Comics by white Jewish ppl at the time used grotesque anti Asian and anti black caricatures and stereotypes. Wonder Woman used antisemitic ones too.
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Replying to @nberlat
Describing people in the 1930s and 1940s as "white Jewish people" is at best anachronistic and at worst blinkered. Global white supremacy (in the form of Nazis, KKK, and other groups) did NOT see Jews as white.
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But that didn't mean that they weren't already being considered White here in the U.S., which is the relevant geography of this discussion. By the 1930s, Jews of Western European descent were already making their way into White adjacency.
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The securing of that status is one reason why the New York Times didn't make many waves about the Shoah - even though evidence of Nazis murdering Jews was already out there and reported in other outlets.
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Additionally: Just because Jews weren't considered full White at that point doesn't mean that White Jewish people weren't engaging in aiding and abetting White Supremacy. The comics they drew were racist in some pretty stark ways and that can't be ignored.
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Replying to @dropoutnation @nberlat
No question about the racism -- which I do think was about gaining white status (the role of Jewish performers in minstrelry parallels this). You can see this in Eisner in particular.
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In many ways, the desire to claim White status was something that Western European Jews were already on the verge of attaining in full measure - and was being acquired by Eastern European Jews even when the Western European ones didn't want any association with them.
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Replying to @dropoutnation @nberlat
Right -- there's a push to being white and also a redefining of white but that's not the same as being white. They weren't unequivocally white -- and indeed bore the marks of their outsider status more than earlier waves of German Jews.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @dropoutnation
see, but "being white" is always fuzzy and subject to revocation, right? it's never a stable category. I'm not *unequivocally* white; especially if I express antiracist sentiments I get Nazis trying to tell me I'm not white on here.
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but generally I'm white. Siegel and Shuster were too. If they weren't, they wouldn't have been able to get a job in comics (sans active deceit, like Herriman.)
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Herriman started 2 generations earlier than Siegel and Shuster. In fact there were openly Black artists working in 1930s and 1940s in comic strips, magazines & comic books (E. Simms Campbell, Matt Baker) -- not many because of racism but they were there.
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Replying to @HeerJeet @dropoutnation
sure; there are always exceptions. but comics' valedictory history presents the industry as uniquely welcoming to the marginalized. that's obviously got some real limitations.
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Siegel and Shuster and Lee and Kirby don't get those positions if they're Black.
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