American racial categories misrepresent many groups

“Jewish identity in America is inherently paradoxical and contradictory.” — Eric Goldstein, professor of history and Jewish studies  

“Americans in general seem to have difficulty accepting complexity and ambiguity. I’m either Indian or American, white, or black. I can’t be both and neither.” — Kavitha Mediratta  

In a uniquely race-fixated United States, a regular question is if Jews are white. You will get a variety of answers, including from Jews. While most Jews are light-skinned Ashkenazim, Jews come in the full range of skin colors and tones. There are light-skinned American Jews who self-identify as white with white privilege as a part of their American identity. Other Jews find it deeply offensive and ignorant to call Jews of any skin color white and part of the white supremacy.  

To cut to the chase, I assert that Jews are not white because, in many ways, they do not fit into the category. Times of Israel blogger Dani Ishai Bejan writes, “I’ve heard all of the arguments for Jewish ‘whiteness,’ but I have yet to hear one that is truly convincing.” Israeli journalist Leil Leibovitz writes, “We’re our own thing.” If you ask me what Jews are, my answer is, “They’re Jewish.”   

As this essay shows, Jews are far from the only group that does not fit into the simplistic American color code definitions of race.

.

American race categorizations are primarily social and political constructs  

Americans have been conditioned to see the American color-coded racial categories as wholly and objectively biological and universal. However, the racial categories have little objective basis in science. Humans are genetically similar, sharing approximately 99.9% of their genetic code. Unlike many other animals, there are no human subspecies. Socially dividing humans by skin and hair color is as arbitrary and biologically trivial as when, in the 19th century, race was defined by blood type and the shape of one’s head. Science writer Kristen Hovet writes, “The part of the human genome that makes our skin and hair look different is tiny compared to what we share.”  

The very idea of race is modern. The word itself did not exist until the sixteenth century, and the white/black/yellow/brown/red color categories were introduced in the late 18th century. Ancient societies, such as the Greeks and Egyptians, did not divide people according to skin color. Throughout history, slaves and their owners have mostly been people of the same hair and skin color. The Slavs, the basis of the word slave, are light-skinned and were enslaved by fellow light-skinned people. Most people were enslaved not because of their physical characteristics but their vulnerability. 

Racial categorization was, and still is, manipulated for political and ideological purposes. American slave owners cataloged people as white versus black and blacks as inherently lesser than whites to justify the enslavement of black Africans. It and other racial categories were later used to justify Jim Crow laws, discriminatory citizenship rules, and the unjust treatment of American Indians, Asians, Latinos, Jews, Germans, Irish, Greeks, and Italians. The last five mostly light-skinned groups demonstrate that racial categorization has never entirely been about skin color.  

American racial categorization is eccentric, peculiar to the United States and continually changing. Depending on the prevailing political and ideological sentiments, Japanese, Latinos, Irish, Greeks, Ashkenazim, Indians, Persians, and Arabs have fallen in and out of the white category. Over the years, Armenians have been classified as yellow, white and brown, while Japanese, American Indians, Arabs, and even Irish have at times been called black. 

American racial definitions are so varying and subjective that some people’s legal race changed when they cross state lines. Two siblings of the same physical characteristics may check different racial identity boxes on a census. I know two like-appearing ethnic Portuguese women, one identifying as white and the other as a person of color. The U.S. Census has continually changed its categories. Many Americans do not see their identity on the census forms and pick “other.”  

Race and law reporter Jenee Desmond-Harris writes, “If race were based on permanent, innate divisions of human beings, the American government wouldn’t have to constantly scramble to change the definitions and qualifications for each category. But it does. All the time. As political priorities change, American racial definitions adjust right along with them.” 

.

The deficiencies with the American race categories are demonstrated when applied to other parts of the world.   

If you ask my Armenian friend from Iran what race she is, she will say Armenian. If, as an American with a narrow American point of view, you rephrase the question by asking what color she is, she will look at you strangely, insist that skin color is not race, and again say that she is Armenian.   

A Somalian immigrant said Somalis do not like it when Americans call them black because that’s not how Somalis view people. In Somalia, everyone is black-skinned, so they divide people using different criteria. 

It caused great offense to most Jews when Whoopi Goldberg called the World War II Holocaust “white on white crime” and said that the Holocaust “wasn’t about race.” Jewish law professor David E. Bernstein wrote that such comments are shockingly ignorant and a sign of “intellectual moral decay.” The Nazis classified and persecuted Jews as a different and inferior race.

Black English journalist and cultural critic Tomiwa Owolade writes, “Right now, we have things upside down. Instead of America importing its ideas about how to think and talk about race to other countries, other countries should be exporting their ideas to America—which, let’s be honest, does an abominable job of thinking and talking about race.”

.

Jews have historically been outcasts  

Throughout the centuries, Jews have been social outsiders, persecuted by dominant cultures. Jews originated as slaves in the Middle East, and have experienced a history of persecution, displacement, bigotry, and antisemitic laws. 

