I’m making this post about medievalpoc as a black male and I am risking my safety on the internet considering that medievalpoc is backed up by so-treu, crackerhell, and co., which is a group of abusive tumblr users who hide behind the guise of “social justice” and wreak havoc on other groups. This alone should be enough to discredit medievalpoc but I’m not stopping here.
For some time now, medievalpoc has received criticism from various blogs due to comments made about marginalized European ethnic groups, namely the Rroma and the Jews. The issue has been with their racialization of the groups as white and defending what has been described as an “American/US-centric” lens. Beginning with the Rroma, medievalpoc received an ask that requested for more images of medieval Rroma, to which medievalpoc made this response:
I have some queued up right now, and plan to do more. It can be difficult because many Romani people from bygone eras don’t meet the set of “racialized POC features” criteria in the U.S. By which I mean, most Romani and Roma people who came to the United States immediately began passing for being passed as white. The “white” members of my family are actually Polska Roma; my uncles and grandfather used to say they were “Sicilian”. That doesn’t really change the fact that my grandmother had to flee the Holocaust hidden inside a suitcase carried by a Jewish family. [x]
Several Rroma on tumblr took issue with this for a variety reasons, largely because they are not white in most cases and face racial discrimination from neo-nazis as well as European immigrants to America (and by white people in general). I pointed this out to medievalpoc to which they said:
First of all, they are “treated as such”, by which I mean, white-appearing Romani in the U.S. aretreated as white. In the late 1600s, the laws and social structure of the United States changed to elevate people with specific features-yes, including the Irish-over ALL people of color, especially and specifically people of African descent with dark skin. These changes also profoundly affected other people of color who were immigrants, as well as reducing Native Americans to less-than-vermin.
I’m an American and I’m pretty much going to see everything through that filter. This blog doesn’t happen in a void, it’s created by a person who has had a life and experiences and lives in a country and is a race; nothing here happens outside of that context and it’s incredibly arrogant to think so.
And that, in short, is why “everything has to be so US-centric” on this blog. No one is forcing you to follow it. [x]
So here, they claim, again, that their lens is a limitation and that they accept support and shaping from other people, primarily by submissions. However, while they says this to me, with other bloggers they deliberately lie about what they said and again makes a way out by saying they aren’t qualified to speak on such matter, and yet continues to do so without apologies.
In another post, one of their followers discussed examples of PoC literature written during the Middle Ages, which they reblogged. I reblogged the post, primarily because they mentioned St. Augustine of Hippo, who has been whitewashed by Western literature, to explain that the Imazighen, though being PoC, exhibit genetic diversity, in which many Imazighen can be white passing. This is perhaps most humorously (or not so humorously) illustrated when Bouchra Benaissa was mistaken for the missing white-American Madeleine McCann. I noted, however, to tristifere, that Berber is a slur for the Imazighen (indigenous North African) and in their response, they mentioned that even white-passing people are not considered white in Europe, at least where they come from. Interestingly enough, they cite medievalpoc, in which they again say that they’re writing from an American perspective and open to learning, this time mentioning the difference in American and European perceptions of race. I have called out medievalpoc several times on their use of Berber and they never once replied to me, however, they did finally respond whenbeauchampfraser called them out, and said they would continue using it for “clarification.” If it’s a slur, they should drop it altogether.
