Drop your weapons
Drop your weapons
The oppression hierarchy is a zero sum game
I didn’t know who Briahna Joy Gray was until today. Gray has 350,000 followers on Twitter. According to her bio, she’s the former National Press Secretary for Bernie Sanders, and a journalist. She’s also a host on a podcast called Bad Faith. She’s 36-years-old, has a law degree from Harvard, and is not Jewish. The latter matters because today she tweeted about a new episode of the Bad Faith podcast thus:
Let’s break this down shall we.
Are Jews White? Does it matter?
No, Jews aren’t simply “White”. We are a diverse group who cannot fit into the American binary of white and Black because we predate it. We are people identifiable by or genetic ancestry and/or religiosity. As to the second part: Does it matter? What kind of a question is that. Could you imagine someone speaking so flippantly about another minority’s fundamental makeup? And then asking if it even matters?
It reminded me of this horrendous panel the BBC hosted last year, asking: “Should Jews count as an ethnic minority?” It seems non-Jews are almost cocky about discussing us and our history and identity as though we’re in the room next door with our fingers in our ears.
Jewish advocate Jordyn Tilchen hit back at Gray. Rightfully pointing out that Jews should never be used as clickbait in this fashion, and later highlighting how traumatizing it is for us to witness these conversations taking place at our expense. These buzz sentences and framing devices erase us, spread fast and contribute to anti-Jewish hate crimes in America.
Gray quickly picked up on Tilchen’s clapback, and proceeded to post her comments on her own feed, baiting her audience of hundreds of thousands to troll the white-passing Jew… Was this in good faith?
I haven’t listened to the episode but frankly who needs to when the teaser and title (!) is so laced with ignorance, but moreover when the host continued to ignore Tilchen’s criticism of the presentation of the debate, and its historical ramifications, instead choosing to continue to lean on the podcast itself. It matters not whether there was Jewish representation on this episode by this point. Language can be a tool; it can also be a dog whistle. The insensitivity here is astounding.
Oi. Well then I got involved.
Gray really didn’t like that. In fact she immediately had a meltdown, pulling the victim card the second she was called out for belittling Jewish advocates from criticizing her in her promotion of her product.
How I assaulted Gray’s body is unclear. She erased my identity, I allegedly brutalized her. I guess we’re even. And despite it still being the month of February, I spoke back.
And she delivered another gaslighting blow:
I’m not surprised by the hysteria. It’s straight out of the hierarchy of oppression playbook. Gray immediately weaponized her Blackness against my perceived whiteness, because she doesn’t really care to understand whether or not “Jews are white”; she’s looking to confirm her pre-existing bias. Apparently I got under Gray’s skin because she returned a whole two hours later with another threat.
It’s not up to anyone who isn’t Jewish to lead a conversation on whether or not Jews are white. This is abundantly true in discussions of any group of people, and it is unacceptable to make an exception for Jews and erase us because it behoves the woke agenda. Nobody - absolutely nobody – weaponizes themselves against another person in innocent ignorance. It’s intentional. Why else was Gray doing it, to both myself and Tilchen - two white-passing Jewish women? She utilized emotion, Black History Month and thinly veiled accusations of racism to send her followers at us with thinly veiled insinuations of racism on our part. Is this someone who wants to dialogue? Who wants to learn more about why Whoopi Goldberg’s comments a few weeks ago were erroneous? I hazard that these are the comments of someone who wants to dictate the narrative to suit their own priorities.
All of us spend our lives now walking on the ideological eggshells that are strewn across the floor of a wrestling ring, in which one tribe is in the red corner and another in the blue. It is a zero sum game pitting identities against one another, particularly minority identities. It only feeds the oppressor. And for those who are caught in the middle with no place on either side of the ring, there's a tendency to defer to the louder voice for the sake of peace, for an easier life. For others, there's a renewed purpose to watching the foreign tribes eat each other and disappear. The motivation for someone who isn't involved to say something and stand for reason, rather than appeasing the mob who believe that 2+2=5, is low, if non-existent.
The arena of Twitter rewards highly strung brawls over cogent, sober debate. It wasn't designed to promote the latter. And under the former, the seeds of hate between people are being sowed by the socialization we've accepted at the hands of our digital overlords. Some days I find that it breaks me. I am clinging onto the power of logic, to the value of truth. And in this instance to the most reasonable principle of human relations: that one person's identity can never trump another person’s identity. Anyone who argues otherwise is a bigot.
All you have to do is ask yourself: if Eve Barlow had a podcast asking “are African-Americans truly African?” what would the reaction be? We know what it would be. It still amazes me how non-Jews feel like they can tell Jews who we are.
It absolutely drives me nuts when non-Jews try to define for me who and what I am. My son recently had a nasty experience at his college where his then-roommate (who is not Jewish) tried to tell my son what was and was not anti-Semitic. Sorry, but he doesn't get to do that.
P.S. My son switched rooms very shortly after this confrontation.