Spoke to P today who told me how wierd he felt when I, out-of-nowhere, brought up racism and criminality and assumptions of innocence/guilt. He said, I don't walk around thinking I'm black all the time.
Eventhough I do walk around thinking I'm Jewish all the time, coz the identity inflects how I see everything, I guess I understood what he was saying. I realise that out of nowhere, the throwaway line had no place. I brought the discussion to 'race' and racism to serve my purposes and not his.
It's funny. It's a classic liberal thing to do - to show others how cool you are, to show them how much you understand them by citing the politics. I know how much it annoys me when someone, out of the blue, talks about Jewishness, when it has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. It makes me think - is that all I am to you - A Jew? Can't I just be a person? And yet it's ok when I bring it up out of the blue, because Jewishness does inform how I see the world.