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(The beginning of this post has been edited, twice, because I accidentally posted, and then sloppily edited the first time, the wrong draft.)<\/i><\/p>\n(The beginning of this post has been edited, twice, because I accidentally posted, and then sloppily edited the first time, the wrong draft.)<\/i><\/p>\n
I’ve been trying to write something in response to Charlottesville for the past two weeks, but I’ve had a hard time finding the words. It’s not that I’ve been\u00a0unclear about what happened there or who was to blame for the violence of that day or for Heather Heyer\u2019s death, or about not-only-Trump’s moral cowardice in equating those who committed violence against the white supremacists and neo-Nazis\u2014whether that violence was in self-defense or not\u2014of equating those people with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists themselves. It’s that so many people with platforms much, much larger than mine have already said most of what I would have said, and it has been difficult to keep up. Better to amplify those voices in the small ways that I can, it has seemed to me, than to engage in the clamoring for attention that putting my own voice out there would have been. So that\u2019s mostly what I\u2019ve been doing, sharing\/forwarding\/talking about\/planning to teach what have seemed to me the necessary and worthwhile things that other people have said.<\/p>\n
I was able to pour some of my outrage into the statement about Charlottesville that I wrote for my faculty union<\/a>, but that statement is by definition not a personal one, and so, while writing it helped me feel I\u2019d done something worthwhile, it didn\u2019t actually do much to help me figure out what I<\/em> wanted to say. I\u2019d thought a lot about the intersection of racism and antisemitism in my own life as a white Jew during the summer of 2016, when I wrote a series of letters that Jonathan Penton published as \u201cThe Lines That Antisemitism and Racism Draw<\/a>\u201d ((If the white-on-black text of Unlikely Stories<\/em> is hard on your eyes, I have posted the letters as a single document on Academia.edu<\/a>.)) in December of that year in his online journal, Unlikely Stories.<\/em> (I posted one of those letters<\/a> to my blog earlier this month.) Again, however\u2014here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>, for example\u2014others were already writing about being white and Jewish movingly and persuasively, and they were doing so in more or less precisely the terms I would have chosen. What they weren\u2019t writing about, however, was where I ended up in the letters that I wrote last year, and that is perhaps something I can add to the conversation.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Lines That Antisemitism and Racism Draw\u201d constitutes my response to a Facebook message Jonathan sent me while he was reading through submissions to a special issue of Unlikely Stories<\/em> called #BlackArtMatters<\/a>.<\/em> Conceived in harmony with the Black Lives Matter movement, #BlackArtMatters<\/em> was to be<\/a>, \u201ca celebration of the incredible continuing contributions of Black artists to the global dialogue.\u201d Black artists were welcome to submit their own work. People who were not Black were invited to submit critical articles about or appreciations of Black artists. I had hoped to write an appreciation of June Jordan<\/a>, my first poetry teacher, but my schedule did not permit it, and so I told Jonathan I would have to pass. Then, in early August of last year, as I was sitting in the airport waiting with my family for our flight to Scotland, where we\u2019d be spending the first of three weeks in Europe, I received a message from Jonathan that said, in part, this:<\/p>\n So [Rosalyn Spencer<\/a>, the woman who edited #BlackArtMatters, is] going through the [pool of] submissions[.] Lots of fine stuff from black folk, lots of fine stuff from non-black folk. There is, however, only one submission from a Jewish academic, who [in a critical article about James Baldwin] starts talking about how, since he’s Jewish, he knows how black people really feel, except only partially, but totally blackly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Jonathan\u2019s irony notwithstanding, I trusted his description of that academic\u2019s racist paternalism because it is very familiar to me from when I was younger and finding my way more and more deeply into both the Orthodox and Conservative Jewish youth movements. However, when Jonathan asked me, \u201cone Jewish writer to another,\u201d to submit something, anything, so that academic\u2019s work would not be the only piece in the submissions pool to represent us\u2014Jonathan did not publish it\u2014I had to say no. Still, I couldn\u2019t get what that academic said out of my head, and so, early in the morning of our first day in Edinburgh, while my wife and son were still sleeping, I started what became a series of six letters<\/a> that I wrote from three different countries\u2014four, if you include the last one, which I wrote after we returned to the US. It\u2019s this last one that I want to share with you now. Not because I think it says anything definitive about racism and antisemitism, but because where it ends, when I wrote it, surprised and even frightened me a little, feelings I have learned to trust as a sign I\u2019ve hit on an idea that needs to be explored further. And because I think the desire for that exploration is something that what happened in Charlottesville, and that everything packed into what happened in Charlottesville\u2014past, present, and future\u2014should compel in us. The letter, slightly edited, is below the fold.