But going flat exposes you to either a restricted wardrobe or people staring, or perpetually explaining yourself...
Who TF has the, um, balls to make you explain where your boobs are?
None, after she cuts them off. Hence all the explaining to the police.
If you're going to wear prosthetics but don't want to be passing, just get the three-breast prosthetic.
I have my doubts about whether or not Jewish people in Squirrel Hill really have much of an option to pass. Obviously, if someone isn't dressed in Orthodox clothing they have some chance of passing, but people make assumptions based on where you live.
The JCC is really nice. I would join, except I know me too well to think I would actually get to the gym.
I should have added people with invisible disabilities to my list of people with complicated relationships to passing. That was an oversight.
4: oh absolutely. I meant to nod to that in the parenthetical, but I guess I said "active" which doesn't quite apply always.
Yeah, the issue of passing definitely brings up some complicated feelings for me. I like to think of myself as non-exclusively Jewish, but my (Jewish) mom doesn't really think of me as such, because nothing about me, including my surname, makes me trip other people's Jewdar. There's little religion in our family, so when we get to my generation it's not much more than a predilection for Yiddish (learned as much from Leo Rosten as handed down) and an outlook on life.
Now, of course, the atmosphere of threat changes things somewhat. I worried about my mother's physical safety the day after the election; how other people assign you can matter as much or more than personal identification, and now there are so many more people taken seriously in the news media who would proactively look for Jews to discredit or stochastically terrorize.
It is probably still most correct for me to label myself a white man, though. Jews haven't been stripped of whiteness just yet.
Who TF has the, um, balls to make you explain where your boobs are?
Oh, no one. But people do stare sometimes and it's uncomfortable to know that they're perplexed. And also if someone is in the process of moving from vague acquaintance towards being more of a friend, it would probably come up at some point.
(Actually, other flat women have definitely had confrontational experiences. I haven't.)
I think sometimes people get awkward around flatness, not because they can't accept a woman could be flat, but if the woman does not have enough other unambiguous gender-presenting markers. It turns into the decades-old "Is this a man or a woman? HOW CAN I KNOW HOW TO DEAL WITH THEM IF I'M NOT SURE" bullshit.
I have few personal experiences to discuss here, for better or for worse, but this seems like as good a time as any to ask something I've always been a tiny bit curious about. Yarmulkes: how common are they actually among Jewish men? Worn by everyone remotely observant at synagogue and/or on holidays and not otherwise? Worn by Orthodox or Conservative Jews at all times and few in other branches? A regional thing? An individual choice that doesn't correlate too well with anything like that?
Maybe I shouldn't ask. It's just that on periodic trips to New York City, it seems like every third white guy has a yarmulke on whereas I never see them here in DC. Likewise a big city, less Jewish but still fairly diverse. I've actually been to authors' book readings or Q&As at a synagogue here and I see them in there sometimes, but not on the street one block away. Like I said, just curious.
I'm an atheist and I'm frequently reminded that other people aren't (hearing "bless you" not just when people sneeze, people giving Atossa presents like a Biblical baby book), but that's very different from having trouble passing.
I think I'm short enough (and sort of soft-faced enough, if that makes sense) to short-circuit that situation, although again, other flat women definitely deal with it. But people do sometimes look perplexed still, like they know there must be an explanation because this is different than just having small breasts, and mastectomies aren't on their radar.
It occurs to me occasionally that I've been visibly and unquestionably in a minority my entire life. But super-privileged, so I have no insight.
5: The JCC is really nice, except for the feeling of guilt that I'm not going to the gym enough. But I figure by rarely going I'm subsidizing the community.
12: Most of the time I see someone wearing a yarmulke, they're wearing Orthodox dress (also counting cases where they're wearing brimmed hats with presumably a yarmulke under them). Outside of synagogue, they're not rare but it's definitely a minority of the male non-Orthodox Jewish population. There are also a small number of older women who wear them.
12, 15: Is there some specific trend in the science-ish student population? Seeing male students wearing a yarmulke but otherwise just normal casual clothes is pretty common in the groups that I teach.
This time of year, you see that on the bus home in Friday, because of the sun taking off early.
Generally speaking, most of the orthodox wear the yarmulkes or other hats whenever they're awake, conservative, reform and reconstructionist only when at worship service. Not absolutely required in synagogue, but there's a box of them whenyou walk in, so might as well. There's no pope who makes up the rules (for any of the denomination]s), so communities differ.
To answer the next question, any hat fulfills the function of keeping one's head covered before the Lord. The yarmulke is not especially holy, it's just convenient (unless you lose your bobby pins, or are bald), and you can't feel it when it's on. Sporadically popular: the logo yarmulke, whether Yankees, HIAS, or https://www.jewschoosetrump.org/buy-a-maga-trump-kippa.html.
Since the vast majority of Jews in America have the option of passing visually undetected, anti-Semitism has to occur against practicing Jews, as primary targets. Non-practicing Jews are not dealing with the same situation as practicing Jews. (And by "practicing" I don't mean beliefs so much as being an active part of a community, whether it be a JCC or your neighborhood or whatever.)
