Country Clubs
Nov. 2nd, 2020 11:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitI'm finally reading Waking Up White. It is already better than White Fragility and I'm only a couple of chapters in, but I was expecting that. I'm going to do a proper post on it later, once I've finished it, something which is taking a while because they're short chapters and at the end of each chapter there are self-reflection questions intended to get you to think about your preconceptions. (And the way she approaches this is so much more likely to get people to actually listen!)
However, I did discover something interesting in the bit at the beginning that addresses the "but it's REALLY about class" people, because Debby Irving grew up a country club girl. My immediately family never belonged to any country clubs, but I had cousins who did.
Jewish country clubs.
And the attitudes of Jewish country club people seem to be somewhat different from the attitudes of Yankee WASP country club people, quite aside from there being something I can't quite identify in her descriptions of her early life that makes me want to offer catlike hiss at the culture she's describing, as I realize that my usual disparaging eyeroll at "country club people" is very specifically directed at the kind of country clubs where you wear salmon shorts and play polo. (Which is also how country clubs usually intrude on my consciousness, as that's how they appear in media, while my experience of the Jewish ones is primarily attending other people's bar mitzvahs.) I don't have the same instinctive mental hiss at the Jewish ones.
The more racial-awareness stuff I read the more I become aware that a fair bit of Jewish culture penetrated through despite my mother's efforts to separate me from it. (Heightened, I think, by growing up in a very Jewish area, such that there are a lot of things that are actually Jewish outlooks that I perceive as "just how the world works." Right up until I'm out of the local area, anyway...)
However, I did discover something interesting in the bit at the beginning that addresses the "but it's REALLY about class" people, because Debby Irving grew up a country club girl. My immediately family never belonged to any country clubs, but I had cousins who did.
Jewish country clubs.
And the attitudes of Jewish country club people seem to be somewhat different from the attitudes of Yankee WASP country club people, quite aside from there being something I can't quite identify in her descriptions of her early life that makes me want to offer catlike hiss at the culture she's describing, as I realize that my usual disparaging eyeroll at "country club people" is very specifically directed at the kind of country clubs where you wear salmon shorts and play polo. (Which is also how country clubs usually intrude on my consciousness, as that's how they appear in media, while my experience of the Jewish ones is primarily attending other people's bar mitzvahs.) I don't have the same instinctive mental hiss at the Jewish ones.
The more racial-awareness stuff I read the more I become aware that a fair bit of Jewish culture penetrated through despite my mother's efforts to separate me from it. (Heightened, I think, by growing up in a very Jewish area, such that there are a lot of things that are actually Jewish outlooks that I perceive as "just how the world works." Right up until I'm out of the local area, anyway...)
