A Question of Blood and Belief

When we published our preview of "Exploring the Karmic Color Wheel," we received a request from one of our readers to publish a 3-part report on antisemitism in the world. We believe that such a concern bodes well with our other articles and creates an expose on racial issues in America and around the world. Here is part one of "A Question of Blood and Belief."

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Stay Curious, 
FFSOM
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By David Tamas-Parris, Candidate for A.A. at the University of Vermont at Burlington

“I don’t know man,” mused my friend Joseph as we waited for the rest of the group to catch up to where we were. “I feel pretty white.” We were sitting in our canoe, having just set out that day from one end of an oblong lake in the Adirondacks. We were there as a celebration of our graduation three days prior. Indeed, his thought was an easy one to have: of the few bubbles available on every standardized test we ever took, “White” always seemed to be the most fitting option; our skin was indeed “white.” Everyone in the group had filled in this bubble, except my friend Nikolas, who is 50 percent Asian/Pacific Islander. I probably would have agreed with my friend Mr. Finkelstein; however, the last year had brought exposure to pertinent arguments, as well as certain experiences in light of which these ideas started to make sense. I had been led to the firm personal conclusion that, despite hesitance to label it as such, “Jewish” is most certainly a “race” in every sense of the construct that matters.

 

    Like most personal convictions, mine was significantly more black-and-white than reality, but in it lied a certain truth: to be ethnically Jewish means that one has to contend with many of the same issues presented to other non-hegemonic races. In most senses, “Jewish” should be considered a race unto itself. It is first necessary to realize that the nature of race, as a social construct, allows for the possibility that Jews are their own race. The are also often distinctive features that stem from being ethnically Jewish that make Jews identifiable, creating a visible difference between Jews and the hegemonic race. Furthermore, standards set by the hegemonic race, both historically and presently, attach negativity to these identifiable features. Providing testament, however, to the fact that the label of a “race” does not apply perfectly to Jews, is evidence of tensions between divisions among people with Jewish ethnicity.

 

    To begin a discussion about applying the label of race, one must seek first to create a working definition for it. This task is especially difficult, as the premise on which the construct was established has been shown to be largely false. “Human populations are not unambiguous, clearly demarcated, biologically distinct groups... Most physical variation, about 94%, lies within so-called racial groups... ‘racial’ groupings differ from one another only in about 6% of their genes... Historical research has shown that the idea of ‘race’ has always carried more meanings than mere physical differences; indeed, physical variations in the human species have no meaning except the social ones that humans put on them...we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called ‘racial’ groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances” (American Anthropological Society). All of this evidence implies that race as a method of categorizing the human species is, to view it pragmatically, ineffective; it simply doesn’t do its job as advertised. This is not, however, to say that it doesn’t exist. The idea of race might be incorrect, but it has effected a society in which its posited divisions exist, due to the people who have payed attention to the “indicators” of these divisions. Essentially, racism has created race, and a race is defined by its corresponding racism. This matters in the context of the Jews, because it means that the group can be considered a race if it experiences its own distinct strain of racism.