I suppose this is a bit oversimplified. If I'm going to say "vast majority" and include people who live in Squirrel Hill, I must only be meaning the option of passing when you're at the airport or away at college or whatever. Which is still different than if you're black, of course. (Or I need to pare down "vast majority".)
I don't know. Anyway, the pope wears a yarmulke, but he can pass.
We are totally non-observant but my brother's family is conservative observant, he's not but married a conservative woman and raise their kids conservative. So of course he only wears a yarmulke in temple. He joked when they got married they needed three sets of dishes- milk, meat, and treif.
Our kids go to JCC summer camp. I'll admit that the environment has made me more nervous about some psycho attacking a Jewish kids' camp but from like 0.01% to 0.02%.
On the bisexual-invisibility thing, I gave up a long time ago, because when would you ever bring up the fact that you're attracted to people other than your spouse, or talk about past queer relationships as some kind of badge of honor? (I didn't date that many women so it looks suspiciously like "a phase," but if you have time-travel capabilities, I can give you a detailed list of women you should talk into going out with 19yo me to improve the ratio. You may have to locate some of them on the basis of hair color and name of cafe where employed.) But I am well aware of how great the bisexual closet is. It's great! No one gives you shit! The conservative Catholic in-laws know absolutely nothing and accept you as a devoted mommy who passed on the family name to your kid. You never feel uneasy out with your husband anywhere. Solidarity with other queer people, as opposed to safe "straight ally" status, comes at such a high cost for so little. Why tie yourself in knots about it? Give up. (And yeah, there's a little bit of "other queer women didn't want you then and they sure don't want you now, so Jesus Christ stop acting so desperate and pathetic.")
A propos of nothing, I so adore this wedding picture of Kathryn Schulz and her officiant Helen MacDonald (who wrote H is for Hawk).
I'm not sure if this makes things better or worse, but the Squirrel Hill murderer's father was arrested for a rape allegedly committed just a few blocks away from Tree of Life. There was no trial because he killed himself.
I think we can safely say "worse."
My kid, as some of y'all know is both bi, genderqueer, and trans, and spends a lot of time angsting over this very issue (because, besides having that trifecta, they're also 20 years old): they pass as female, but they don't want to pass as female, but they also don't want to keep outing themselves as trans male, especially since really they're genderqueer, so not exactly male, and ALSO bi, and on top of that depression and anxiety, and did I mention the Jewish thing, except because they're half me (Pentecostal only now atheist) they don't feel like a REAL Jew, so...
Welcome to our special hell.
At least they hail from an incredibly progressive part of the world.
25: so much sympathy/empathy for them. That seems like a situation where you would want to, I don't know, obsessively take up some craft like boat-making and just be a set of arms for a while.
Omg I can't believe misgendered the kid, in 26, on the heels of 25. Will fix when I'm back on a computer. My apologies.
Huh, passing. I never know. Jews know me by my face right away. Goyim, I don't know if they do.
I used to tell this story, which might not be as amusing as I think it is, that the teachers at the Russian program I used to, at least two of them (Russian Jews) started a conversation with me: so, your ancestors. From Russia, right? Maybe like around Ukraine?
Anyway I don't go to shul ever so I only feel like my own personal danger level has ratcheted up lo these glorious few years not from "nobody's going to shoot me" to "maybe someone is going to shoot me" but from "state sanctioned antisemitism is so last century" to "well here we are then."
I was always more on guard about becoming a target because of the whole queer thing but lately, I guess it's a toss-up. I've been out for nearly 30 years and live with a man and named my cat after a wise-cracking secondary character played by beloved character actress Thelma Ritter in a Bette Davis picture so the plausible deniability is just not there.
Apparently, there's an open to all service at Tree of a Life tonight and another one tomorrow.
Goyim from areas without many Jews rely on the TV for their information. They are likely not very accurate because George was supposed to be a gentile on Seinfeld.
It sounds stupid, but I'm a white American who emigrated to Canada 10 years ago. When I first arrived, I thought about this a lot -- with my accent and appearance, there was no reason for people to realize that I was actually originally American; and since I'd only been in Canada for a few days, it felt dishonest to 'pretend' to be Canadian (even though my status there was permanent). It took me a long time to get over the urge to blurt out my full history to people I was talking to.
Is it possible they all know you're from America and are just too polite to make a deal of it?
I pass as non-Jewish, to the extent that people make anti-Semitic comments around me and expect me to go along, except that I actually do go to Jewish services semi-regularly, and in fact was at a shabbat service dedicated to observing HIAS's call to action for refugees a week before the ToL shooting and sort of wondered if a similar event was a spark in Pittsburgh. I pass somewhat less as straight than I used to. I notice that people tend to assume less/ask me more frequently. I'm also a little better about mentioning it than I once was. I don't know what counts as an invisible disability, but I also pass as much less frequently depressed than I am.
I don't know what my point is, really. I am confused about my own emotions about ToL. I would have liked to have talked about it in therapy, but my therapist himself created a bunch of drama this week and therapy was then dedicated to the aftermath of that. I guess the point of this comment is to say that something really disturbing happened to a Jewish community because of their visible support for HIAS, and I am a member of a Jewish community that visibly supports HIAS, and I just feel kind of numb about it but maybe typing something in this space will be in some way clarifying.