The United States and Canada have a long history of antisemitism, including quotas on Jews at universities, bans from social groups, and derogatory stereotyping. My elderly Ashkenazi neighbors said that, when they were kids, Jews were not allowed to swim in their local Baltimore public swimming pool. Despite and often because of the stereotypes of Jewish privilege and power, antisemitism and antisemitic attacks continue.   

Most important, Jews have their own distinct international culture, thousands of years old history, beliefs, languages, and peoples. Judaism is not some 2023 American thing to be defined through a 2023 American political lens. 

Black-skinned Jewess Brandy Shufutinsky, of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values and the Alliance for Inclusive Ethnic Studies, said, “I don’t use white Jews or Jews of color. A Jew is a Jew is a Jew.” She says the prevailing “colorism” is American-centric and that “Jews predate race.”  

.

Reductionist American race theories continue  

Under a binary oppressed versus oppressors model that views people as white (oppressors) or non-white (oppressed), Jews, successful Asians, Latinos, and Middle Easterners have been put into the white or white adjacent category. The progressive race theories often incorporate age-old antisemitic stereotypes, and have received strong pushback from Jews, such as here, here, here, and here.  

Political science professor Samuel Goldman writes, “Jews do not fit into the sharp distinction between oppressor and oppressed that characterizes ideological ‘antiracism.’ Therefore, Jewish experiences must either be ignored or reduced to a monolithic conception of white supremacy.”   

History professor KC Johnson said, “If Jews are seen as ‘white’ (which, in this permutation of progressivism, they are), and ‘whites’ cannot be subjected to racist attacks, then antisemitism becomes a trivial concern.” 

Black academics Ralph Richard Banks, a law professor and founder of the Stanford University Center for Racial Justice, Glenn Loury, an economist at Brown University, and John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia, say the new progressive race model is just as reductionist and racially essentialist as the previous ones. McWhorter wrote that Robin DiAngelo’s book White Fragility is “How to be racist in a whole new way.” 

The progressive “white” or “white supremacy” category is so huge and diverse— grouping together a wealthy Persian immigrant in Silicon Valley, a Hasidic Mizrahi Rabbi in Brooklyn, and a poor fifth-generation German-American farmer in Alabama— that it defies any attempt at making a reasonable unified definition. Loury argues that the “BIPOC” category is similarly untenable, including people whose only commonality is that they are not white.

The race theory misunderstands power in the United States, with the power belonging to a tiny percentage of wealthy people rather than everyone with a particular skin color. Sociology professor Richard Alba writes, “Our current racial division tends to cast the white group as dominant, and while parts of it are, not all of it is. We’ve lost sight of how much disadvantage can be found among whites.” Ralph Richard Banks echoed this, saying, “(I)t’s both analytically wrong and politically misguided to promote an ideology that suggests that all white people have it good and all black people have it bad.”

.  

Other groups have similar experiences  

It is not just Jews who have these objections.

Many Asians strongly object when progressives put them in the white adjacent or white supremacy category. Many Asian Americans were outraged when the North Thurston Washington State public schools grouped them with whites because they did well on standardized tests.   

Kenny Xu of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR) writes, “Asian Americans are not ‘white-adjacent.’ They are unique individuals from many distinct cultures. Their individual successes are theirs alone and belittling those successes as ‘white-adjacent’ is racist in myriad ways.” Chinese American author Patricia Pan Connor writes, “Calling Asians ‘White Adjacent’ is racist and insulting. The idea that Asian Americans are too successful to be persons of color assumes success is a ‘white’ trait.”   

Americans of Middle Eastern and North African descent have said that categorizing them as white misrepresents who they are and their experiences. Persian sociology professor Neda Maghbouleh writes that such Americans have “a plethora of different experiences that made them feel that some of their experiences were actually closer to communities of color in the U.S.” They have pushed for a Middle Eastern and North African category on the census. 

After being classified as white, Indian Americans pushed for an Asian Indian category in the census. Latinos have increasingly been checking “other” instead of white on the U.S. Census forms. Multiracial is one of the largest growing demographics, with many multiracial people changing their primary racial self-identification and/or picking multiple races on the census form.

.

Modern societies should be moving away from rather than reinforcing reductionist racial categorizations  

All this demonstrates how, no matter how they are configured, reductionist and stereotyping racial categorizations are hollow and perpetuate division, tribalism, and misperceptions. Studies have shown that fixating on race only makes racial prejudice and strife worse.  

Author of How to Fight Antisemitism, Bari Weiss, said, “I just fundamentally believe that we should be fighting for a world in which there are no caste systems, in which people are judged based on their individual merit and character, in which we move from the historical construct of race, rather than reifying it. I just don’t think you look at history and believe making people fixated on their immutable characteristics and saying those immutable characteristics have immutable power leads to anywhere good.”  

Glenn Loury wrote, “If we can’t find some way of countering the underlying problematic ideological commitment to race as an essentialist category, we’re in trouble. Martin Luther King had the right idea with colorblindness, yet today it’s regarded as a microaggression to say one doesn’t see color. Of course, it’s impossible literally not to see color, but despite pressure from cultural elites, we needn’t give it the overarching significance we now do. In fact, if we’re going to make our experiment in democracy work, we mustn’t give it such significance.”