On Identity, Ethnicity and Race

I had an angry reaction when I recently found that my profile with my employer showed my race/ethnicity as white; nobody ever consulted me about that. I have pondered the significance of these classifications for many years and would like to sum up my conclusions here. All of us have multiple identities. We have personal identities, the sense of who we are. We may have many social identities based on what other people see and think of us, how they treat us, etc. Some of our identities are objective, such as ethnicity. Others are partially or totally subjective, such as the notion of race.

Let's work our way through these. There is no iota of my personal identity which has any relevance to "White." I do not come from Whiteland nor did I have any ancestors who would have identified themselves as Whites. That was the reason for my anger at being classified as White. I would variously describe myself as a European-American, a descendant of Eastern European Jews (which is my ethnicity, and likely a descendant of inhabitants of the Khazar nation long ago. I do not belong to any race because, as sociologists long ago included, there is no such entity from a scientific point of view. As a species, we are perhaps only 80,000 years old and our DNA has not differentiated into any groups which could be characterized uniquely. Races are arbitrarily defined in societies by those who use them to maintain themselves in power, regardless of whether it was Whites versus Blacks and others in the USA, Whites versus Africans and Asians in South Africa, or Jew versus Palestinians in Palestine. An African-American scholar and friend of mine once observed that it was the English who conceived the idea of a White Race to prevent themselves from becoming a minority in the United States. At first, the Irish and southern Europeans, such as Italians, were not part of the White race, but when their numbers were needed, the notion of race was extended. For Blacks, even one-eighth descent from an African made one Black. Many contemporary African-Americans are descended from marriages with Native Americans, which was largely ignored in the USA race lexicon. South Africa had very complex racial classifications, including White, Coloured, Black, Asian (but not Japanese who were considered White for economic reasons), and fifteen or twenty other categories. There was a board which classified people. Each year they would report on reclassifications in which children of the same parents were often put into different races. However, nobody was ever classified from Black to White or from White to Black. Israel's racial classification system is simpler, though it has problems with non-Jewish Russians and with African dark-skinned Jews who emigrated there. In fact, I argue that there isn't even an Israeli nation since Israeli citizens belong to many nations, including the Palestinian nation. The only way such a nation could begin to come into existence would be for the state of Israel to abandon Zionism and Jewish supremacy and become the state of all its citizens. Personally, I am a USA citizen and thus belong to the USA nation and to no other nation. Dual nationality is certainly possible, for example, for children with parents of different nationalities, but it does not apply to me.

Let us digress for a moment on that topic. When I defined my personal identity, I referred to Eastern European Jews. There were also Jews in Palestine and other Arab countries, including Morocco and Yemen, the Sephardic Jews in Spain, and so forth. Three of my four grandparents spoke Yiddish, which was a Jewish language only spoken in Eastern Europe. The fourth grew up on a farm in what is now Slovakia. She told me that they spoke German at home, but she was also fluent in Hungarian. I had a Morrocan Jewish friend. We realized that we had nothing in common aside from our support for the Palestinians. The only common language we had was English. His ancestors were likely descended from Berbers who converted to Judaism. I won't pursue this in more depth here because I have done so in other blogs. The only point to emphasize is that there is no single identifiable group which could be called the Jewish people. Since that group does not and cannot exist, I do not belong to it. My ancestors most likely were Khazars, whose kingdom converted to Judaism en masse, and then dispersed westward when that kingdom fell. Millions of them ended up in Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and other countries.

Since the USA was and is a racial society, it does divide people into races, but it does not consult us about our identity. Even for the laudable purpose of ameliorating historic discrimination, it classifies us without our participation, as my employer did. While I support that purpose, affirmative action, I do not support the assault on my personal identity which causes me to be classified as White, which is a meaningless category. This becomes embodied in full absurdity by those who declare they are part of a White Nation, which is defined only in hostility to those they despise. There is no such quality as Whiteness, there is no Whiteland, no White language, no White culture, no common trait at all. Those who use the term White are thus propagating, usually unwittingly, the racist structure of white supremacy that the term was invented to promote and preserve. I doubt that the Ku Klux Klan, which hated Jews along with African-Americans, would have classified me as White. I'm not sure why I used the past tense in that sentence since the Klan and their cohorts still exist.

So far, I have been discussing strong and sometimes pernicious characteristics of identity. There are, of course, others. To give one example, I am a musician who primarily plays the banjo. To many of my musical friends and to me, too, being a banjo player is a very visible part of my identity. Yet I know many other people who are not aware of this at all. On my job, I have a particular identity associated with my history there, my known capabilities and expertise, and so forth. The point is that few of us present our entire identities to everyone or even focus on all of our identity all the time.  When I am playing the banjo, I am a banjo player. When I am working at my job, that is usually far from my consciousness.

I'm sure I haven't mined every aspect of identity here, but I have addressed some aspects which I think are confused by many people and which muddy our thinking and obstruct us from dealing with the real world.

I want to add a footnote about the Khazars. I just read the Wiki page on Khazars, which disparages the likelihood that most Eastern European Jews were descendants of Khazars. They offer essentially two arguments: the Khazar origin of Eastern European Jews was taken up by anti-Semites and anti-Zionists and DNA studies. The former, obviously, is irrelevant. If we are the descendants of the Khazars, then the use or misuse of that fact by others is not related to the fact of origin. The second, interestingly, is not supported by the studies included on the Wiki page, which only show that  European Jews are more genetically similar to other ethnic groups in the Middle East (which you would expect if they fled from the Khazar area adjacent to the Middle East) than they are to their neighbors in Europe. But the real question is this: What happened to millions of Khazari Jews when their kingdom was destroyed and where did the millions of Jews who arrived in Eastern Europe at the same time come from?

As an anti-Zionist, I will also point out that there is no need to refute claims to Palestine based on rule there for a few centuries at most more than two millennia ago. The claim of Palestinians to Palestine is based on their presence there when the Zionist colonization began. That the Palestinians likely include the descendants of the ancient Hebrews among other indigenous peoples there is not a basis for a claim to Palestine, but merely an interesting historical fact which exposes the lie of Zionist "claims." For Zionists, however, to try to try to deny my origin--the origin of Eastern European Jews--as Khazari, is an assault on our identity and a travesty to objective history.