No -- I grew up in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, and lived in Toronto as a foreigner for 4 years. My accent falls into the range of indistinguishable, in Canada and America both.
My comment is about the experience of having a status that might be important, but which isn't apparent from one's appearance; and it's also about being given a status, in my case, Canadian, that one understands but hasn't internalized yet.
Seinfeld is all messed up. Jerry Stiller is supposed to be a gentile.
As long as you're sure aboot that.
34: "people make anti-Semitic comments around me and expect me to go along..."
This is something that happens to the kid, too, mainly because there are so few Jews in our town. I think I've told this story here before, but when I taught Jewish lit one semester, I had Evangelical students who were surprised to find out that Jews still existed -- they thought Jews were just in the bible, like Pharisees.
Pharisees still exist. They're just Christian now.
I think in a whole lot of these cases, there's a pressure to pass, so as not to "claim" identities in a way that isn't optional for others, and a pressure not to pass, so as not to erase the identity and help show strength in numbers. The effects of going either way are usually small.
But I have also been thinking about this in the context of all the recent fake-Indians stuff in the news, and how mysterious I find it that Elizabeth Warren would have checked that "Native American" box at all, ever. Or this professor, as profiled in this highly critical post. On some fundamental level, I just don't understand how people get sucked into these fantasies. I understand how you can come to depend more or less existentially on maintaining a con that you might, had circumstances been different, have been able to drop -- so let's say fantasy-formation is path dependent. Clearly there was a point past which Prof. Smith wasn't going to say "I am spontaneously beginning the difficult process of admitting that I've misrepresented my ancestry for years." But I don't understand how you can take a family history, for which you don't even have names and birthdates, and decide it's some key part of being you.
[N.b.: My tone is always clearer in my head than in text. First rhetorical question of 22 is sincere; everything after "but I am well aware..." is bitter and ironic. I also do not literally have a detailed list of people of any gender I once had crushes on, although like everyone I remember the worst embarrassments (and I remember one interest ending abruptly when its object professed admiration for Milan Kundera).]
Have you tried the Knitted Knockers? They're supposed to be more comfortable than the prosthetics (which I hope is true because I just made six pairs of them for a charity event). I'd be happy to make you a pair if you don't mind giving your address to a stranger on the internet. (I am Mollpeartree on Ravelry if that helps; I am Ravelry friends with Lizard Breath.)
Knitting seems like a lot of work when yarn already comes in balls.
You can take the stuffing out to wash them though!
Also boobs are surprisingly easy to knit.
Sort of on the theme of passing, I recently participated in an event at which security had to be ramped up, post the Pittsburgh events. I had a mild level of unease about it, enough that I bothered to send my family an e-mail in case they heard on the news that the event was happening and got nervous (they don't usually track my travel/speaking engagements closely but in this case they knew where I was going to be), but was generally feeling OK about it.
Upon arrival, I was chatting with other participants about how we had reacted to the alert e-mail we got from the event organizers, and we all agreed that we had thought about how to identify the exits in whatever room we were in, make sure our phones were fully charged, etc.
I was thinking about the vulnerability of one of my co-presenters (a black man) but had totally forgotten that my other co-presenter was Jewish until she said worriedly that she wasn't very Jewish-identified but had felt a wave of fear when she realized that her name and photo were all over the event promotional materials.
It was a jolt to me, and I felt stupid and inconsiderate for not having considered how vulnerable she might feel. I would never in eight million years have felt vulnerable due to my several Jewish great-grandparents, in part because literally no one except a handful of Eastern European immigrants I've met has ever thought I was Jewish (and indeed I was raised nonobservant Christian by my Presbyterian mother and agnostic father, and am now a Quaker).
Anyway, I reacted in the moment by making a semi-joking comment about using my white-lady privilege to protect them both, but I have been thinking about how I might react better in the future, and how I might remedy my own obliviousness to the fear that my friends and colleagues may be feeling. Open to all suggestions.
(The event itself went off without a hitch.)
"But I don't understand how you can take a family history, for which you don't even have names and birthdates, and decide it's some key part of being you."
I would never check, or have checked, the American Indian box on any application, but my family tells the story (on one side) of how our great-great-grandfather was a Miami Indian who fought at the Battle of Fallen Timbers against Mad Anthony Wayne (this now comes out as one complete phrase whenever I say it) and on the OTHER side how a great-great-grandmother was a Crow Indian. This latter we now have some paperwork to support -- my father went around the country doing genealogy about ten years ago, and found both the marriage license and a photograph of the grandmother in question.
I am more suspicious of the Battle-of-Fallen-Timbers grandfather, although I believed in him faithfully as a small child. I still remember the thrill I felt when we studied the Battle of Fallen Timbers in some history class or the other.
It's funny, I'm (very obviously) disabled, but never have thought of it as an identity or thought of "passing". I mean, I don't judge anyone who does, but at a certain point one has bigger problems than what any particular son of a bitch thinks of you.
Another day, another Trump opponent gets mailed a bomb. Today, Tom Steyer.
Slow delivery, or a new bomber?
I guess analyzing saliva takes time.
