17 is very interesting. On the one hand, it seems to me that any racially-based movement for an autonomous state has the potential to be called racist. But then when I think about the discussion of an autonomous Kurdistan (for example), I don’t recall ever hearing a concern about racism, only about whether such a state is feasible for geopolitical reasons dealing with Middle Eastern stability, etc.
I forgot to note, I do agree with the additional items other people wrote, I just wanted to do my own phrasing.
Also, I want to say that comment #1 shows just how obnoxious the perspective of outsiders can be:
Note how anon brings up the non-sequitor of attacks on churches to discredit the feelings of fear Jews have as being irrational. Fuck you, anon. Regardless of how much or how little other groups are attacked, that does not affect how Jews feel about safety. We know there are violent anti-semites in the US (fatal attacks in LA in 1999, Seattle in 2006) and in international terrorist groups (fatal attacks in Mumbai in 2008, Casablanca in 2003, Buenos Aires in 1994). Every synagogue and JCC in the world is aware of this possibility, whether or not they can afford to take extra security measures. Our JCC in DC has a full-time security specialist who arranges all kinds of drills for staff and high-tech security equipment. A waste of money, seeing how infrequent anti-Jewish attacks are? Debatable–but the fear people feel from knowing we are targets is not debatable, nor can people be debated out of it.
Perhaps:
“People understand that my religion includes a spectrum of beliefs, with many different sects, and do not automatically assume that I will adhere to a certain degree of orthodoxy.”
There’s a fundamental disjunction between what you and I would consider to be a wrong done to the Native kids and their families, and what the Rush Limbaughs consider a wrong.
I think this is completely true, but I don’t think it’s that simple. The point of these arguments disputing the fact or severity of NA genocide is to prove America innocent of genocide. This isn’t just a difference in perspective, it’s a no-true-American fallacy. Rush et al. argue that settler incursions, reservations, Indian schools, forced relocations, blockades, strategic destruction of food sources, not-necessarily-lethal violence including for example rape and abduction, etc. all don’t count as genocidal tactics because we used all of those tactics. If they aren’t genocide, then we weren’t committing genocide, so we aren’t responsible for genocide, QED. Destruction? What destruction?
…In other words, you could probably sit down with a trail-of-tears apologist and use one of those all-purpose cocktail napkins to draw a straight line between the gradual dismantling of German Jewish citizenship, the gradual theft of German Jewish property, the gradual destruction of German Jewish livelihoods, the gradual imprisonment of German Jewish people, and the eventual extermination of Germany’s Jewish population.
And, Socrates-like, you could probably get him to agree that all of these policies were unified under a single idea: eliminationist antisemitism: genocidal racism. And you could probably get him to agree that they therefore constituted genocide together, that it doesn’t make sense to include bullets but exclude systematic starvation, or to say that typhus in the ghetto was less lethal or evil than typhus in the camp.
But this would not help you much if you tried to argue similar things about our govermnent and its crimes–in fact, you’d probably lose him if you tried to talk about American antisemitism during the Nazi era.
I don’t want to spend too much time exploring the psyches of Holocaust deniers, but it always seemed like the argument that actual extermination did not happen was based on this mentality, too–although it also seems that they’re trying to use this as a linchpin rebuttal.
It seems like they figure that these actions really are morally gray so long as there was no poison gas involved, that there is nothing shocking about the historical record if you redact that one bit. And nothing significant, nothing systematic. The Nazis didn’t kill anybody. They just enslaved, tortured, terrorized, starved, and infected millions of people in a massive network of prison camps.
piny,
You’re right that proving America innocent of genocide is the subconscious motive for making such arguments, but for it to be the indisputably conscious motive, Rush et al. also should be arguing that when “settler incursions, reservations, forced relocations, blockades, strategic destruction of food sources, not-necessarily-lethal violence including for example rape and abduction, etc.” are used by groups with which Rush doesn’t identify, then they do count as genocidal tactics. Otherwise there isn’t any clear inconsistency; they theoretically could believe of themselves that they simply don’t “play the genocide card” the way liberals do, that they need to see a gas chamber before they’re willing to concede that this is genocide.
EDITED TO ADD: “The Nazis didn’t kill anybody. They just enslaved, tortured, terrorized, starved, and infected millions of people in a massive network of prison camps.”
