My question is not about institutional racism, in case it’s still unclear.
He looks more Eastern European/Central Asian than any kind of Italian…looks like a Kazakh or one of the other peoples from the Steppes, like Charles Bronson.
“Israeli” doesn’t imply “not white.”
This is a nonsensical argument. “Whiteness” is an entirely socially and externally defined concept. There’s nothing within you, as a matter of biology or character or anything else that makes you white or not white.
And of course she can be both, that is, if she were capable of being present in Germany in the 1930s and in the United States today, she would be considered differently by the people she encountered.
If the “What” is something that is entirely created by and depends upon the thoughts of the people around you, of course it can.
Referring to Gal Godot specifically: Does the script call for a white woman, or a woman of color? If she is white, she gets to be Wonder Woman. If not, she gets cast as “Arab Woman Number Three.” Hollywood casts people according to types, and if she is not white she will be categorized and only called on when they specifically need a character of that color. Check out Chloe Wang… She looks very white, but because her name was ‘Wang’ nobody would hire her. She just went into the file labelled ‘Asian.’ But they couldn’t cast her as an Asian character, because she didn’t look stereotypically Asian. When she changed her name to Chloe Bennet, she immediately got a starring role in ‘Agents of SHIELD.’ Her stage name moved her into the ‘white’ category which has more opportunity for lead roles.
As for everyday life, entire libraries have been written about the systemic effects of casual (perhaps even unconscious) racism that damage people’s prospects for housing, education, employment, advancement, health care, and - most of all - law enforcement. I’m rather astonished anyone still questions this, given the abundance of data.
I’ll just share this anecdote: My wife teaches school in Tennessee, and she consistently reports seeing black children receive harsher discipline than white children (who are treated with greater leniency), and they receive worse grades for the same work. So If you took a white child and black child who were equal in every way, the black child would finish school with worse grades and a worse record, which then makes them less competitive for college. This is the kind of thing people mean when they say we “treat” someone as being white.
That is precisely the point. You are treated differently depending on what people “think” you are.
As all Jews know, whether someone thinks you are Jewish can be a matter of life or death.
I appreciate the work you put into this, really. And I take full responsibility for not being clear in my initial question.
To save y’all the effort of typing responses like this (again), understand that I’m not asking about blatant cases of discrimination and prejudice. I’m talking about how coding another person as white (or not white) might affect the behavior of your average, non-racist white person, such that an outsider could possibly tell they are being perceived as white.
This is something that I, as a black woman, can really only guess at; and there aren’t too many parallels in the world of black self-identification to draw from. That said, when a white-looking person with African ancestry publicaly identifies themselves as black, wrongly or rightly, I do infer a political message from that action. And that inference comes with certain assumptions that might affect how I respond and relate to them. A feeling of kinship, perhaps. A sense that they get certain things. I don’t assume they have necessarily been racially discriminated against, but I might assume they are more sympathetic (than your average white person) to the struggles of black people and other minorities.
With whiteness, identification tends to work differently. It’s more of a “if you have to ask what I am, I’m not white” kind of thing. But even that isn’t a hard and fast rule because I’ve seen blue eyed, blonde haired Spaniards get casually distinguished from the rest of the white race. In fact, I vaguely remember someone on this board telling me Charlie Sheen isn’t white because of his very diluted Spanish heritage. When you see that happen, it makes it clear there is more going on here than simple labeling.
The way many white people treated as an affront that Obama was called black instead of black and white is another relevant observation. It made me feel like many whites wanted there to be a sandwich board hung on him declaring his whiteness, in a way that would’ve never been expected if Obama was your typical light skinned African American with Euro admixture. During this time, I saw white people wanting to treat Obama as a biracial man as opposed to a black man, and getting hung up on racial labels in pursuit of this.
I’m not sure if any people are going to cop to treating those they perceive as white any differently than non-whites, but I’m just putting this out here anyway. It’s pretty “safe” to pin the whiteness phenomenon down to prejudice and privilege. Much more tricky to talk about how it manifests with more subtlety than this.
All right I will give you one specific example. I’m still not sure if this is what you’re asking so I may be way off base here. But some coding took place and I did it.
Some years ago I was working in a mall in a specialty shop run by a friend of a friend. Basically, I like a little retail fix around the Christmas season, extra money (assuming I don’t spend it all on the stuff I’m selling to other people), and the friend needed some extra help.
At this mall, during the time I was working in the shop, an ugly incident happened where some stressed out retail peon used a racial slur on a stressed out holiday shopper and there was a big flap. Not in the boutique I worked in, but in one of the anchor tenants, big department store.
A couple of nights later I was working alone, about 15 minutes from closing because the mall closed, but late, holiday hours. The store was empty. I pulled the grill down a little ways, to indicate that the time for coming in to browse was over. This is a clear signal. And yet, in came three women, who were not white.
