[quote]Alffi wrote:
[quote]EmilyQ wrote:
[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:
What is your point. You can’t hind not liking big noses. Can’t hide a southern accent and all the negative connotations that go with it. What’s so special about darker skin?
[/quote]
My husband was born and raised in Texas. Some members of his family have significant accents. His is less prominent, but present. However, when he’s in a business meeting and needs to represent himself as sharp and competent it’s barely discernible. Similarly, I was born in NY and grew up on Long Island and in New Jersey and Connecticut. When I got to Connecticut and kids made fun of the way I said “dog” and “water” I fixed the way I said those things. When I was waitressing for tips in Richmond, Virginia I got rid of my Northeastern accent altogether and replaced my use of “you guys” with “y’all.” At this point I am under the impression that it is not possible to regionalize me by accent. Strong accents disadvantage. They are markers for educational and intellectual deficits, just as slovenly written skills are.
As for the kike thing, I will merely say that the word bothers me not at all (half European Jew, half Irish Catholic) HOWEVER if someone with a German accent were to call me Jew, Jew-girl, Kike, or any variation of Juden that I pick up as being a distinct identifier…I would go fucking crazy and while I don’t fight I would certainly escalate things to such a degree that if my husband were present there would be a fight.
I can’t even imagine the rage I would feel if I were black and a white stranger called me a nigger. And I’m pretty cheery and mild as people go.[/quote]
So you think being a jew is a huge insult. Must be hard to wake up every day and run away from your genes.[/quote]
Did I say that? No. I don’t worry about it at all, and in fact rarely think about it. I’m an American and as such family religious background and ethnicity matter very little in comparison to other identifiers, such as economic and educational attainment.
But that sort of proves the point that I can choose to highlight it as an aspect of my makeup or not, as I see fit. Black people don’t have that choice.
But at any rate I am very specific that only the people whose near ancestors tried to exterminate people like me need to tread carefully with regard to using any potentially negative form of Jewish as an identifier for me. That’s not to say I dislike Germans. I don’t. My husband is part German, which is obvious looking at him, with his square jaw and outstanding posture. I simply say that I will not react well to people who sound like Heinrich Himmler calling me a name so recently used as a derogatory by the people of the Third Reich, who tortured and killed the people they called by these names.
Were I living in a country whose dominant race enslaved and oppressed my own, I would be very touchy indeed about the use of their identifiers, whether I allowed friends and sundry others to use them or not.
As BG said, it’s all context.
