Late-Night #ThursdayThought: Example Of Why Maliciously Questioning Someone’s Ethnicity Is Not Funny

 I have been repeatedly questioned about my Jewish heritage in part because I did not find out about my Jewishness until I was 18; I come from Crypto-Jewish families; and I’m a Jewish Christian—and especially because of the latter part, some people have maliciously questioned me.

It makes it even worse when malicious questions about my ethnicity are not the only malice that I’ve endured—especially because some of that malice has been verbal and other (although at least, thank God, that it was) non-sexual abuse that has rippled well into my adulthood. Compounding that is that (as I’ve mentioned before) a great-great-grandmother of mine and a great-granduncle (who actually died due to a  Schizophrenia-linked coronary occlusion) had it (and both are long deceased). 

This came to my mind as I was trying to find a GEDMatch population-match result—with the calculators unchanged and the results exactly the same as I had gotten them in the past— and I cannot find that one result, despite that I know what I saw . When I have occurrences like this, it scares me to think that the dormant Schizophrenia gene maybe set off in my generation (and as far as I know, my great-great-grandmother and great-granduncle, z”l, were the last ones to have Schizophrenia on our side)— and then I wonder if I saw what I actually saw. 

As for this particular occurrence, as aforesaid, it is an example of why maliciously questioning someone’s ethnicity is not funny—especially if you somehow know what trauma he or she has already endured in regard to both his or her ethnic background and family history as well as other kinds of trauma, and your goal is to retraumatize him or her. 

 PS Similar comments can be made about, for instance, the disgusting and malicious question of Senator Warren’s Native American heritage (and I have made clear that I both  disagree with most of her politics and find the questioning of her ethnicity—which she was luckily able to prove with DNA in lieu of records—abhorrent)—questioning someone about his or her ethnicity for a political or another kind of cheapshot or trope is never okay.