I lived in Fairfax County in Northern VA on and off for a number of years and I always noticed how racially diverse that suburb of Wash DC was. Not that there wasn’t any racism, mind, but…I don’t recall hearing such xenophobia amongst the general suburbanites, mostly because many of the supposed “hated groups” comprised such a large sector of our neighbors in the 'hood.
I worked on a lawn crew as a young lad once, all Mexicans and a black lesbian chick that I used to smoke weed with on our lunch breaks.
I know. I went up to NoVa and visited my freinds in Fairfax County…
MAN I LOVE IT THERE! I was BLOWN away by how many… non-white people there were. BLEW me away, my friend was kinda embarassed by it, because I kept going “brown person! Another one! And another one!” More than 4 Indian/brown people at a restaurant that is NOT a single family or an Indian resturant! Holy crap!"
I LOVE NoVa and I think it’s a great place to live to get the best of still calling myself a Virginian, and still getting diversity. It was the first place where I EVER saw a Brown/Indian Female Police Office. That BLEW MY MIND!!!
But yeah… I’m a bit lower down. Born in Lynchburg, and had college at W&M.
It was diverse. More than Lynchburg I suppose. But yeah, VA’s cool like that. It CAN get really diverse… just not so much in the places I was at. It’s the Duality of the South, sure you can find one thing there, but if you look around, you’ll find just the exact opposite somewhere else. I love my Home State.
It’s important to understand that anti-Semitism is usually very different from other kinds of bigotry. It’s not necessarily any “worse” but it is often of a different character than anti-black, anti-Hispanic or anti-any other group racism.
The typical stereotypes about blacks and Hispanics are that they’re dumb, lazy, violent, or some combination thereof.
The typical stereotypes about Jews are that they’re powerful, evil, and corrupting. It’s a different kind of hatred, and it always has been. Nobody ever alleges that there’s a giant conspiracy of blacks, gays, or Mexicans to take over the world, control all the money, manipulate the media, etc. But people DO say these things about Jews. (Or, nowadays, “Zionists,” which is often just a code word for Jews and is used in the same sense that people used to talk about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, except now they can say “I’m not anti-Jewish, I’m just anti-Zionist!” I think David Duke has said that.)
Surprisingly, the people that YOU probably expect to be the most anti-semitic (i.e. Southern fundamentalists) tend to like Jews, at least in the abstract. They reserve their real animosity for Catholics.
I know, it’s counterintuitive. That’s why a moron like Sacha Baron Cohen wasted so much time searching for anti-semitism among Southern rednecks. If he really wanted to hear vile antisemitism in America, he should have spent more time in black ghettos.
Funny story, sort of. My mother was raised a fundamentalist Christian. As far as she knew Jews were a faraway thing (then she went to Berkeley! but anyway). She did, however, know who all the Catholics were and was taught, frequently, to worry about how her Catholic friend(s) were not ‘saved’.
She showed me her high school yearbook a while back, saying ‘what do you notice about my class?’
Fully 60% of the kids had surnames of the ‘Greenberg’, ‘Goldstein’, ‘Himmelfarb’ variety. This was in the LA area in the 50s and 60s. (And now my mom has one of these surnames for her very own!)
I’m not sure if fundamentalists as a rule remain as insulated as they were back then, but it’s possible I suppose.
As a Gentile Brit my own personal observation is that the only Anti semitism I’ve noticed has been from the British National Party,a small extreme R. Wing party who hate just about anyone and everyone,though they seem to hate Muslims more then Jews, and Islamists who have been known to be quite vociferous in their antipathy to Jews.
But that is only my own personal impression and is not based on any sort of statistical evidence.
“Jewish jokes” may often be self-deprecating bu they rarely feature comments about how cheap Jews are … or about Jewish cabals etc. Sure we make fun of our guilt, of our mothers, of our spouses, of our sex lives (more often lack of in the jokes), of stupidity amongst our own, of past oppression even, but we ourselves do not make jokes that are the fodder of Jew hate. Interestingly, back in the day (long before even my time ;)), when a Jewish comedian decided to have his regular shtick be how cheap he was he also made sure that his character was not thought of as Jewish (Jack Benny).
When Memphis’s current U.S. representative, Steve Cohen, first ran for his seat, there was quite a backlash here that exposed a lot of anti-Semitism among my community.
My wife father was Jewish and her mother, black; she looks “white” but self-identifies as black. I’ve seen het get flack from black people perfectly willing to accept her (and even happy that she doesn’t try to “pass”) until they learn that her non-black parent is of Hebrew extraction and my wife herself is Christian.
You’re right, lots of people do use those kinds of phrases without thinking about them. But does that make it less wrong? I don’t think so. It just shows that they don’t think about what they’re saying before saying it.
I disagree with this. I think a lot of people don’t “think about” those phrases before they say them because those phrases do not mean the same thing they used to. There is no longer anything to think about when saying them. On the other hand, I think “jewing somone down”, is still a phrase that requires some thought before saying it. However, if people continue to use it in everyday speech for the next 100 years, it is not going to carry the same weight as it does now. For example, I just recently found out that the word chintzy is “offensive”. The thing is…that word is not offensive. It might have been offensive 100 years ago, but now it has a definition in the dictionary that has nothing to do with it being a derogatory term. Saying that it is offensive is just some PC BS.
People have been using “Jew” as a verb meaning “to swindle” for a long time. If anybody was under the impression that it’s a new thing, they are wrong. Dictionary.com’s source dates that usage to 1824, and if anything I’d say it’s probably less common than it used to be because people are more aware it’s offensive. Maybe it’s enjoying a revival on videogame chats, but I think that’s mostly kids being ironic.
I don’t think chintzy is at all offensive, as it comes from Sanskrit pretty directly.
On the other hand, using the name of a group as a slur is, itself, always going to be offensive even if it enters common parlance. That’s why “don’t be such a faggot” is “you’re such a Jew” or “you’re acting like a nigger!” are all offensive, and will be in 100 years.
