and how they didn't have to face here for too long WEB Du Boise's double consciousness like the rest of PoC.
"In the wake of World War II, the horrors of Nazism were becoming public and publicly repudiated. Eugenics and political forms of institutional anti-Semitism lost much of their hold. A good economy and a progressive political climate enabled America to dismantle some aspects of legal discrimination and segregation. One result was that Ashkenazi Jews became white; for a while, in the ’50s, we even became a best-selling flavor of American popular culture. Those benefits weren’t extended to African Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese Americans and other Asian Americans. Racism itself didn’t take a hit. The category of white just expanded to include Southern and Eastern Europeans. I figured it was permanent.
One of the greatest privileges of whiteness is that you don’t have to spend all your time and energy defending your collective right to exist. When I first encountered anti-Semitism, on a pleasant day in Montana in the summer of 1959, I was secure in that privilege. As a bunch of us tossed around softballs, one guy reached out and snagged a ball being thrown to me. 'I jewed you!' he shouted joyfully. When I asked what he meant by that, he told me it meant that he was acting like a Jew — grabbing what wasn’t his. I asked him if he’d ever met a Jew. He hadn’t, so I told him that I was Jewish. He was amazed because I didn’t have horns (really). I didn’t experience him as hostile, just dumb. I didn’t have to defend Jews; we were white.
Twenty years later, in North Carolina, a friend told me that many white Southerners still didn’t see Jews as white. Again, this didn’t really bother me. These folks, I thought, just didn’t know any better.
Read more: https://forward.com/opinion/356166/how-jews-became-white-folks-and-may-become-nonwhite-under-trump/
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