The view of some in my community on passing: Don't even try. If the Nazis would be able to find you, you aren't passing.
Most of the German Jews were not religious, and did not dress or speak differently. They took the records of weddings and circumcisions before they torched synagogues.
The "homosexuals " couldn't be located through birth records, and generally were not out to their families or neighbors. They took subscription lists before they torched certain magazines -- names and addresses.
In this century, if "they" could find you by cyber-raiding facebook, or ancestry.com, you're not passing.
I think that this is a big thing for people with serious psychiatric issues who after getting treatment function at a high level.
They don't want to be perceived as "mentally ill" in the way that a Street person is, and they're probably less open at work about going to psych appointments than one would be about chemo, for example.
Yarmulkes: how common are they actually among Jewish men? Worn by everyone remotely observant at synagogue and/or on holidays and not otherwise? Worn by Orthodox or Conservative Jews at all times and few in other branches? A regional thing? An individual choice that doesn't correlate too well with anything like that?
As unimaginative said, there's a lot of variation and individual choice involved, but a schematic version of the general pattern would be:
Orthodox: Always
Conservative: Only in synagogue
Reform: Never
But the pattern really is only general, and Reform synagogues do typically have them available even if most people don't take them. If you see someone wearing one in public he's* almost certainly Orthodox.
*There's a gendered component too, and some but not all Liberal (=Conservative/Reform) Jewish women wear them in synagogue as an egalitarian thing. Traditionally, though, and still among the Orthodox, they are only worn by men.
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I have a bunch of mainly Swedish rag rugs in my downstairs rooms and the one by the door has got filthy. So I googled up instructions for cleaning them. There were lots of really helpful Swedish ideas:
a) I always take mine down to the jetty and wash them in the lake.
b) I put them in the washing machine but don't spin them. It's very important they dry in the open air, so hang them on your balcony
c) The easiest method is to do it in winter: just rub them on a snowdrift and then dry them on your balcony in the sun before rolling them up while still a little damp to stop them wrinkling.
I don't think I'm living in the right house. Or country.
You could ship them to my daughter, who recently insisted on buying a Swedish phrasebook and attempting to teach herself Swedish (she's barely 7). She could pick up some good rug-washing vocabulary and she would probably enjoy it more than anyone else you know.
Does this just mean you bought a rug at Ikea? We have one, but never washed it.
33: Tim's Dad and brother sound Canadian. He really doesn't, and most people don't realize he's Canadian. He was born in Montreal but move within a few months to NJ, then Sweden around age 2 or 3. So, he was 6 or so when he first lived full time in Canada. His brother was born in Sweden, but lived in Canada since the age of 1 or 2. I also think his brother overdoes the "Eh" business. He says it a lot more often than their Dad does, and Tim never says it.
He often doesn't like to have people know. Sometimes at his job people complain about the h1bs and why can't they hire more Americans.
I don't really here much of that. But, I got my last job through a guy who worked on an H1B before he became a citizen.
I may as well be a Canadian if I can't spell "hear" right.
Have you tried the Knitted Knockers? They're supposed to be more comfortable than the prosthetics (which I hope is true because I just made six pairs of them for a charity event).
I do have a pair! I'd say the problem is more finding a bra that doesn't hurt - specifically where the strap passes on the sides, below my underarms, is still very tender. (Actually I think the numbness is wearing off.) I often wear a tanktop underneath a bra (although I recently bought a fancy mastectomy bra that is a little better.)
people make anti-Semitic comments around me and expect me to go along,
Whoa. This definitely never happens to me. I 100% get classified as not-from-here pretty quickly, in a Northeast/rootless cosmopolitan generic way.
I thought you came from the South?
68: yup, what Teo said. I grew up in the South, but as a kid of academic transplants. We did not fit in.
And no pearl of Southern womanliness accreted upon your soot-stained Yankee grit?
If a cat had kittens in the oven, you wouldn't call them Totino's pizza rolls.
Unless you figured, fuck it, they're in the oven anyway so let's eat them
My breasts were southern, but I took them off.
(Actually the problem was literally that my breasts were of Jewish descent.)
That got so weird so quickly.
people make anti-Semitic comments around me and expect me to go along
This has literally never happened to me with an American. I guess I also read as rootless enough. Hasn't spared me the holding forth on the driving skill of the races and such.
60 it would be easier to send her my tiny mumin books, if I could find them. There are little ones they sell in the children's museum in Stockholm which is a place of pilgrimage for me.
The rugs came partly from a Swedish woman in East Anglia, who send to have gone out of business, partly froma great place in Sweden that does mail order and also sells old, proper hand made ones that i can't afford and are often anyway ugly since they really were made from the bits of worn out clothes that accumulated.
The Swedish company does the best ones.
"people make anti-Semitic comments around me and expect me to go along..."
This has never happened to me in person. Racist, sure, but never anti Semitic. Possibly this means I am failing to pass as a Gentile. (I was a member of the University Jewish Society for some reason that neither I nor the society was ever able to explain. I certainly never applied to join. Paperwork error perhaps.)
