The Global Citizen is a joint project of New Voices and the American Jewish World Service (AJWS). Throughout the year, a group of former AJWS volunteers will offer their take on global justice, Judaism, and international development. Opinions expressed by Global Citizen bloggers do not necessarily represent AJWS.
I’m not racist, because my people were the targets of anti-Semitic attacks for thousands of years. I’m not racist.
In fact, I’m oppressed. Cornel West writes about the history of Black-Jewish relations in the United States. He talks about how Jews used to be seen as non-white – that’s right, 1800’s genteel America slurred “the blacks, the Jews, and the dogs” together. Judaism was a race of people with long payes, big noses, slimy dirty fingers, and Shylock’s thirst for Christian blood. And all of this minimized the true racial diversity that represents the world Jewish community, with Jews from every continent of origin and every skin tone.
Yet Jews and blacks do have it different in America. Over the course of the past fifty years, Jews have successfully transitioned into the white majority in America. Now I start to feel confused. I’m not white, because white isn’t just a skin color – in America, white also connotes a religion, namely Protestantism. But my skin is able to “pass for white” – that is, I can successfully receive many of the same privileges that my black friends are denied by society.
It’s funny that among Jews, there should be such a strong political resistance to affirmative action for blacks. And it’s funny that among blacks there should be such a strong political affiliation with the Palestinian, and not Israeli, cause. What’s behind that?
Well, to be honest, I’m a little bit racist.
We all are. That doesn’t mean that I consciously discriminate against certain groups and not others based on race. It just means that I’m a part of a system that has really hurt black chances of success. I don’t mean to preach; I’m going to share these examples because they had a huge emotional impact on me when I first heard them a month ago. First of all, blacks were effectively excluded from inheriting property until the 1960’s, and because of this, today’s whites have about $7 trillion dollars of inheritance more than blacks do. That pays for things like, oh, maybe, an education at an elite private university. This is huge affirmative action, for whites, against blacks. Also, whites for the past 350 years had their pick of housing locations, and so even today, blacks are five times as likely to live near factories with toxic waste than whites are. That’s a huge problem that white discrimination has caused for the mental and physical development of black children.
What does that have to do with Judaism? Well, as a Jew, I sometimes forget the struggles that my great-grandparents went through as underdogs in American society. I also forget that Jew and black are different – that while my family successfully made the transition from non-white to white, from oppressed to privileged, my black friends have no such recourse. “We made it without affirmative action – let blacks do the same!” It doesn’t work that way.
And throughout this entire article, when I thought I was actually fighting for social justice, I only helped minimize another group that lives on the margin of both populations: Jews of color.
So I guess I’ll choose not to be racist. Oy, shvertz azayan yid.
