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This tweet is idiotic on its own terms in that, even if it did make a historically coherent claim, it somehow arrives at the inexplicable conclusion that the racial regime of 1930s Germany somehow determines Jewish racialization everywhere and anywhere for all time.
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But the tweet also reflects a Jewish talking point that has become prevalent from Right to Left—that the Holocaust signals not only a historical period of Jewish non-whiteness but also that supposed Jewish non-whiteness was the ideological basis of Nazi antisemitism.
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Addressing the first idiocy is easy enough. The historical record is simple: European and non-Black North African Jews have been considered white by the US gov't since the 1790 Naturalization Law (sry Brodkin stans!).
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This is evident in the debates recorded in the Annals of Congress from that year. It is evident through the history of Jewish slave-owning. It is a historical fact that no amount of antisemitism can wave away. That whiteness sustains internal hierarchy somehow eludes so many.
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Addressing the question of Jewish non-whiteness vis-a-vis Nazism is more complex—not only bc the historical record is but also bc there is a Jewish *investment* in reducing Nazism to whiteness supremacy tout court to ensure Jewish inclusion in (US) anti-racist movements as
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proper victims of racism (that is, white supremacy).
There is a tendency to reduce all historical racial regimes to the consolidated USian Jim Crown binary of Black/white that formed the topos of US Civil Rights struggles and indeed became the hegemonic frame of anti-racism
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There is a tendency to reduce all historical racial regimes to the consolidated USian Jim Crown binary of Black/white that formed the topos of US Civil Rights struggles and indeed became the hegemonic frame of anti-racism
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But the global development of racial capitalism was incredibly uneven and contradictory as racial regimes modulated and compressed local and global relations of exploitation and ideologies of subjugation into novel amalgamations.
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Anyone who has srsly studied the Nazi racial state knows that its racial theories r marked by an extraordinary ideological incoherence. This is not surprising—racial theories more often than not r recruited to justify exigencies of state policy rather than determine them.
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Countless German schools of racializing thought and practice—Göttingen's philology n craniology, Munich's Geopolitik, Freiburg's eugenics—competed n mangled each other in practice, n Hitler himself cherry-picked theories to support his political goals. But, in broad strokes,
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the central incoherence of Nazi racial theory vis-a-vis Jews was the question of whether, (1) following a Renan-Marr-Rosenberg line of thought, the Jewish race simply represented an inferior, Semitic race in a global hierarchy privileging *Teutonic* whiteness (already here
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one sees there r racially inferior—i.e. non-Teutonic—white people) or (2) the Jewish race rather was a sort of anti-race—the mongrel refuse of race-mixing, the embodiment of racial impurity *itself.* This view is most explicit below, from the Nazi doc Der Ewige Jude, and
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reflects a line of thought approximated by Gobineau-Chamberlain-Günther.
These are all broad strokes and somewhat reductive in their own right. But what should nonetheless be clear is that Nazi race war and genocide cannot be easily assimilated to the historical and
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These are all broad strokes and somewhat reductive in their own right. But what should nonetheless be clear is that Nazi race war and genocide cannot be easily assimilated to the historical and
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ideological terms of white supremacy in the US. This does not mean they don't have a relationship—they have a real, material and ideological relationship. But that requires nuanced analysis of how racializing discourses and technologies travel, concatenate, and mutate.
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