It's not incredibly frequent, but it happens. I would think some readers of this blog might remember the dog rescue guy (a WASP) who wanted me to be his side piece, and who later contacted me again and made comments about gross old Semitic men with small penises (and then when I said I was Jewish retreated into some nonsense about "Semitic" not referring to Jews). Friends of mine at the other place might remember the Trump-supporting black guy in my laundry room who wanted to tell me about the Rothschilds and the twelve Jewish banking families, etc. There have been some scattered other comments. It might be relevant that I often read as approachable, non-judgmental, and willing to listen which can make people a little more disinhibited around me.
I do remember some of those.
It might be relevant that I often read as approachable, non-judgmental, and willing to listen which can make people a little more disinhibited around me.
It's kind of funny because I usually read as unapproachable and judgemental and not interested in listening.
I can't tell whether you're being sarcastic! In any case, I wasn't trying to comment on how other people come off. Just that especially relative to my environment of self-protective New Yorkers, I sometimes seem more accessible than average. (This was really extremely true when I was younger; it's diminished now that I'm old and hard.)
A hardening accompanied by diminishment is very unusual. I suggest you consult your physician.
"It might be relevant that I often read as approachable, non-judgmental, and willing to listen"
Ah, that explains it, because I completely don't.
Ajay's got a killer resting bitch face.
90: sorry about tone confusion! I wasn't being sarcastic. I genuinely suspect you come across as warmer and more approachable than me.
"people make anti-Semitic comments around me and expect me to go along..."
It's only happened to me once -- during a class discussion, when a clueless student remarked casually that "Well, Jews control all the money, so," and all the other students in the class stared at her, aghast.
"What?" she said. "They do?"
"XXX!" the other students cried. "Dr. delagar's husband is Jewish!"
"Oh." She did not look at all put out. "Well, I didn't know."
"I wish we controlled all the money," I added. "I'd send some our way."
She just shrugged, clearly not believing a word my lying race-traitor mouth said.
But the kid, attending high school, heard so many "funny" Jew-bashing "jokes." Didn't put up with any of them either. I think I told all y'all here about one of them, which came from her US History Teacher, who "joked" about the German Exchange student in the class, saying that her grandparents could have sent the kid's grandparents to the camps.
VERY FUNNY.
I have the reverse situation: not in any way Jewish, but am more-often-than-not assumed to be Jewish.
Nobody thinks I'm Jewish, even though most of my white neighbors are. I think I just look too Irish.
Even though my Irish-y skin tone actually comes from my Italian side.
Maybe your Nebraska plates give you away.
I don't have those know. Iowa's new plates look like the shitty ones Nebraska stopped using a few years back.
There's still a good crowd of people outside Tree of Life.
I haven't read the entire thread, but every time this topic comes up, I'm surprised all over again that so many people apparently identify other people as Jewish. I ... just don't. It never occurs to me one way or the other. But as I've grown older, I have begun to run into people who do: a previous boss who sometimes said things like, "These book buyers I ran into at the book sale, well, Jewish." Uhhh. I challenged him each time (why is that relevant?? who cares?), and he seemed to find it funny that I was so annoyed.
I have no idea how I grew so blind to such a thing,* and over time I felt that my old boss was somehow training me to look for Jewishness or something, which was irritating in its own right.
* All I can come up with is that my dad was in the military, with such a diverse bunch of other military people that nobody paid any attention to who or what someone was. At least as a kid, that's how it seemed to me; maybe among the adults it was different, but it never filtered down to me. The categorizations that people often use, along religious and/or ethnic lines, I'm only recently grasping as super important, or at least relevant, to a lot of people.
I really sound like an idiotic moron, don't I? I'm sorry -- I just don't know how I never added these categories to my mental landscape when dealing with other people. Maybe because we were moving every 3 years, or one or two years, when I was a kid, until high school?
At any rate, I am very sorry that Jewish people would feel that they should need to "pass". Of course it makes sense, but god, I'm so sorry.
Yes, parsi, be sorry. It's your fault. All of it.
No surprises in the Tallahassee shooting.
I can't tell if they're just going to masturbate to violent fantasies or
live them out then masturbate. Possibly, they don't know themselves. But this is fucking nuts. They control the White House and both branches of Congress. If they wanted to put a very big dent in illegal immigration, they could do it in about four seconds with penalties for employers.
AIHMHB I have an aunt-in-law, very nice person, who used the phrase "chew me down" to describe when someone drove a hard bargain with her, not realizing she had misheard the phrase "Jew me down" when she learned it however many years ago.
109- I'll be interested to see what happens (not that I'm hoping it happens) when one of the racist militia people shoots a minority army soldier. Who will Trump support?
Are you sure she misheard it? I learned it that way, I assume from adults who were trying to Bowdlerize what they knew they shouldn't say, at least around kids. Like "drat" or "flutternutter."
Google says that 110 is actually a very common misusage. I wonder if it's one of those things where people get super defensive if someone points out it has an antisemitic origin- "Well I never knew the origin of the term so I'm not antisemitic!"
Get these fluffernutter snakes off my fluffernutter plane.
My favorite swearing substitute is Shut The Front Door!
111: He will blame the six-year-old from Guatemala the militia man was aiming at.
True, aim is tough when you're taking a shot at a range of 1000 miles.