Come to think of it, the one person Rush & Co. might accuse of genocide who didn’t have gas chambers was Stalin. But I don’t know if the Gulag is commonly agreed to have been genocide or if it’s more a matter of “lefties were bad too!”
I think many people distinguish between (and I cannot even believe I am about to use these terms, but I’m trying to explain people who I disagree with) deliberate genocide and incidental genocide.
In that view, if your goal is “kill them all” and you kill lots of group members, then you’re committing deliberate (“real”) genocide. Like the Germans did to the Jews.
Whereas if your goal is “live right there on that river” and you just so happen to kill lots of group members, then you’re not. And if you send people away to reservations but don’t kill them, then it’s also not thought to be genocide.
So w/r/t NAs, the whites in the soon-to-be-U.S. arguably would not have engaged in killing NAs had they just up and left for Canada. (Of course, then the French would have killed them instead. But then those folks would blame the French.) Because the goal was “settle” and not “slaughter,” then the incidental killings of so many NAs aren’t genocide.
Oy, just saying that made my head hurt, but I think it’s actually a pretty common view.
Again, the California government paid people who brought in the scalps of Native Americans. How is that not deliberate?
I think Sailorman’s right that people make that distinction, but I think they do so in ignorance of or in contradiction of historical facts. Even as someone who was always taught that a very serious injustice was done to native peoples in the settling of the Americas, I still find myself startled when I read about the specifics. Just a few months ago, I read something that excerpted colonial documents and letters in which the writers advise other colonists to do away with their local Indian populations by giving smallpox infected blankets as gifts. Now, it’s not like I’d never heard of this before, but it still startled me to read the casualness with which is was discussed and the way this was recommended as a first resort, to head off even having to deal with these people.
The American enterprise may not have required that every last person of Indian blood be exterminated, but it did require killing an awful lot of people, and no amount of accommodation, surrender or flight could have stopped it. It was deliberate.
First: you understand that I am trying to explain/understand the theory of people I disagree with, and that I am not espousing that argument, right?
I don’t really know enough about the scalping. I’ve found that some papers said they should all be exterminated (that sounds like genocide, at least to me–“exterminate” is pretty damn clear) but depending on what actually happened then (for folks who distinguish various types of genocide) they would fall under the “war” exception. Forgot to mention that one: in that theory, you get to kill everyone presumed hostile.* So killing males might not be considered genocide.
Truth be told, i’m done with explaining this, even to try to understand it. It just feels icky.
*You read scifi, right? Help me out here: A short story about an enormous (30 foot tall) Earth person in the distant future, landing on a random planet populated by small but reasonably advanced beings. The person flies an enormous ship, talks to his Hindbrain and has something referred to as Slab. He is pleased that he gets to practice diplomacy. Earth ends up killing all the aliens by the end.
I got that. Bringing it back to Holocaust denial, I think they’re trying to drag it back to the incidental category. If they were to be successful in that, even with a large minority of the public, I don’t really know what all the implications of that would be. I think it would be bad, but in what ways, I don’t know. (Which is to say, Richard, I’m not ignoring your question up at #72. I just don’t have an answer.)
Which leads to the final issue of semantics.
If you look at the U.N. language on genocide it talks about doing stuff “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”
But of course the term “genocide” came into use only ~1944, obviously in response to the Shoah. Although the U.N. definition also stems from 1948, and although that definition technically includes actions other than the attempted complete extermination of an entire race, the word was in use before the decision and had by that time become fairly linked to the Shoah.
So because the term “genocide” in common usage is linked to the Shoah, and because that happened to pretty much be the pinnacle of genocidal action, “less bad” actions are often not considered to be genocide.
It is as if genocide has two definitions: 1) “to destroy, in whole, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” and 2) “to destroy, in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” Most people use the first definition. Which is actually fairly understandable depending on the source (see, e.g., here and here and here .)
I would be depressed if people thought anything less horrific than the Holocaust was OK. That would really bother me. But I would not be upset if they did not, on their own, mentally classify it as genocide, because it is fairly normal to think “genocide” means only definition (1) above.
So to some degree, asking “why don’t you think this is genocide?” is a bit like asking “why don’t you think this is racist?” The question we should be asking is “what definition of genocide are you using?” or “given ___ definition, do you agree that ___ meets the criteria to be classified as genocide?”
I know, Sailorman, it’s just that I agree with Chingona that even in order to make the argument that the people you disagree with are making you have to contradict the facts of Native American genocide (which have been whitewashed in cultural history, which facilitates people doing that).