Now here’s the thing, if they had been friends of mine I would have told them to get the fuck out of my store (even though it wasn’t my store), did they not know what putting the grill into a visible position meant? (And my friends would probably have said yeah, it’s like a yellow light, right? get in there fast before the grill goes down all the way.) If they had been people like me, say, middle-class middle-aged white ladies, I would have put it more politely but said the same thing. Just. Go. Away. This store is closing. Don’t mess up these things I’ve just folded, don’t even think about pulling something off that hangar, no we don’t have that in another size/color. Please please do not take something that’s folded with pins in it into the goddamn dressing room to unfold it and take all the pins out and leave them all over the dressing room, please. If you touch it you have to buy it and then get out. Why did FoaF leave me here to close this place alone? I hope she’s having a great time, the bitch. I hope she gets food poisoning from the buffet, or at least has a hell of a hangover. Making me put up with this shit. (Should note here that even at Macy’s, where I never had to close alone, I noticed myself getting increasingly hostile with customers as the holiday season wore on, and I think the customers got worse too. This happened pretty late in the season.)
All this angst, and it was their fault. Because they weren’t white, so I couldn’t throw them out, because they’d think I was racist–or was it maybe more racist to not throw them out? Because by god I was treating them differently because of their race. And that’s racist.
The thing was, the more like me I perceived somebody, the more like myself I could be. And by “like myself” at that moment I mean full raving retail peon meltdown bitch. By being not like me, they were forcing me to be not like me. They were also challenging my assumption that I was a good person because really I was a racist. And I resented them for it. And then again, why couldn’t I treat them like friends? Because they might think I was getting shirty toward them because they were not white. Things might escalate. I can get in a mood where things escalate and I was veering heavily toward that mood. At that hour, late in the season. Earlier in the season, or even earlier that day, I probably wouldn’t even have noticed them enough to remember, all these years later.
Now if this is way off base, sorry. Don’t worry about me having to type it all out. I type fast. It’s no trouble. Should have put a TLDR warning on it.
PS they eventually left, about the time the mall turned off half the lights in the hall. I have no idea if they realized they’d just gotten different treatment because of their race, or how they perceived it at all. Did they know, when I said, “Is there something in particular that you’re looking for?” that what I really meant was, “If you’re seriously shopping get something and go, if you’re browsing, just go”? Probably not. Probably just another shopping expedition to them. Also probably that’s pretty much what that phrase always means.
^ Thanks for that example. Yes, it’s the kind of thing I’m looking for.
Feeling more free to express yourself in a natural way without worrying about causing offense or being misjudged is understandable. It sounds like the same kind of self consciousness a black person unaccustomed to speaking around white people might feel, leading them to overcompensate with their diction so they don’t confirm the stereotype that blacks can’t speak proper English.
So perhaps one test as to whether a white person views someone else as white is if evidence of racial self consciousness shows up in their interaction.
This is pretty much accurate. “White” as a category makes absolutely no sense, for the most part, unless seen through this lens. Obama has one white parent and one black parent. But nobody calls him “half-white”. They call him black. The one-drop rule is a thing - why?
Well, it’s because fundamentally, the way society looks at “whiteness” is built around racial purity. This is why you see calls to “protect the white race”. That’s why the people who talk about “white genocide” and “the great replacement” are so terrified of interracial marriages - the child of a white father and a black mother is not “white” any more, and therefore interracial marriage destroys “whiteness”.
(That none of this shit makes any sense in terms of genetics or science or any kind of rational thought should not come as a surprise to anyone.)
It also means that posts like this:
…Are… shall we say… sketchy. What the heck are you on about?
Plenty of people make a big to-do over Obama’s half-whiteness. Those same people also like to remind you that Halle Berry isn’t really black either.
But if Obama and Halle were a couple of mediocre nobodies, these people wouldn’t see their “whiteness”. They would be viewed the same as any rando black person with caramel complexion.
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Gal Gadot’s proximate ancestry on both of her parents’ sides, so far as Wikipedia can ascertain, is “European”. This is – very broadly – in common with, say, South African actress Charlize Theron’s proximate ancestry, isn’t it?
Are you from the United States? White or not white has well established legal implications in both criminal and tort law. Minority status constitutes a legally protected class. Determinations of class are firmly rooted in the foundation of our society as a whole.
If someone treated Gal Gadot differently after we was discovered as “non-white” it would probably be as a Jew, and have nothing to do with her “middle eastern” features. Obviously Jews can look like anyone.
I look look quite a bit like Henry Winkler, who is a Jew, even though I’m genetically 100% European (according to 23andme). Enough so, that I used to be called “the Fonz”, a character of Italian decent. So he’s a Jew playing an Italian, and I’m .9% “broadly southern European” so if I have any Italian ancestry it’s probably very slight.
There’s a look which I call “vaguely ethnic” - dark hair, dark eyes, Olive skin that bronzes a nice brown in the sun. A look that may not beg the question “are they white?” but might make you wonder their ancestry.
