Shalom, thank you
It is an honor and privilege to address you Jewish leaders and Jewish leaders in formation. I appreciate the opportunity and feel humbled by the responsibility.
Responsibility because racism has been called variously the core wound of American society, the cancer at our core, our original sin, deepest shadow, fundamental contradiction - choose your language- they all convey the same message that the United States can not and will not be a spiritually healthy just society unless and until we put an end to all forms of racism.
I will address today some of the different aspects of racism, the process of racialization, how racism and its corollary white privilege constrict the spiritual growth of each one of us and some suggestions of what we can do, in between you will have opportunity to speak with each other and at the end there will be time for some questions.
Racism’s clearest manifestations are on the physical bodies of black people- African people were brought to these shores and treated as “bodies” -- not as human beings, and, racism was burned into the soul of the United States. Slavery was a system that could only be maintained by extreme violence and that has left a legacy that leads directly to the way the law enforcement and penal systems treat Black people in America today.
Violence and murder are the most glaring but consider this, black people die younger, are hungrier, sicker, have a lower birth rate, a much higher rate of infant mortality, and have a much higher chance of breathing toxic fumes, and living near a superfund site.
That is why it is so important to declare that Black Lives Matter.
Racism constrains the soul of America as a whole, of each group within this country, including we Jews and of each person. The full spiritual development of each of us is hampered by racism. Our spiritual growth is in part gauged by our ability to feel compassion for an ever-growing number of people, and racism constricts that.
Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote:
Racism is worse than idolatry. Racism is Satanism, unmitigatedevil. Few of us seem to realize how insidious, how radical, howuniversal an evil racism is. Few of us realize that racism is humanity’sgravest threat to humanity, the maximum of hatred for a minimum ofreason, the maximum of cruelty for a minimum of thinking.
I believe it is useful to tell you a little about why it is important to me. My parents were both Holocaust survivors, each the only surviving member of their respective families. I grew up knowing the effects of extreme racism.
They were refugees, we lived for the first ten years of my life in the 1950’s in Brownsville in Brooklyn – classified at the time as the most rapidly deteriorating neighborhood in New York- I still remember the fires. We moved out when the landlord sold the building, we were the last white family to leave the block. I saw first hand the effect of what I later learned was redlining.
Then, living in East Flatbush, I went to Erasmus Hall High school and our perennial rival for the basketball championship of Brooklyn was Boys High, an all black, boys only school in Bedford- Stuyvesant, a dense, very poor all black neighborhood- what used to be called the ghetto. During my senior year on an afternoon in- February of 1965 – a month before the march and bloody Sunday in Selma- about dozen or so of my friends and I decided to go to the game at Boys High.
Our starting five were all black as well- (with a couple of future All Americans)- it was a close, tense game in a densely packed gym of hundreds of students, chanting and clapping, it felt like the floor and walls were undulating. We were the only white spectators, and sitting at the furthest point from the exit. Our team won in the final minute. The crowd was angry. By the time we got to the exit we were walking single file with our hands on each other’s shoulders, I had the misfortune of being last in line. When we got out into the street all I could hear was people chanting, “kill whitey” I was terrified. I was pushed down into the street, lying in fetal position, being kicked and punched, tasting my own blood, while people continued to chant kill whitey.
Suddenly, these two black young men reached down, each one grabbing an arm they began lifting me up- and shouting, “don’t kill him”; as they were carrying me others reached in to punch me- those two fought them off and got me out of their safely. They saved my life- they risked their own safety, possibly their lives, to save me.
Later I thought it is easier to understand getting caught up in the violence of a crowd, than to understand two black young men risking their lives to save an unknown white guy.
Though it certainly took me a while to sort it all out, I experienced the rage the black community feels because of oppression and the grace of being saved by two people able to step outside of the black-white dynamic and act in a fully human way. I think this background helps explain my commitment to the issue.
And here we are fifty years later, still struggling as a nation with racism.
Let’s take an overview of the problem. I think seven definitions will be helpful, forgive me if some of this may be obvious but I think clarity of terms is useful. We have been taught to think of racism simplistically as the overt racist language or actions of an individual, it is far deeper and more subtle.
First, race is a social construct, there is no biological category of race; it was created by society. I know for some people this is hard to understand, biologists are very clear and emphatic that race is not a biological category, there are not enough similar genetic markers. Yet we visually see skin color and race is a social reality because humans made it so; perhaps the primacy of visual information has played a role- two thirds of the electrical activity of the brain is related to vision; and more of our neurons are related to vision than the other four senses combined.
•Second Interpersonal Racism: it is prejudiced and discriminatory behaviors where one group makes assumptions about other groups based on race and this the result of explicit conscious bias. And this is what ordinarily comes to mind when we think of racism.
• Third- Internalized Racism: occurs when a group is consistently bombarded with negative messages about their own appearance, abilities and intrinsic worth, and then internalizes those negative messages. It holds people back from achieving their fullest potential and reinforces the negative messages which, in turn, reinforces the oppressive systems. An example in the Jewish world- many Jewish women don’t think they are attractive in a culture where northern Europeans are the standard of beauty.