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Wednesday, August 24<\/strong><\/p>\n Dear Jonathan,<\/p>\n We\u2019ve been home for a couple of days now, and we\u2019re finally settled back in enough that I can take this time to write without feeling guilty that I should be doing something else. Tomorrow, I need to begin prepping for the new semester, which starts in about a week, so this will have to be the last letter I send you.<\/p>\n Not too long after Michael Brown was shot and killed by Darren Wilson, someone started the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite. It seemed at first like a marvelous idea: white people tweeting stories about times they\u2019d been stopped by the police and been treated politely, kindly, even indulgently\u2014the precise opposite of the kind of treatment all-too-many Black people have come to expect from law enforcement. The more I read the #CrimingWhileWhite tweets, however, the more skeptical I became. Yes, there were plenty of 140-character-long stories that fit the hashtag\u2019s purpose perfectly, and, yes, the effect of telling those stories one after the other was to highlight the fundamental unfairness of how cops all too often treat Black people. Highlighting that unfairness, however, seemed to be about as deep as the hashtag could go. Don\u2019t get me wrong. Fairness is important, but, as a framework for dealing with white privilege, it has definite limitations.<\/p>\n This default focus on fairness was why I didn\u2019t post my own #CrimingWhileWhite story, despite the fact that it matched the hashtag\u2019s intended message. Basically, a cop pulled me over because my rear license plate was missing, and then he let me go with just a warning that I should replace it as soon as possible. He didn\u2019t even write me a ticket. The full narrative of that encounter, however, is far more complex than this brief summary suggests, and Twitter\u2019s 140-character format would have meant the loss of that complexity. So I tried instead to write the story as an essay in itself, but nothing I wrote did justice to what I thought I was trying to say, so I put it aside. I want to tell you the story now because I think it\u2019s relevant to what I\u2019ve been writing in these letters.<\/p>\n About thirty years ago, I was driving my girlfriend home late one night along an otherwise deserted stretch of the Northern State Parkway. From behind us, a patrol car\u2019s all-of-a-sudden flashing lights illuminated the dark. At first, I didn\u2019t think the lights were for me, so I moved over into the right lane to let the car pass. It, however, moved into the right lane behind me, and a voice came over its loudspeaker telling me to pull over, which\u2014confused about why I needed to; I knew I wasn\u2019t speeding\u2014I of course did.<\/p>\n As I watched the officer approach my car in the rear view mirror, I was frantically buttoning the inner placket of the shirt I was wearing, which my girlfriend had playfully undone while I was driving. The design of the shirt\u2014with two sets of plackets, one inner and one outer\u2014made it look like I was wearing two shirts, and I was just starting to button the outer placket when the officer\u2019s knock on the driver\u2019s side window interrupted me. I rolled the window down. \u201cPlease step out of the car,\u201d he said. I could see he was white. \u201cBring your license and registration with you, and come around to the passenger side.\u201d<\/p>\n He watched me take the registration out of the glove compartment, then walked over to where he wanted me to stand.<\/p>\n \u201cWho\u2019s in the car with you?\u201d he asked when I got there, taking my license and registration from me.<\/p>\n \u201cMy girlfriend,\u201d I answered.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat was all that commotion I saw in the front seat after you pulled over?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI was buttoning my shirt,\u201d I told him, and I reached to open the outer placket so he could see what I was talking about.<\/p>\n \u201cStop!\u201d the cop said very forcefully. \u201cDo that slowly.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhat?\u201d I asked, a bit of a challenge in my voice, since I didn\u2019t at first understand why he\u2019d so suddenly changed his tone.<\/p>\n \u201cOpen both sides at the same time,\u201d he instructed, \u201cone with each hand, and lift the shirt up.