(no subject)

[serene]

Inspired by a post from black_pearl_10, I just want to say this to everyone reading my LJ:

If you have a "race card" to play, please play it*, so that you can help me learn the rules of the game. It's not your job to educate me, but I want to make it really clear that I appreciate learning from you, and I don't want to ever be a part of silencing you.

kthxbye

[*if you want to. Or not. Because, like, it's your call and all.]

Comments

[snippy]

As a Jew I talk about antisemitism sometimes, but not nearly as much as I suffer from it or read about it happening to others.

When my sister and I were the only white kids in an otherwise-completely-Hispanic elementary school, we were called names, chased home and beaten every day.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I had a similar experience in junior high. That is, white kids were a minority, and the Mexican kids scared the shit out of me, sometimes on purpose, sometimes because I was scared because of my own racial biases.

My Jewishness is an odd thing -- that is, it mostly exists in the confines of my family. My mother's father was a Russian Jew from Poland who pretended to be Catholic in order to marry her mother, and he let her raise the kids Catholic. Yet my family memories include great grief and sorrow over the massive numbers of my relatives who died in the holocaust, and it includes going to Mass on Sundays. It includes chopped liver and knaedlach soup, and it includes lasagne.

Since my mother's not Jewish and we weren't raised Jewish, there's really no way in which I interact as a Jew in the world at large, but I feel like it's there, if that makes any sense.

[snippy]

I got this link at Alas, a Blog. It's a post about Judaism and "whiteness."

[sistercoyote.livejournal.com]

I have no race card. I am a massively white American mongrel.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

*browwrinkle* I don't know how to respond to this. I've been participating in discussions about race online for a long time, but I have no idea what you meant to say, in your post.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

I mean to say I'm never going to tell someone who tells me that X or Y is about race that they're "playing the race card" in order to shut them down.

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Ah.

I'm glad I asked for the expansion. Given what I know of you, I knew my icked feeling was misplaced.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I don't know whether I have a race card to play or not. I may or may not have Maori ancestry. I've been told to check it out to see if I have access to "all those lucrative Treaty of Waitangi settlements and scholarships and stuff", but IMO that's a damn poor reason for doing so.

If I do (and it's a matter of getting round to it rather than a lack of will to do so), it'll be for Agent Weasel's sake, not mine, and certainly not for pecuniary gain.

[firecat]

*hands you a white card*