Racism isn’t just for fraternities

Here at New Voices, we’re no strangers to the questions of Jews and race. And while it seems like we’ve done a good job of beginning a very much needed conversation on the complicated relationship that we American Jews have with race, ethnicity, and privilege — and we’re nowhere near the end of this conversation — most of the Jewish community has yet to really begin that conversation in a meaningful way.

Last week, we were reminded of that when the University of Chicago’s AEPi chapter had racist, misogynistic, and Islamophobic emails leaked to Buzzfeed, causing it to circulate through the Jewish news circuit.

It would be very easy to dismiss this as the standard hyper-masculine culture of fraternities that incubates the misogyny, homophobia, and racism. There’s little surprise when we find out that, yes, it’s still there. Since I’m not a University of Chicago student, nor a member of AEPi (or any fraternity), I can’t comment on how typical it is. I can, however, speak to the need to contextualize these emails within the wider Jewish community.

When we excuse away the emails as part of fraternity culture, at best we do little more than just age the “Boys Will Be Boys” argument about a decade from pre-adolescent to college-aged men, and at worst we let ourselves off the hook for any institutionalized racism or stigmatization. When we blame racism on another institution — here, fraternities and fraternity culture — we forget that we also might have something to contribute to the racism that has, finally, been brought to our attention.

Over the last year, as the United States began to have a much-needed conversation around race and racial privilege, the Jewish community started to follow suit. At the same time, there’s been significant pushback against these discussions. Much of it began with the insinuation that Jews are not privileged because of the history of violent anti-Semitic persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. Although this approach has been critiqued because not all Jews experienced the Holocaust equally, the discussion of whether or not Jews are yielded privilege by their Jewishness is one fraught with questioning and controversy within the Jewish world.

People balk at the language of intersectionality, the study of related systems of identity and oppression. Many feel alienated from the conversations, and even disregard the mere concept of intersectionality as one that “makes you stupid” because it’s used by racial and economic justice groups as a means to support BDS against Israel’s occupation of the Occupied West Bank.

At the same time, shutting out any conversation around intersectionality and privilege because it’s used by those with whom one disagrees allows us yet another reason to hide from the realities of race and privilege that many Jews today — particularly white, gentile-passing Jews — are yielded today.

If the problem is with some far-off, isolated group, then we can afford to disregard and ignore it, even though that means that we’re ignoring the realities of our lives every day. But when we do this, we forget to confront reality, and not only of the diversity of the racial and ethnic composition of the Jewish community (non-white Jews continue to exist, despite our continued deliberations as to whether or not “The Jews” are a white-privileged group). It allows those of us who have racial privilege to ignore much of the racism that results when we forget this important fact. (And lest you think that racism is just something that occurs in more insular, socially conservative Orthodox communities, think again.)

When we as a community excuse away racism and other forms of continued oppression as just being part of a small subculture, we excuse ourselves from any sort of blame or complicity. We need to do the exact opposite. Our lack of outrage and complete silence in the majority of the Jewish community when racism does rear its head here makes us just that: complicit in the racism perpetuated against other minority groups.

When we make excuses every time we have a problem confronting the privilege that many of us face — because it makes us uncomfortable to acknowledge the realities that many of those around us, both inside and outside of our community, do not have the luxury of being able to ignore — then our silence becomes part of the problem of racism. And as our silence goes, so, too, do we.

 

Amram Altzman is a student at List College.