serene: mailbox (Default)
serene ([personal profile] serene) wrote2009-02-23 08:02 am

(no subject)

Inspired by a post from [livejournal.com profile] 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.]
snippy: Lego me holding book (Default)

[personal profile] snippy 2009-02-23 05:05 pm (UTC)(link)
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.

[identity profile] serenejournal.livejournal.com 2009-02-23 08:27 pm (UTC)(link)
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: Lego me holding book (Default)

[personal profile] snippy 2009-02-24 01:02 am (UTC)(link)
I got this link at Alas, a Blog. It's a post about Judaism and "whiteness."