Journaling project, Day 7

[drwex]

Too often we say “life is not fair” while we’re eating our food, sipping a drink, and reading tweets on our smartphones. Think twice and be thankful. Right now, before you think of anything else, breathe deeply, appreciate where you are, and see the value in what you have.

What’s one privilege you have that you often take for granted?

When my kids used to complain that things weren't fair I pointed out that nobody ever promised them fair. I grew up in such a privilege bubble and was completely unaware of it. Really the concept didn't enter my consciousness in any meaningful way until a couple decades ago. I've tried to make my kids more aware of it, but I don't think I've done a particularly good job.

As a kid, I experienced antisemitism, both directed at me personally and in rare incidents of swastikas being spraypainted on our synagogue. But that didn't link in my mind to privilege.

As an adult, I hung out with lots of gay people and didn't understand why they were made to feel ashamed of their sexuality, their life choices. I used to have long hair, and would get random people shouting insults at me, giving me the finger, telling me to get a haircut. "hippy" and "freak" and "faggot" were words people used to insult me, but it always seemed like a personal thing, not about the systems of privilege that I had, or did not have. And certainly I didn't reflect on how these incidents were symptoms of larger structures, social choices, and how much of what I did perpetuated those inequalities. Today I think I know better, and I try to act better.

One great privilege I have is "passing". I am a fairly standard-looking individual now. I have shorter hair that fits within the typical conventions of my visible gender identity. More to the point, I don't wear the yarmulka, the peyot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payot), or the fringed tzitzit that would visibly identify my non-mainstream (and non-white[1]) identity. Unlike a person of color, these are choices I get - a privilege to masquerade within the mainstream.

I mentioned earlier that I used to hang out with (both off- and on-line) many gay people. "Passing" was a big deal in the 80s and 90s. To do so, or not, was a political as well as a personal choice. In 2014 the movie Do I Sound Gay? (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3997238/) documented one aspect of this. Those of us who are old enough remember when gay (male) characters in media always talked with an exaggerated lisp. I have the privilege of passing because my voice is naturally middle-American sounding. I can fake a touch of southern accent when it's beneficial and I'm a decent vocal mimic. The privilege to pass is something I've often taken for granted, and just as often worked to maintain.

Sometimes, though, I hang my pride flag on the front of my house because fuck that noise.

The follow-up question that isn't in this prompt, but that consumes a lot of my mental space these days is "How should I use my privilege?" I have money privilege, white privilege, cis privilege, male privilege - the list goes on and those things are just facts of life. I'm not trying to be other than I am, nor do I think I'll see society change enough in my lifetime that these privileges will dissolve. The question then becomes, "so what are you going to do about it?"

Still figuring that one out.

[1] The "conditional whiteness" of European Jews is a really freaking complex topic that I'm only barely starting to get a grasp on. It has a lot to do with the racist assumptions of fascists/KKK, something to do with the fact that antisemitism and Islamophobia are two sides of the same coin, something to do with really offensive attempts to erase Jews of color, and something to do with the left's equation of Judaism with the worst forms of colonialist Zionism. Like I said, complicated.

Comments

[reedrover]

One great privilege I have is "passing."

Yup. Right there with you.

[sovay]

The "conditional whiteness" of European Jews is a really freaking complex topic that I'm only barely starting to get a grasp on.

If you have not yet read it, David Schraub's "White Jews: An Intersectional Approach" is not the last word on the topic, but it is intelligent and wide-ranging and has fantastic footnotes.

It is interesting for me to observe this bend within my own family. My mother has never once thought of herself as white; she specifically writes in her ethnicity as "Jewish" or "Ashkenazi" on census forms because the time and places in which she grew up firmly shaped the idea of whiteness as non-Jewish. I grew up with the idea of whiteness as non-Jewish but also potentially accessible to me, not because of the conditional whiteness of some set of American Jews (I don't think I even encountered the concept until college or even later), but because of my father's side of the family (whose Irish immigrant whiteness was itself recent enough to be debatable in the twentieth century, but is not in question now). And nowadays I say that since about February 2017, my totally unhelpful, knee-jerk analogy has been that being Jewish in the current construction of American race relations feels a lot like being bi, including the part where your self-definition isn't accepted but both sides of the binary are happy to give you grief for looking like the other.

[drwex]

Thanks for the suggestions. I might start doing that myself.