Tag: antisemitism

tygermama:

lydia-gastrell:

kat2107:

meta-hemeralism:

snakegay:

tomibunny:

rottenlesbian:

rottenlesbian:

please stop reblogging sylvia plath poetry 

For ppl asking why she’s an anti black, anti Semite. She has used the n word and compared her depression to the holocaust

Even not counting her poetry her private journals are full of disgusting, overblown antisemitism. She didn’t just use Jewish people for her metaphors, she outright hated them irl and yet decided to use their suffering for her own gain

here’s a source with some quotes

okay, I’m Jewish and I appreciate this sentiment. and if someone wants to cut out Sylvia Plath, go for it, I get it.

But. by this logic we’d also need to stop reblogging TS Eliot, Oscar Wilde, and Shakespeare quotes. Virginia Woolf wrote anti-semetic things in her private journals, too. If you only want to read classic poets who liked Jews and black people, that’s fine, but like. good luck? Sylvia Plath isn’t an exception.

idk. Tumblr’s attitude of “consume nothing problematic” just doesn’t work if you’re part of a group that most culture-creators over the last few centuries have hated by default. For people actually in those groups, it’s not like the only two choices are 1) worship authors who hate you or 2) completely cut the majority of literature out of your life. You learn to read critically and acknowledge flaws where you find them.

anyway, as a Jewish woman, I would much rather see a version of this post that said “please read Sylvia Plath poetry critically because she’s anti black and antisemetic” than just “stop reblogging Sylvia Plath poetry.”

IMO, reblog Sylvia Plath all you want, just not unthinkingly.

Sometimes I fell like tumblr has put itself on the the extreme opposite of “consume stuff incritically”

“Don’t consume stuff instead of dealing with it.”

If I ignore its existence then I won’t have to take a layered view on it. 

But guys… anti-semitism is a thing and it’s been a rampant thing for centuries. You can’t ignore that the middle ages or the early 20th century existed. Or heck, the middle of the 20th century in the US. 

People always are a product of their times. And some times where just racist as fuck! That was normal! And that is something you have to look at and look at critically because these times will return. And very normal people who are talented and nice will have very horrible, unthinking opinions. 

That includes you, btw. 

So think instead of ignore.

My history professors were always trying to tell us that you CAN NOT view the past through a contemporary lens if you expect to have any kind of understanding of the past. And “understanding” does not mean acceptance, so let’s get that out of the way right now. 

 We have the privilege–yes, PRIVILEGE–of living in a time that is the product of other people’s grueling hard work, of centuries of people before us being arrested, beaten up, impoverished, KILLED so that we could stand on our high horses and be proud of growing up in the enlightenment they made for us. Any one of us unlucky enough to have been born 100, 200 year ago would like 99% be racists, anti Semites, and probably misogynists (yes, even minority groups, because anti Semitism and misogyny have long histories in black culture too) because the only way to not be all that in a world where it was so normal it was like believing in gravity was to be exceptional. I mean, beyond your time philosophical genius kind of  exceptional. For any of us to believe that we would just magically be all enlightened and woke if we hadn’t had the benefit of a world around us teaching us not to be is an insane level of arrogance. It would be like trust-fund Brad insisting he would still be a success even if he hadn’t inherited 80% of a company to start. No, Brad, someone did all that work before you were born buddy. 

Even the amazing people who were taking leaps to end various discriminations a century ago are still problematic. The white abolitionists were definitely racist by our standards, just not racist enough to want slavery (and most of them were insane Christian fundamentalists who had no tolerance for any other creed). But it would be insane and a gross dereliction of historical duty to just ignore these people and pretend they didn’t exist because they couldn’t magically meet all our privileged standards 170 years ago.

UNDERSTANDING DOES NOT MEAN ACCEPTANCE

solacekames:

goathornsandblackwool:

White people who openly say that “Diversity is a code word for white genocide” are explicitly stating white people are too weak to survive if they have to compete equally for resources and would literally die out- literally go extinct- without being protected and isolated for their safety.

Y’all white people need to do something about those weak links among you.

It might seem like this argument would work but it doesn’t 😦 I mean, it works against people who are on the fence, but committed white supremacists already have a practiced answer: the white race is always the best and smartest and strongest and whenever they’re not, it’s because traitors on the inside (Jewish people) stabbed them in the back. It’s the same argument Hitler used to rise to power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth

This is an incredibly powerful explanatory model if you choose to believe in it. Everything good you do is because you’re naturally good and deserve it: everything bad you do is because an enemy made you do it.