"CHEWS WILL NOT REPLACE US!"
"CHU WILL NOT REPLACE US!"
"CHEWIE WILL NOT REPLACE US!"
WE BURNED ZHOU BEFORE IT WAS EVEN A THING.
122 JUST RUBS SALT IN THE WOUND.
I don't like Star Wars/Trek crossovers.
You know who else was obsessed with purity?
I'm never comfortable that Chewie/tribble ships are really consensual. The size difference is just too much.
130 I had no idea that was a thing but of course rule 34 remains a universal constant.
Anyway, on the actual subject, my thinking on passing, especially since the 2016 election, parallels some of the sentiments that unimaginative refers to in 54. But I think about it less in terms of passing per se and more in terms of what people who are not white in the eyes of Trump supporters and the right expect to get out of voting with the right.
Do they think it's going to matter that they voted for "meritocracy" over some caricature of affirmative action when the time comes to prefer whites for college admissions and employment at all levels? Do they think they're going to retain citizenship if some sweeping court case puts them in the same categories that get stripped from citizenship? I have non-white Trump supporting relatives and the last I heard political conversations with them are just stupidity, ignorance, and fuck you I've got mine with no understanding that the "I've got mine" isn't going to last, if not for them, then for their kids.
I have an urge to wear a yarmulke when I go back to NY out of solidarity (in December for 3 weeks so perhaps a meetup will be in the works).
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NMM to Hardy Fox of the Residents (maybe)
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[Now that fa returned to topic, I'll post this comment draft I gave up on... All I can say is that I am dreading the point in 2020 where we look back and think that, actually, 2018 was a pretty good year in retrospect. Regardless of election results, I expect the terrorism to continue, and it's not even amusing that the far-right terrorists surely have their own version of Niemoller's quote as a battle cry.]
Still thinking about 40/47... I grew up with the stock "Indian princess six generations back" story, and went through phases (in childhood) of being romantic, skeptical, indifferent, etc. I've been thinking about how my great-grandfather left Sault Ste. Marie and married into a lily-white, Anglo-American-since-the-colonies family in Chicago; I wonder if the story of origins was whittled down to the token single ancestor because that was such a common thing among "white" people, ergo, had no effect on passing as white. Or else they all legitimately wanted to forget the rest, or did forget.
Looking at this timeline, my ggf grew up in the years after they executed Louis Riel, his mother was white and an outsider, and his father died when he was very small, so it's not at all surprising he chose the path he did. But his mother did stay in SSM for many years: she didn't just take her kids and leave after being widowed. I am guessing that it was his decision to leave. Anyway the white-ification was basically complete by my mother's generation and I in particular look 100% Northern European; the California sun bleaches my hair more than it darkens my skin.
I'm four sheets to the wind here but when I was a kid I remember several classmates in elementary school (on LI NY ) who said thy had Cherokee ancestors. This was just a thing then.
It always takes me a little bit too long to remember that métis isn't South American tea.
Not checking the dates now but I think I was in elemertary school when Warren was at Harvard.
it's not even amusing that the far-right terrorists surely have their own version of Niemoller's quote as a battle cry
They just use the actual quote with no sense of irony. Maybe the self-identified Nazis don't, but I've seen it referenced on far-right social media when I've gone to look if someone is the right-winger they seemed to be from faux-reasonable but obviously trolling comments (answer: yes).
138 autocorrect is fucking useless when you're drunk.
137: oh hey, I can call my Canadian weed shop "yerba métis." (Wow, I think that might be the most unconvincing lie I have ever uttered.)
139: yep. I bet there are flavors, though.
Maybe we should move on to the bullshit in Georgia as the weekend wanes?
On reflection, 137 symmetrically prevents my passing in either Canada or the Andes. A lonely exile clearly has always been my fate.
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New frontiers in whiteness! "They used plenty of reclaimed wood, and kept two of the original cage doors."
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143: That is remarkable and, yes, very very white.
An Oscar-winning film will be made about those people when they die of Lyme disease in the Maine woods.
Them and their tick-bitten dog, Moose.
There is this preening aestheticized quality to 135.last that is making me squirm with horror and embarrassment. I took every word to be basically descriptive in isolation but the combined effect is really unfortunate. All I meant was that even within my extended family I'm unusually pasty and have washed out hair and so on, not that I'm some kind of Aryan beauty. L.O.L. jfc no.
I feel like I should have been aware of Louis Riel before this.
As a white person, I can attest that that is one sweet-ass bus.
AND THREE SWEET-ASSED BUTTS.
Riel was the guy who rebelled twice, in exactly the same way, but like 100km further west? I feel like there's this paradox between the stereotyped Canadian virtues of clemency and foresight.
140: I only know about him from a "comic strip biography" of him by Chester Brown.
The Louis Riel Trial. From Douglas Linder's Famous Trials site. This is where I first heard about Riel.
149. I recall reading about Riel ages ago when I went through a phase of reading a lot of Canadian authors, and was led from that to reading (some) Canadian history.