I don’t know the story, but it sounds cool.
That last post is my argument, BTW, not the hypothetical argument of my opponents–just in case that wasn’t clear.
Is the point “This was not genocide?” Because even if you DON’T whitewash the facts of what we did to NAs, it does not meet certain definitions of genocide because we did not as a country seek to exterminate all NAs.
So someone who thinks “what the U.S. did was not genocide” may think that because the history’s been whitewashed (no disagreement that it has.) Or, they may think that because they conclude that a government who creates reservations* and signs treaties* when it has complete military superiority is not involved in “the systematic killing of all the people from a national, ethnic, or religious group, or an attempt to do this.” Because, fairly obviously, the government could have killed all the NAs if it chose to do so.**
I’m good with the U.N. definition, in which the U.S. treatment of NAs is obviously genocide. But if you said “hey Sailorman, if you use the Merriam Webster definition and do not distinguish between tribes, did the nation of the United States commit genocide against Native Americans as a group?” I would have to say “no.” Yet if you said “using that same definition, did Californians commit or foment genocide against the group of NAs that lived in the area?” then I’d say “yes.”
Do you see the semantic problem? Unless you are dealing with the Holocaust, it is hard to tell whether someone saying “that’s not genocide” is ill-informed about facts, using a non-U.N. definition, or completely denying reality.
*though both were comparatively worthless and/or horrible.
**I really don’t know enough about this: maybe we tried to kill an entire tribe? In which case I would be wrong. Could well be.
My understanding of what went on in California is that it would qualify as genocide under either definition, and I have read historians who call it genocide, with the explicit qualification that they are very conservative in applying that term.
Without being an expert on this period in American history, I wonder if it’s significant that we’re talking the “final frontier” of the American project in California. Like, signing treaties and then breaking them and then signing new ones and then breaking them is so time-consuming and we’re very nearly done, so screw it, let’s just kill them.
As for genocide as a term, it was always my understanding that it was developed to describe the Armenian genocide, and was already available and in use when it started being used to describe the Shoah, once the scope of it became known. But the Turkish government tries very hard to cast the Armenian genocide as the second type you describe – incidental, the product of a larger wartime situation, etc. I don’t know that anyone buys that but them, and I think it’s appropriate to be skeptical of efforts to too strenuously make the distinction.
That said, I think I get the distinction the you are getting at. Just to set the Holocaust aside, I think someone could make a good-faith argument that what happened in Rwanda is fundamentally different from what happened in the Balkans and that those differences matter in terms of understanding what went on, the goals of the perpetrators, etc.
I think the genocide against the Native Americans would be of both kinds, depending on the tribe.
yeah–different words would be helpful semantically just to distinguish things and have the discussion about what is going on. But if you’re talking to someone in the Balkans, or someone who might possibly be classified as having been a victim of some as-yet-undefined “lesser” genocide, I don’t think they would necessarily agree.
huh. Wish I had an OED subscription to doublecheck the etymology. I am pretty sure from memory that the word didn’t pop up until post WWII and my online sources support that, but I don’t really trust the Web for that sort of stuff.
Going on nothing but bad guesses: If it was based on Armenian history and was commonly linked to Armenia, then I suspect that widespread recognition of the Armenian genocide would have come earlier, or alternatively that the “no genocide in Armenia” countries would have (in 1948) blocked or modified the UN definition which currently stands.
“I really don’t know enough about this: maybe we tried to kill an entire tribe? In which case I would be wrong. Could well be.”
We didn’t try. We DID kill entire groups of peoples.
Okay, according to Wikipedia (I know, I know), Raphael Lemkin didn’t actually use the word genocide until 1944, but he was first laid out the idea of it as a crime under international law in an essay in 1933.
From the entry:
So I was wrong that the term genocide was applied to the Armenians in the aftermath of that genocide, but it seems clear that he had crimes precisely like those committed against the Armenians very much in mind in developing the concept of genocide. And I don’t think it would be correct to say that it was only the Holocaust that he had in mind.
In the essay where he first defined genocide, Lemkin wrote:
I don’t really see how American government actions against Native Americans could not meet that definition.
I think the phrase “ethnic cleansing” tends to be used as genocide-lite. I remember hearing a lot more about “ethnic cleansing” in the Balkans than about genocide.