When someone is treated as white, what does that look like? How do you know that’s how people treat her?
I ask because this topic has been touched on before but in different contexts (ex-Obama’s racial identity, passing as white looking black person, the one drop rule), but I haven’t really see anyone delve into what functional difference it makes if someone identifies as white vs non-white.
If Gadot was treated as Middle Eastern, would we expect that this aspect of her identity be mentioned every time she and her work is discussed? In other words, how would we know if she’s treated as non-white?
I think if Gal Gadot wasn’t a famous person and she committed a violent crime in the US, pretty much all the witnesses to the crime would describe her to the police as a “white female”. She would not get the “some kind of Hispanic or Ay-rab” treatment that someone like this woman would likely get.
They get the benefits of white privilege. For example, being allowed to make a phone call in a hotel lobby without being escorted out by the police, or whatever the latest humiliation is. Define “white privilege” as simply “not likely to be the target of a racist attack, whether personal or systemic.”
The number of purely white people in the world is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. Native Americans wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.
She’s referred to as “Israeli” just about every time she’s discussed.
As for how she’s treated, why play that game? In 2018 America, she might be treated as white; in 1942 Germany, she would’t even be treated as a human being. So what is it, white or subhuman? She can’t be both.
As all Jews know, what other people think of you doesn’t change what you are.
I’m not really sure there are “Middle Eastern” features. As I said, Levantine people can look pretty diverse. The Greeks, the Romans, and Norman crusaders all passed through there. You’ll find people who look like they can pass as natives of France, Spain, even Germany.
Take Bashar Assad, put a Carhartt jacket and a NASCAR cap on him, and he wouldn’t look out of place in any rural Middle American waterin’ hole. (Preferably leave him there, too.)
Gal Gadot has generic Mediterranean features which would look typical in the south of France, almost anywhere in Italy, or Spain (I mean, quite attractive, but typical of an attractive woman from there).
I too am curious. It sounds like you are trying to get him to admit something, such as that he is “not white.” I wonder why this, or whatever it is, is important to you.
To add, I took the OP to be focused not so much on discussing the specifics of the subsequent treatment (which vary enormously in time and place), but the foibles of perception that precede such differentiated treatment. Even if we believe strongly in aspiring to social equality, and even if we know intellectually that “white” is not a well-defined category in any objective sense, we still can’t avoid the instinctive process of constantly categorizing people we meet. So I took it as an empirical question about how our particular historical & cultural baggage has shaped our instinctive boundaries for the category “white”. That’s what I think Darren Garrison made an attempt at above.
Having written that, I guess I’m not sure what purpose this serves.
Jews have rules for who gets to be a Jew and in Israel, those rules matters a great deal. So while I agree with you that self-identity is important and should be respected, I do think the way people treat you matters too.
I don’t think Gal being described as “Israeli” means that she isn’t seen as white by most people who look at her. I mean, there are nationalities that are commonly used as a stand-in for race in the US (“Indian” being one that comes to mind), but “Israeli” isn’t one of them. Perhaps it is different in other countries, though. This is a topic that is definitely context-specific.
It’s not a game; I’m just curious what people really mean when they say (or ask whether) a public figure like Godot is treated as white. It implies a Middle Eastern actress would be treated noticeably different.
Do regular, everyday white people accept that they treat people that they see as white differently than those they see as non-white? I rarely see this admitted to, but it stands to reason that such differences in treatment gets at the heart of the whiteness question.
I understand your curiosity, but IMHO the only people who consider how ‘white’ somebody might be are racist Nazi-wannabe scumbags, not ‘regular, everyday people’.
The old joke goes:
Immigrant: How do I know if I’m white or black?
Resident: Just go to L.A., and the cops will let you know.
I think that needs to be stated more carefully. Only racists explicitly aspire to treat people differently. But we all (to varying degrees, and with varying degrees of conscious awareness) do treat people differently.
In a way its insulting because “white” says nothing about your ancestry. Like someone might prefer to be called Filipino-American or Italian-American. I know one guy who refused to go by the classification of “white” and he got it so he is a “Celtic-American”.
She’s Sicilian. “Very, very Italian” is a paraphrase for “Sicilian,” you see. We’re of North African Berber, Arab, Carthaginian, Catalan, and Anatolian extraction in addition to the usual Greek and Italian. Sicily is smack in the middle of the Mediterranean and gets everybody coming or going. Italy drew most of the roots of its civilization from Sicily, and vice versa: The pre-Greek Sikel people came from Italy, near Rome. The Elymians came from Anatolia. As for the earliest aboriginal Sicilians, the Sicani, nobody knows how they first got there.
With Grande, there are two reasons I think for why she is assumed to be Hispanic. The first is her look, where she tends to tan fairly heavily from her normally paler skin. That gets her thought of as some sort of “brown.” Then her name is “Grande,” and while that is an Italian name, it’s also a Spanish word, and most Americans think of Spanish before Italian.
As for the OP’s question: there are times when white is inclusive, and times when it is not. A lot of the talk about white culture is about white Anglo-Saxon culture, for example.
As for Gal Godot: her skin is light enough and her features European enough that she gets seen as white, regardless of her nationality. And, as an actress, she is treated as white in that she doesn’t just get “ethnic” roles.
Race is a social construct. In American society, whiteness brings a certain amount of privilege. If you are someone that benefits from that privilege, then you’re white.
Right now we have a fairly expansive definition of whiteness, in the past it was more exclusive. The best way to tell is whether you have actually lost opportunity or experienced negative consequences purely because of your race. If so, not white. Otherwise, white. It sometimes gets a tad confusing because of virtue signaling to claim non-whiteness, so people that have essentially been white their whole lives to be claimed to be non-white because of some unobservable background.
Also Norman on top of all that, which is why blonde hair and blue eyes can pop up in Sicilians. And the Sicilian look likewise pops up in the rest of Italy too. Mario Andretti has that “East Mediterranean” face to a T, but he’s actually from Istria which borders Slovenia.