Gal Godot has it, the Kardashians have it, Nikki Haley has it, Catherine Zeta Jones has it, I have it, and most of the people mentioned here have it. And if they want to identify as white, fine by me.
Wut?
Race is a protected class, not “minority status”. Since whites belong to a racial group they are not exempt from rights under the law.
I have a coworker who has a stereotypically-sounding Jewish surname (not “Goldberg” but similar). Everyone assumes he is Jewish because of this. But he isn’t Jewish. If my coworker (who identifies as white as far as know) told me he felt like a non-white because he gets the “Jewish” treatment all the time, I don’t know what I would think. But I know I wouldn’t think the same thing if he were actually Jewish.
I don’t know what this says about me, though.
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Alexis:
According to census categories, Middle Easterners are Caucasian, and in much popular culture prior to 9/11, they were portrayed as such - in Disney’s Aladdin, the skin tone of most of the characters is just barely darker than those of the characters in Beauty and the Beast or Little Mermaid, and certainly not “brown” by any stretch of the imagination.
The whole notion of “brown people” in first place gained popular currency (if not entirely invented) after 9/11, or at least after the subsequent invasion of Iraq, when opponents of George W Bush wanted to tar him with a single “racism” brush to encompass Arabs and African-Americans and galvanize them as a single voting bloc to oppose him. Just how dark the skin tone of Arabs is on the spectrum between Caucasian-Americans and African-Americans was irrelevant, it was a convenient term for political purposes.
Pray tell, what is “Jewish treatment?” I’ve been Jewish for 67 years and have no idea? Do people speak Yiddish to him? Assume he’s smart? Assume he’s cheap?
BTW, many Israelis are descended from European immigrants and refugees, and so are pretty much like us Americans who are descended from European immigrants. So I don’t get this Middle Eastern bit. Sure, that’s where we originally came from, with our blood no doubt mixed with that of good Christian rapists over the past 2000 years.
When I lived in the Congo, all whites were called Europeans - even those from the US.
The whole concept of a binary divide of ‘white people’ and ‘non white people’ today in the US is a political construct. The Democrats want to be the ‘party of minorities’. And arguably they are genuinely so to some extent, nor a problem that they want to be unite that coalition. But it leads IMO to a lot of lumping together of the US race problem into white v other when in real life it’s more complicated.
I live in an area that’s heavily Hispanic (Hudson Cty NJ is the biggest Cuban center in the US outside FL, but a very diverse Hispanic population nowadays) next to one heavily Asian (Bergen Cty has overtaken Queens as the leading Korean center of the NY area). There are also many ME’ers in Hudson Cty. There is not much ‘racial’ tension among any of those groups and whites, in the sense of outright hostility and mistrust, IME. Where real hostility and mistrust occurs it’s usually between/among African Americans and other groups (though not so bad in that case either). Which has a historical background, but it’s the reality. And some immigrant groups who aren’t ‘white’ are not very friendly to African Americans or at least more open about it than native born Americans. Again, most of those groups vote for the Democrats (Cuban-Americans in this area are mainly Democrats, the GOP is not as strong as among the Cuban community in FL), but so do most ‘white’ people around here. The idea white people here are deciding who is ‘white’ and ostracizing everyone who is not, or ME’ers, Hispanics and Asians all laser focused on how they are or aren’t ‘white’ and total solidarity with all other ‘non whites’ against ‘whites’…just not a very accurate depiction of everyday life here as I perceive it.
It’s not that group affiliations don’t matter at all. I just don’t see a discussion of whether Arabic speaking immigrants around here are ‘white’ or not as being that central practically.
It’s not just that.
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In the early days of migration into Europe, around the 1st Century AD, Jews proselytized. Most people think of Jews as a non-proselytizing religion but this was not always the case. They actively sought converts and gained them from the native European population, especially in what was then the Roman Empire.
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After the Romans, Italy was ruled by the Lombards. The Lombards did not have anything against Jews and mixed freely with them in Northern Italy. In those days, people practiced slavery, and Jews (like anyone else) could and did buy slave women from the native Italian population. These women sometimes became officially married to Jewish men and adopted Judaism; in other cases they were concubines but their children were brought up as Jews.
Remember that the Jewish population was SMALL and so a little genetic admixture went a long way in influencing the makeup of the overall population. Genetic evidence indicates that the European population with the closest genetic proximity to Ashkenazi Jews, are the Italians. Despite the popular association of Ashkenazi Jews with Eastern Europe - and they did live there for a very long time - I think the most current studies place them as being “clustered” geographically with Southern Italy, where the very same combination of continental Italian ancestry (including Germanic tribes) and Middle Eastern-North African (“MENA”) ancestry make up the population.
In other words: “Aaaaaaaaaaaay” and “Oyyyyyyyyyyy” are close relatives. :p:p:p