attackfish

I'm ethnically but not racially mixed, being the daughter of an Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch Jew and an ex-Mormon, and I go around forgetting I'm a relatively religious Jew who speaks Hebrew and wears a Star of David every day, until something like Christmas or Easter comes around and everybody is swept up in the rituals of a world that just really isn't mine, and I keep forgetting that, or until someone says something that makes perfect sense from a culturally Christian perspective (It kills me most when Atheists do it, and then deny it) and assume I think the same way. Then it just hits me sideways, and I realize what it had to be like for people who were forced to convert, or go into hiding, and the kind of mask they not only had to build but remember they were wearing and how everyone around them was trying to rip a part of them to pieces. And I feel so lucky, because my faith and ethnicity isn't the target off the worst of it anymore.

And where I live is majority Hispanic, and most of my friends are Hispanic, and every time I say the word Anglo, I get told I'm not, I'm Jewish, get that through your head. It's another weird reminder, that I keep forgetting I can't assimilate all the way, and I'm the only one forgetting.