Let us discuss this for a moment. As several people have noted, racism is constructed differently in Europe than it is in the United States. In the U.S., racism is primarily color-based with some axial differentiation on white-Others. White-Others (mainly non-Germanic/WASP white people, especially European immigrants) face some xenophobia and a significant degree of stereotypes, but ultimately they assimilate into whiteness and enjoy most, if not all of the privileges available to white people. In Europe, however, color simply doesn’t constitute whiteness. European racism consists of xenoracism (where immigrants/non-natives are othered/face discrimination as a race) and ethnoracism (where members of a collective ethnic group constitute as white and everyone else doesn’t.) In Europe, unlike America, simply having light pigmentation doesn’t make you pass. They take into account your country of origin, ethnic background, and family heritage. If you are not of the specified white group, you are either a degenerate white group (the Slavs, Balkans, Iberians, etc.) or not white at all (Saami, Jews, Rroma, etc. such groups faced heavy assimilation in their host countries, resulting in a large population of light pigmented people.) This is evidenced by the Nazi targeting of the Jewish “race” (die jüdische Rasse, they developed racial theories and racial biology that categorized Jews as a separate and degenerate race; because of this usage, the word race has such negative connotations in European languages that only neo-Nazis use it) by searching family records, genealogies, and historical documentation to determine Jewishness (eerily similar to the Limpieza de sangre of the 16th century, [x] [x], but then again, much of the antisemitism Jews faced during the Holocaust was simply a reintroduction to things they had already experienced since the Middle Ages). Another example could be found in the Bosnian War, in which the Serbs and the JNA perpetuated ethnic cleansing of the Muslim Bosnians and Croats due to their Muslim heritage (evoking non-white “Arab” connotations). Northern Italians often discriminate against Southern Italians, especially Sicilians because of their Moorish/Arab heritage. Spaniards are not considered white by most of Europe due to their Moorish history. owning-my-truth has written several excellent posts explaining this, coming from an Afro-Swedish background. [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] He has also written his own post about race in antiquity as well as responding to medievalpoc [x] [x]
In light of this, it should be understood that race is fluid and its construction varies upon geographical standing. Racism isn’t lateral, it’s multi-axial. So, especially when you involve pre-19th racial constructions, racializing ethnic groups must include intersection of religion and sociocultural context within historical settings. medievalpoc “acknowledges” this, yet blatantly ignores it. The url medievalpoc is a misnomer because PoC isn’t a universal term for non-white people. owning-my-truth has written an excellent post concerning this issue.
Granted there are white Jews, but when talking about European Jews in Europe, where the majority of their discrimination is centered, their whiteness is non-existent. medievalpoc tries to argue that because the primary purpose of antisemitism was religiously fueled during the Middle Ages, the assimilated European Jewish population cannot be seen as people of color. There are a couple of things wrong with this. For starters, one simply can’t make blanket statements like that exclude a group of people in racialized as non-white in their localized form of discrimination and regard them a certain way simply because they aren’t compatible with your localized understanding of what constitutes as a person of color. Secondly, medievalpoc entirely erases the fact that the so-called “White Jews” of Medieval antiquity gained their collective European phenotype through involuntary assimilation.It is convenient for bloggers to call all these people “white” simply because they “look it” disregarding the fact that the Jewish population in Europe was originally non-white and became light-pigmented through assimilation. I wonder, then, why are people so quick to racialize this fraction of the assimilated Jewish population as white, but the white-passing Saami people are free from the accusations of whiteness, and people suddenly understand that they underwent heavy assimilation under Scandinavian occupation. We understand that the Aborigines of Australia are PoC, even though a many of them are extremely white passing. [x] [x] We understand that diasporic Africans are significantly lighter than their mainland African counterparts due to slavery, accordingly we understand the lighter-pigmentation of Native Americans because of white settlers and assimilation. And yet when it comes light pigmented Jews, whether they identify as white or not, we will racialize the entire group as white and defend our statements despite erasing identities and experiences. Yes, there are white Jews. Yes, some Jews identify as white and pass as white, but no, that doesn’t exclude them as an entire group from being non-white (especially when most Jews are non-white.)