135/136 I guess this explains, somewhat, the difference between my reaction to the Warren thing and many/most other people's. This was definitely not a thing anyone I knew would have claimed, because who cares? There are lots of actual Indians at school, and one of the dads is a chief now, and everyone has been on a reservation for a field trip or a powwow or something. Bragging about an Indian princess ancestor would be weird and boring, like bragging that your ancestor was a mayor of some town.
Which apparently is not a standard American experience. (I knew that, I just hadn't really internalized it)
Bragging about having an ancestor involved in a poorly conceived military action against Canada was very common where I grew up.
My grandfather's great uncle was mayor of Omaha!
My great-great-grandfather was the first chief of police in Billings. (I think)
He might have been fooling everybody, saying he was at work chiefing the police when really he was the library looking at magazines with pictures of women with bare ankles.
I don't think the library was built yet
This is a decent explainer about the Cherokee myth:
The Cherokees resisted state and federal efforts to remove them from their Southeastern homelands during the 1820s and 1830s. During that time, most whites saw them as an inconvenient nuisance, an obstacle to colonial expansion. But after their removal, the tribe came to be viewed more romantically, especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother. That great-grandmother was often a "princess," a not-inconsequential detail in a region obsessed with social status and suspicious of outsiders. By claiming a royal Cherokee ancestor, white Southerners were legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South, as well as establishing their determination to defend their rights against an aggressive federal government, as they imagined the Cherokees had done. These may have been self-serving historical delusions, but they have proven to be enduring.
Maybe this is in the link in 164, but didn't the myth have a subsidiary role justifying the occasional weak expression of African genes?
That angle isn't in the article, in fact, but this is the pithiest statement: "Shifting one's identity to claim ownership of an imagined Cherokee past is at once a way to authenticate your American-ness and absolve yourself of complicity in the crimes Americans committed against the tribe across history." I think that basically nails it.
"We'll take the identity and you can fuck-off to Oklahoma. The shittier parts of Oklahoma."
What are the non-shitty parts of Oklahoma?
The Cherokees were actually pissed when the government decided to call it "Oklahoma" because that's a Choctaw word and the Cherokees thought they were a more important tribe than the Choctaws and should therefore get to name the territory.
"We just felt we could do better than OK."
143: girl y has named one of the meals in our rotation "advanced white" (inspired by our toothpaste). it's a pile of quinoa, avocado, pan-fried potatoes, and lentils with cumin, topped with cilantro. truly the whitest meal I make, especially if there is spelt bread on the side.
168: I'm curious too.
|| I feel badly because I always pause to complain about my life but girl y is having serious mental health problems including cutting herself starting two years ago and I didn't find out until now. and what do I say about that because I can't stop cutting myself at the moment--which is how I ended up in the actual nuthatch last time (well, to be fair, I was hurting myself much worse then.) also I've had a for real margin call from my bank and it's put me in a state of heart-stopping panic all the time. one of the things manic people do is spend their families into penury, and while I would't call it that, I done fucked up bad. I don't want to tell husband x that I've hurt myself because I feel he has too much to worry about, and no amount of him patiently explaining that I cause him more trouble hurting myself and then lying about it than I do by just fessing up can convince me. I just feel like every good quality I have is being submerged in a rising sea of fucked up crazy. this is dumb since I could be manic or deeply depressed right now which would be way worse. but the hurting myself, I didn't used to do it at all, I can't take it. damn you, inner self that is inimical to overarching self! had to get that off my chest, carry on. ||>
Sorry to hear about all that, al. Hope things get better for you soon.
thanks, y'all! it'll be ok, I'm just struggling a bit at the moment.
Actually, you occasionally pause to do something other than complain about your life. That said, good luck al! We can be the Greater East Asia Self-harming Sphere!
171: I'm prepared to help you meet your margin call obligations in exchange for a year's supply of "advanced white." We can even carry out the transaction before 5pm PST tomorrow because I'm on the hook for dinner. Would also accept spelt bread.
Seriously, I'm sorry for you and sorry for poor girl Y, and yes tell your husband. Maybe think of it like this: obviously it upsets him to hear that you hurt yourself, but if you both hurt yourself AND lied to him about something separate but equally important, you would clearly be an even bigger asshole, right? ...unless you're lying to him about overnighting me a lot of home cooking for terribly inflated prices.
ooh, tempting offer! but like, you know the recipe already now. cook quinoa normally, slice avocado and put lemon so it doesn't brown, fry small cubes of potato in olive oil, um, easiest is to drain canned lentils, fry cumin in oil briefly, heat up the lentils, you're good! however I'm sure husband x would be fine with the advanced white export scheme. how about pasta with garlic, anchovies, HK flowering chye sim (or whatever greens) and parmesan? very nice.
thanks lurid keyaki, and you're right about me being an asshole if I lie about it, like I did yesterday. mossy, first ouch, perhaps deservedly, secondly I'm sorry you are qualified to join this greater east asian sphere. then again, greater east asian spheres don't tend to be free of injury.
During that time, most whites saw them as an inconvenient nuisance, an obstacle to colonial expansion. But after their removal, the tribe came to be viewed more romantically
NOW THERE'S AN IDEA.
Oh, alameida, I'm very sorry. Not being manic is good. Do communicate with Husband X.
