Whiteness is a lousy identity

This is unsolicited advice

If you're upset and triggered by a Jew offering unsolicited advice, don't read the rest, unfollow me and carry on your life. If you're very certain of your white nationalist identity and you know the entire Talmud (from a Reddit post), stop reading and leave now.

I'm a Jew

I am absolutely sure I am not white. It is easy for me to be sure of what I am not because I have a strong knowledge of what I am and my own identity. Even if I was white, however, I sure as hell wouldn't be moaning about white privilege! I'm quite sure that Jewish privilege is to be first up against the walls no matter who is running the revolution.

This doesn't translate to any personal animosity toward "white" or "whiteness" or toward any non-Jews on the grounds of them not being Jewish. This is because I don't hold racially supremacist views of any kind (and I'm with Nassim Nicholas Taleb on IQ differences)¹.

I most certainly believe my political and cultural ideologies are superior to other ideologies. I know people can change ideologies and are not stuck with any mode of thinking purely by accident of birth.

I also don't like people telling me what or who Jews should be, it's a very tricky subject and this post was spurred by a twitter thread I saw this morning. More on that another time. Despite this I'm going to offer some probably unwelcome advice to my white friends: your "whiteness" isn't the best aspect of your identity to cling to.

Your "whiteness" isn't a great identity to cling to

Jews should not self identify as white. This is especially because the modern definition of white seems to have been captured by two competing groups:

1. White Supremacists
2. Marxists

The White Supremacist definition of white certainly excludes Jews and they go to extraordinary lengths to ferret Jews out no matter what the political ideology or beliefs of individual Jews might be.

For the modern Marxists, white is a negative construct thrown by people working from an "intersectional" Marxist point of view. White is used almost always in connection with White Supremacist.

I'm not saying I agree with how this has worked out, I'm telling you what has happened.²

This is the reason I'm saying "whiteness" is not the best identity to use specifically because (as long as you're not a KKK member or a far-left Marxist) whiteness is almost always defined by your enemies.

What does an Arkansan have in common with a Frenchman, Irishman or an Italian from Sicily?

Are all of them white? Similar but not even the same skin pigment? What is the shared identity you're going for and is race and skin tone the very best thing to coalesce around?

There are 5 components to an indigenous identity: land, language, culture, spirituality and blood. Where is the white land? What is the white language? What is the white spirituality? And who has the white blood? Every one of those questions leads to a multitude of answers including separate Christian sects which have fought wars for more than a thousand years while hurling abuse at each other in different languages. It's pretty obvious there is no one white language 👌.

My problem with whiteness as a unifying identity is that it is only racial: it sets you up to exclude natural ideological allies (for example, non far-left Jews like myself, Sikhs and Hindus in the UK, even many Asians who aren't fond of Islam).

Even Judaism, which does have a diverse ethnic component, also has a conversion path. I have a number of converted Jewish friends standing with me on the ideological battle grounds and of course I'm comfortable with Zionists from any ethnic background. I'm commanded by the Laws of Judaism to accept converts as my Jewish equals (and the ones I know are far more observant than many of my born Jewish friends).

Locking yourself into skin tone means you're falling into the same race based (and racist) ideology which the damn Marxists use. They've also got a whole, other class based thing going on which also shows up on the real far-right as well, but why choose to define your identity that way?

How to build a positive identity

Most white people do have far more positive identity components to turn to. I'll tell you about my identity as a way to spark some ideas.

I was born in South Africa to Jewish parents who moved and took me to England before I could talk. I grew up in London but always felt like an outsider because of my Jewish identity and my South African origin. My Jewishness was passed on to me by my parents through rituals and extra education (Saturday mornings at "Hedar" learning Jewish stuff).

I renounced my South African citizenship (they called me up for the army) when I was 17 but still felt some affinity to my place of birth. I'd pretty much always support England against South Africa after Apartheid ended and South Africa was allowed to play international sport. In that way I would have passed the so called "Tebbit Test". I did support South Africa when they lost to Australia at Twickenham in the Rugby World Cup semi-final in 1999, 4 years later I was cheering when England beat Australia in the 2003 final (with a similar drop goal finish).

Learn from Jews in Israel instead of hating or envying us

As I came closer to get married and raising a family I couldn't escape the pull of the strongest identity I always had, my Jewish identity. Skipping forward a few years, once I had my first child the desire to raise him amongst my own people was even stronger. There was both a push from various experiences in London and a positive pull to be "home" in Israel even though I'd never lived there.

Many Jews will know what that feels like. On the day to day level Israel can seem an alien culture to a Jew raised in Europe or the US. The language is hard and the culture abrasive: but at a higher level there is something intangibly special about living amongst people who you identify with, no matter how different they are on a visible or genetic level. And that's without even considering the 20% of Israel who are Muslim Arabs.

If you're from a small town in the North of England, you'll know what home means for you. There are customs and foods you recognise as your own. There's a dialect unique to your town or village. Those are aspects of an indigenous identity, even if you live away from there now.

Thinking of Israel as an "ethno-state", as the far-right likes to do, is completely bonkers. Israel is wildly diverse at an ethnic level both within the Jewish majority and in the minority non-Jewish populations. Thinking that we all look, talk and think like Woody Allen or Alan Dershowitz is one of the most strange delusions I see in the rest of the world. I even know many Jews outside of Israel who can't fully grasp the ethnic mixing here and the differences between very different origin Jews.

What Israel does have is a shared history, both a modern history of struggles since the waves of modern Zionism in the mid 1800's through the Declaration of Independence and the wars to retain our country. That's married to our ancient history, shared with the world in the form of the Hebrew Bible and confirmed again and again by archeology. We know our customs, our rituals, we follow our own calendar and speak our revived ancient language. The revival of Indigenous Israel is the greatest ever rebirth of an Indigenous culture, possibly even the only one.

Now you understand why the far-left Marxist Globalists and the CCP are all working to destroy common history. That's one of the essential underpinnings of a common identity.

Israel has absorbed more immigrants as a proportion of its size more quickly than any other modern nation. Just the influx of 1 million Russians from 1989 to 1999 was an absorption of 20% of our population! This was only possible, without societal breakdown, because nearly all came as Jews to become Israelis. It's not important how religiously observant they were or are, their kids grew up speaking Hebrew and 20 years later they have a Russian flavour of Israeliness but they are Israeli.

Indigenous identities

This doesn't have to mean ethnic purity or blood and soil. Civic vs Ethnic nationalism are the code words the far-right like to use for debating this.

The point here is to have something to be proud of, an identity which is native and allowed to express itself and allows for cultural and linguistic values which do hold a special and higher position than recent arrivals.

For me, looking around the countries of Europe, and across the different States of the United States, there are many fundamentally native cultures which can be asserted.

And it is these identities the far-left and the Marxists are trying to destroy and replace with their dreams of "one world globalism" and a socialist utopia.

Lumping this all together and casting oneself as a victim of a "white genocide" is a profoundly negative response. It is the opposite of what Jews did here in Israel. The Zionist movement successfully oversaw Jews moving to, advocating for and then fighting and dying to re-establish ourselves as sovereign in our own biblical homelands.

It's far better you never lose your sovereignty in your homeland first because getting it back and keeping it is far harder than it looks.

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Footnotes

1: This is a Twitter thread between Nassim Nicholas Taleb and now canceled Stefan Molyneux. Whilst I will agree sometimes with Stefan, because he has produced at least one poorly sourced and unchanged screed against Israel's self defence actions, I'll never take anything he says at face value.

2: Read Politics and the English Language by George Orwell if you want to understand how bad it is to lose control of language and terms like "white".

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