• Fourth Institutional Racism: it occurs when assumptions about race are structured into the social and economic institutions in our society; when organizations, businesses, or institutions like schools and police departments discriminate, either deliberately or indirectly against certain groups of people to limit their rights or opportunities. Think how stop and frisk tactics disproportionately affects people of color or about how few black women there are in the sciences. This type of racism reflects the cultural assumptions of the dominant group and is often not recognized.
Diads please as silently and quickly as possible turn to someone near you to be partner, who doesn’t… one person please tap the other- the tapper is now Aleph and the other Bet, each will have 4 minutes and I will time, do not switch until I ask you to, when aleph speaks bet just listens attentively no dialogue, Aleph please say what is hard for you in talking about race- what is hard for you in talking about race, please begin bet just listen attentively until I call time.
Thank you- if we had more time…. I will continue with some terms
• Fifth Structural Racism- this is the accumulation over centuries of the effects of a racialized society. After WW II the GI bill enabled millions to buy homes- and to go to college- it fueled the creation of the broad middle class in America. The black community was largely excluded from these benefits through a variety of racist practices and this prevented most from joining the middle class.
Think about what it means today to have been left out of that process of wealth-creation, home ownership, college education, etc.
The median wealth of white families in the US today is 11 times the median wealth of black families. $110,000 verses $10,000.
The critical aspect of racism that we must address today is the accumulation and incorporation of long-standing racialized practices into all of our social and economic structures, or structural racism.
Sixth- Implicit Bias
This refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. These biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control.They have been implanted by all that we have ever taken in, and remember we live in the context of society that is continually producing and reproducing racist images. Residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. Rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection.
They arepervasive. Everyone possesses them, even people with avowed commitments to impartiality such as judges.
The implicit associations we holddo not necessarily align with our declared beliefsor even reflect stances we would explicitly endorse.
We generally tend to hold implicit biases thatfavorour own in-group, though research has shown that we can still hold implicit biases against our in-group- the deepest form of internalized oppression dolls study
If you like there is a simple set of on line tests you can take that reveals implicit bias on a wide range of issues just google Harvard implicit bias- and I can almost guarantee you that you will be surprised.
Implicit bias is the cause a significant amount of the discrimination that people of color experience, for example this has been proven over and over again by investigating bias in hiring.
The good news is that implicit biases aremalleable. Our brains are incredibly complex, and the implicit associations that we have formed can be gradually unlearned through a variety of debiasing techniques.
The seventh is a term you may not be familiar with- Racialization- developed by john a powell, a professor at Berkeley and social justice advocate, in his very insightful book Racing to Justice. And I thank my friend and colleague Rabbi Toba Spitzer for turning me on to this.
He wrote, “Racializationorethni-ci-zationis the processes of ascribingethnicorracial identitiesto a group that did not identify itself as such.[1]Racialization and ethni-ci-zation is often born out of the desire for domination or division. Often the racialized and ethnicized group gradually identifies with and even embraces the ascribed identity.” These processes have been common across the history of colonialism, nationalism, and racial and ethnic hierarchies. Please note that it is a verb- it is the process of setting up a group as other and less than in order to dominate or weaken them.
The process of racialization is baked into the origins of America, our cultural DNA. Let’s briefly examine the early history of our country.
When the European colonists arrived on this land- their basic premise was that the Native people were less than human and this- justified dominating them, taking their lands, and eventually the destruction of their culture. The indigenous people had no idea that they were being considered as less than human.
Christopher Columbus was acting as a Spanish agent in accord with a Papal Bull of 1452 that declared the Christian Doctrine of Discovery whereby Christian nations could "capture, vanquish, and subdue the saracens, pagans, and other enemies of Christ," to "put them into perpetual slavery," and "to take all their possessions and property."
Please note how strong these words are: capture, vanquish, subdue, perpetual slavery, take their property.
In 1823, the Christian Doctrine of Discovery became part of U.S. law by the Supreme Court case,Johnson v. McIntosh. Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice John Marshall observed that Christian European nations had assumed "ultimate dominion" over the lands of America during the Age of Discovery, and that - upon "discovery" - the Indians had lost "their rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations," and only retained a right of "occupancy" in their lands.
Remarkably the doctrine of discovery is again cited by no other than Ruth Bader Ginsberg in a 2004 Supreme Court decision in ruling against native claims. The Vatican still refuses to rescind the doctrine of discovery. At the very beginning the original occupants were declared as less human than white Europeans. This has never been healed and it set the stage for the treatment of Africans.
In the early 17th century many of the English who came were indentured servants or poor workers, while an elite group ran the society. At that time many of the Africans who came to America came by way of the Caribbean where they had learned to speak English. The concept of race had not yet been developed. Workers, indentured servants and blacks began cooperating. In 1676 this group joined forces in a rebellion against the elites in order to gain some rights, it was called Bacon’s rebellion and caused fear among the ruling forces.