I wonder if the "romanticization" of Cherokees by ante-bellum whites was partly because Cherokees were slave-holders, too.
As for "authentication," the experience of having been identified by others as part-Cherokee was for some not much different than being identified as part-African. There was and is a lot of prejudice against Native Americans, especially in the west, but "even" in Oklahoma. The internalized effects of prejudice do not end as soon as one can "pass."
182.1: I am reading "True Grit", which is great, and at one point Mattie Ross describes meeting some Indians - "but these were not, as you might imagine, painted Comanches, but Creek and Cherokee, who had owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy". In other words, in context, they were civilised Indians.
In other words, in context, they were civilised Indians.
184 The construction is entirely racist but it's amazing that the Iroquois aren't on that list.
"but these were not, as you might imagine, painted Comanches, but Creek and Cherokee, who had owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy"
Probably bought them off the Comanches though. They built a huge state on slave trading.
No. They bought them from their white neighbors in Georgia.
185: It's only applied to Southern tribes in a Southern context. Those tribes are also precisely (or at least mostly) the ones exiled on the Trail of Tears. If it were applied more generally, the Haudenosaunee would probably fail to be included for the racist grounds you mention--their civilization was complex and somewhat urban but not (as) Europeanized at that point.
(On that note: if anyone could point me to reputable info as to what Native American nations were in Southwestern Pennsylvania before the Beaver Wars, I'd appreciate it. Also info on to what degree the Seneca nation, and Haudenosaunee in general, were around here--was there settlement, or was it just hunting grounds?)
IT WAS A CHINESE DUDE WITH A COWPOX VACCINE
On that note: if anyone could point me to reputable info as to what Native American nations were in Southwestern Pennsylvania before the Beaver Wars, I'd appreciate it.
The short answer is that there basically is none. There are some vague references in colonial records from surrounding areas that might refer to the inhabitants of this area, and archaeological evidence shows that they definitely did have some indirect access to European trade goods, but beyond that we really just don't know who they were or what language(s) they spoke.
Archaeologically they're known as the Monongahela Culture, and the archaeological evidence is actually really interesting in terms of their settlement patterns and so forth, so it's really too bad that we don't have any historical evidence to shed more light on them.
It's nice that they named the river after them.
More likely, "Monongahela" was based on what the people who killed the Monongahela Culture called them river.
It's often assumed that white people are called that for skin color, but actually it's because of all the salt we rub in other peoples' wounds.
To be fair, all white people did was provide a reason for and a means for the genocide.
And they really needed those beaver pelts. It's not like they were a luxury for the idle rich or something.
190/191: Thank you! I figured it was something like that--archeological evidence, hearsay, and a lot of sadly missing information--but it's helpful to have that confirmed. I've heard a lot of people make strong claims about it lately and was wondering if there's something I'm missing. Sad that we don't know more--they're so close in both time and space to so many other actually historical cultures. (Most interesting claim: Osage. But their own national website claims they moved out of the Ohio River Valley circa 400 CE. Although they still claim every county touching the Ohio as ancestral land.)
Monongahela is probably a Lenape word--Wikipedia claims Unami--but the people who killed the Monongahela Culture were indirectly white folks, either via disease or by encouraging the Haudenosaunee to harvest pelts further afield and kick ass along the way. I don't think the Lenape moved west until later. (But if they were involved, that's white Americans' fault, too.)
The Lenape were from New Jersey. They must have done something.
Osage specifically is pretty unlikely, but there were other Siouan languages spoken in the Virginia Piedmont and possibly parts of the Upper Ohio Valley, so it's definitely possible that at least some of the Monongahela Culture people spoke a Siouan language.
I think it's more commonly assumed that they spoke an unattested Iroquoian language, but I don't know how much (if any) evidence there is behind that assumption.
Algonquian is also a possibility, though I don't know if anyone's actually argued for it. Part of the problem with figuring out who the Monongahela were is that they occupied an area surrounded by speakers of these three language families on different sides, and with the general lack of evidence it's not clear which if any they belonged to.
Honestly, the whole place has been going downhill since the glacier retreated.
201: Makes sense to me. It amazes me how widespread the Algonquian* and Siouan languages are, and how intertwined they became territorially with each other, Iroquoian, and other languages families.
* not even talking about Algic as a whole, which is befuddling
205: Yeah, it's a really fascinating puzzle. I've been reading up lately on some of the attempts to correlate the linguistic and archaeological evidence, and they're really interesting if inevitably somewhat speculative.
Is it known whether the mound builders used draft animals of any kind? Who writes well about them?
It's hard to write a good story about draft animals. Orwell does, but I think he's making some kind of analogy that's going over my head.
Boxer is totally overrated as a character.
Do you think anyone would fight wars over those piddly little things they call beavers nowadays?
211: Not so piddly! The largest native rodents in North America!
A sad shadow of their mighty burden-bearing forefathers.
207: It is known that they did not. "Mound builders" is a pretty broad term that isn't really used by archaeologists anymore, and I think the literature on the various cultures that built mounds is pretty specialized and technical these days, but I'm not really an expert in this area.
I don't know how they go coconuts, but couldn't get almonds.
I think beavers do the bark, not the nuts.