It also doesn’t work for the same reason why “so you think you’re the master race but Asians and Jews are inherently smarter?” doesn’t work. They don’t so much see themselves as the best at everything ever as much as the creators of everything wonderful that has existed. They see all the pretty cathedrals in Europe and go “this is the pinnacle of human achievement and we will never get back to anything like it.” They think any intermixing between White and non-White cultures will lead to the end of civilization as we know it. They justify all of this with some really bad evolutionary psychology. It’s all rubbish of course but it’s attractive to people who are willfully ignorant of science and history.

hanukkahsolo:

hanukkahsolo:

Y’know, this whole shit that TERFs pull by making “receipt blogs” and “masterposts” of everything from the perceived wrongs of or crimes by trans people (especially trans women) remind me, as a Jew, of other particular ideologies that supported the listing and publication of crimes by members of a marginalized group as means to discredit and vie for the mistreatment of said group.

this is being brought back by angry TERFS an honest to goodness year after I wrote this, so reminder that people from every group act wrongly and using this to discredit a particular group/as an argument for their continued oppression is a rather familiar tactic. 

clayandsorcery:

A little perspective

This post is for Jews only.

Y’all, take a breath. I know it’s easy to be afraid, to be outraged, and to get worked up by the renewed waves of antisemetism. But these neo, meso, and paleo nazis are simply adding their names to the roll call of failure.

We are a people that can trace our roots almost 6,000 years. How many people can say that? How many nations and people have been lost during that time? We have survived famine, war, diaspora (twice!), and holocaust. The Greeks failed to annihilate us, as did the Babylonians, the Persians, the Romans, the Catholics of Spain and Portugal, the Germans and their collaborators. The Jewish faith has multiple holidays dedicated to our survival in unlikely circumstances and improbable military victories.

Don’t underestimate our enemies, but don’t get down on our chances either.

Not to mention their WORST nightmare is our reality. They fear “”“white genocide”“” because they think it will make them into a persecuted minority. Their fear of even the potential of having the lived experiences of people they’ve oppressed is a notable weakness of theirs.

cuntybisexual:

god okay at the gym today i was watching CNN and this stupid fucking white male anchor had a south asian guy as one of the guests or whatever, and they were talking about harvard’s discriminatory policy toward asian american applicants. basically harvard’s approach iterates that without the subjective personality metric, harvard’s campus population would be 43% asian, and thus the quotas, which cap the asian population at 19%, are necessary to preserve diversity. so naturally the south asian guy was talking about how racist this is. and the motherfucking white male anchor waxes lyrical about how he wants his white kids to be around black and latinx people so that they get a “diverse education with multiple perspectives”. as if asian americans don’t contribute to diversity! frankly this whole thing reeks of “asians are overpopulated so we need to rid the world of them” tbh. and naturally the south asian guy was like “wtf are you talking about, that’s quite literally racist against asian americans and it tokenizes black and latinx people as well” and of course the fucking cracker was like “you misunderstood me, you’re reading into this too much, blah blah blah”. when will white men die? 

full offense but this really is the model minority myth in action and it’s why i’ve always fucking said that the myth doesn’t just serve to impose positive stereotypes on asian americans. its primary function is to make invisible the racialized struggles of asian people so that white supremacist capitalism can usurp asian labor. 

not only do white people routinely erase the diversity of asian people, but they also continually try and erase white supremacist, colonialist, and imperialist brutality against asians. european countries colonized so much of south asia and southeast asia. europe + the US occupied china through spheres of influence. USA dropped two nuclear bombs on japan and interned japanese americans. the US killed numerous vietnamese civilians for the sake of imperialism. the US continues to exert an imperialist influence in the korean peninsula, in guam, in okinawa, in the philippines. britain fucking drained every last resource from india and enacted two genocidal famines in the region of bengal. winston churchill said that indians were worse than germans. britain then left the south asian subcontinent with a bloody partition of punjab and of bengal, effectively contributing to the bengali genocide of 1971. the US invaded iraq and afghanistan and destroyed both countries, it installed a dictator in iran. britain colonized yemen. france colonized lebanon and syria. USA, britain, france, canada, and its allies hurl bombs and drone strikes in pakistan, in yemen, in iraq, in syria, directly leading to the rise of reactionary groups within those countries, such as ISIS. the US has enacted brutal sanctions against north korea and has prevented korean reunification for its own purposes. 

and this doesn’t even begin to cover american discrimination against asian immigrants, beginning with the chinese exclusion act and vile xenophobia and racism against east asian immigrants. or how today, south and southeast asian immigrants face immense violence. or the resurgence in anti-sino bias. 

it’s so fucking easy to forget that asian americans actually do face racism to because white people are so good at pretending that every asian leads an easy life and isn’t racialized and that all asians look and act and think the same.

There were similar quotas in place, and the same justifications for
them, against Jews at Harvard in the 1920s-1930s. The whole “we don’t
evaluate for merit but for ~~personality~~” is a dogwhistle for
discriminating against whoever is getting the model minority myth
applied to them at a given time. It’s not a positive myth at all and it encourages discrimination, stereotyping, and violence.