from Juan Cole: >Israeli Court Punishes Palestinian-Israeli for Passing > Posted: 22 Jul 2010 12:29 AM PDT
> The conviction in Israel of a Palestinian-Israeli man on rape charges because > he had consensual sex with an Israeli woman who thought he was Jewish is > completely recognizable to anyone who knows the history of race relations in > the United States as a punishment for passing. > Passing was the practice of light-skinned persons with at least some > African-American heritage moving in white society and concealing their > African lineage. The peculiar American racial definition made persons > African-American if they had virtually any African ancestry at all (the one > drop rule). In contrast, no one in Arab societies cares if someone´s mother > or grandmother was from the Sudan, and Brazilians conceive of race as on a > spectrum (not that there is no racism there but it is not the old US > black-white absolute). > It was to forestall and punish passing, which of course led to intimate > relations between what US society defined as Blacks and Whites, that > miscegenation laws were passed.< -- Jim Devine "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