the-orb-weaver perfectly sums up this with this quote:
I get pretty PO’d when people try to apply some blanket definition of whiteness on us – because there’s almost always some kind of agenda connected to it. To the white supremacists, we are not white, and are lumped in together with all the other non-white people they want to be rid of (and sometimes given extra special discrimination because of the fact that some of us DO pass, so we’re imagined to infiltrate the power structures in ways that other minorities can’t). But to the leftist brand of anti-Semites, we’re very, very conveniently white and lumped in together with the colonialists and globalists. [x]
Jews and Rroma both come from non-white regions. The Jews come from West Asia and the Rroma from South Asia. Both groups are non-white but have light-pigmented populations due to forced assimilation. This isn’t to say that light-pigmented people from these regions don’t exist (Aishwarya Rai, Poopa Dweck, Saleh Bakri, Sharbat Gula, etc.) but that the presence of light pigmentation in West Asian and South Asian diaspora has been obtained via assimilation. Further still, these groups are not racialized as white, despite the appearance of some, (look at these depictions of Rroma) considering therampant anti-Rroma and antisemitic tandems on the rise in Europe. Additionally, there are Ashkenazim (European Jews) that aren’t white in the U.S. (Drake, Lisa Bonet, Lenny Kravitz, Kat Graham, etc.) Conflating Jews with whiteness doesn’t only erase the large majority of non-white Jews and Jews of Color, but it also erases the complexity of Jewish ethnicity. This is why medievalpoc’s statements, such as “there are white Jewish people. and there are Jewish people of color,“ are wrong because not only because Jewish people aren’t white in Europe, secondly, not all Jews are white.
medievalpoc repeatedly states that they post what would read as non-white to a white American:
If Rashi looks white to a white American policymaker or educator, he will be included in the curricula.
If Blanche of Castile looks like a person of color to a white American policymaker or educator, she will be omitted.
If someone is not-white, whether they appear white or not they are NOT white. This is hugely gross because for one it erases light-pigmented non-white people and perpetuates the larger issue of white people claiming light-pigmentation as their own and erasing the narratives and identities of non-white peoples. For example, St. Augustine is sometimes depicted as what medievalpoc would consider “PoC,” and yet his Amazigh heritage is largely ignored and glossed over in mainstream white academia. The presence of “PoC” coded artwork doesn’t stop or negate white academic erasure of non-white people from the historical narrative. Furthermore, what is read as “PoC” to medievalpoc is subjective, and this is exemplified in their posts on the Bristol Psalter, an illuminated manuscript from Greece. Considering that Greek people created this manuscript, it’s highly likely that the manuscript depicts Greek persons. This shouldn’t be uprising, considering that Greek people can fit the range of features depicted in the manuscript. On another note, most Mediterranean people fit the range of features presented in the manuscript, including those from the Mashriq, which is what the manuscript actually depicts, considering characters from the Bible were of West Asian extraction. medievalpoc, however, ignores this, and calls King David “black”, to which I objected, because (1) It’s a Greek manuscript and Greeks and Mediterraneans can easily fit the depiction (2) regardless of how he is perceived, the character depicted is Levantine Jewish (3) racializing an ambiguous character as black, considering that medievalpoc is not black. Additionally, they say that they are “not in the business of telling Black people how to feel about any of my posts on constructions of Blackness” and yet they speak over me and tell me that they see an ambiguous character as black, and sarcastically nods me off for “disagreeing” and doesn’t continue to listen to me on why I, as a black person, take issue with their misconstrued racialization of painted figures.
I’m not going to comment on medievalpoc’s other blogs or their alleged fabricated ancestry (though the fact that they said most Rroma people passed as white even the most Rroma don’t pass for white and that Jews were “white” in Nazi Germany even though Nazi racism categorized Jews in the lower Semitic race, and that Rroma people couldn’t immigrate here without difficulty until the 60’s, when LBJ got rid of the quota acts, is super super fishy to me) — that’s something other people have done and are continuing to do.
I love the idea of promoting non-white narratives and identities in eras and regions where non-white people have been repressed, but medievalpoc has a lot of cleaning up to do before I consider them legitimate and well-rounded.
As one blogger stated:
POC is also a completely anachronistic term that really doesn’t apply to pre-modern time periods. and using it in the way medievalpoc does further cements the idea that being a POC is a matter of possessing certain phenotypical traits instead of being a racialized person who takes on a political identity for solidarity. [x]
Let’s not forget this and please be sensitive when talking about issues that are not your own.
Problems with medievalpoc TW: Rape, Racism
Published
Mooncustafer 