\u201d<\/p>\n Now I understood. \u201cI don\u2019t\u2013\u201d have a gun, I wanted to say, but he interrupted me. \u201cJust do what I told you!\u201d<\/p>\n I glanced quickly around and noticed that his partner, whom I could not see clearly, had stepped out of their vehicle. I don\u2019t remember if they had their guns drawn, or if their hands were at their holsters, or if maybe one had his gun out while the other was poised to draw if he had to. Or maybe their hands were nowhere near their guns. I really can\u2019t recall. What I do know is how suddenly afraid and even more confused I was that they were now treating me as if I might be armed.<\/p>\n I held the front of my shirt open and up, while the officer shined his flashlight on me. \u201cKeep the shirt up,\u201d he said, \u201cand turn around.\u201d I did as I was told.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere are you driving this late at night?\u201d he asked, his voice considerably more relaxed now that he knew I didn\u2019t have a gun tucked into my pants.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m taking my girlfriend home,\u201d I said as I straightened my shirt.<\/p>\n \u201cWhere does she live?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cShe goes to Adelphi University.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhere do you live?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn Stony Brook. I\u2019m in graduate school.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWhose car is this?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cMine.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cHow long have you had it?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cA couple of years. I got it from my grandfather.\u201d<\/p>\n He examined my license and registration very closely, shining his flashlight once or twice so he could see my face as he did so. Then he asked, \u201cDid you know your rear license plate was missing?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNo, I didn\u2019t,\u201d I said, and he took me to the back of the car to show me.<\/p>\n Car thieves, he explained, take the rear plates off the vehicles they steal so the cars can\u2019t be identified from behind. \u201cThat\u2019s why we stopped you,\u201d he said, returning my license and registration. \u201cThere\u2019s a ring of car thieves operating around here. We thought you might be one of them.\u201d Then his voce grew a little stern, \u201cJust make sure you get that license plate taken care of as soon as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI will, officer,\u201d I said. \u201cThanks!\u201d<\/p>\n That was the end of it. I got back into my car; he walked back to his vehicle; and he and his partner drove away. As I said before, he didn\u2019t even write me a ticket.<\/p>\n As soon as I buckled my seat belt and put the key in the ignition, my girl friend, who was also white, started teasing me. \u201cYou should have seen yourself,\u201d she smiled. \u201cYou were so scared. You should\u2019ve stood up to them more.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cYou do realize they thought I might have a gun on me, right?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t be ridiculous,\u201d she said. \u201cYou didn\u2019t have a gun. They weren\u2019t going to shoot you.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t know what they would or would not have done,\u201d I said. \u201cWhat I know is that they could have, and I\u2019m glad nothing I did made them think they had to.\u201d I turned the key, the engine turned over, I pulled back out onto the parkway, and I drove her home.<\/p>\n Not once\u2014and if this is not a sign of white privilege, I don\u2019t know what is\u2014not once in all the years since that incident took place did I think about it in racial terms. Indeed, I always thought about it in terms of gender, what would have happened if I\u2019d tried to be more of a man, like my girlfriend suggested I should have, and what it meant that she would make that kind of suggestion in the first place. Then I saw the #CrimingWhileWhite hashtag, and I understood that this was a story I could contribute to that effort, but that\u2019s not what made me want to tell you the story now. Rather, I am telling you this because of how I felt when I heard on NPR\u2014I was driving home from work a few weeks before my family and I left for Europe\u2014the audio of Philando Castile\u2019s girlfriend talking to Castile, and to the cop who shot him, as Castile sat in the seat next to her, and she couldn\u2019t do anything to stop him from dying.<\/p>\n The similarities between my story and his started to haunt me almost immediately. I was driving with my girlfriend; so was he\u2014and their daughter was in his car was well. He was pulled over for a broken taillight; I was pulled over because my rear license plate was missing. In each case, the cop believed a routine traffic stop might turn into something violent and deadly. Jeronimo Yanez, the cop who stopped Castile, said that Castile resembled a suspect in an armed robbery; the cops who stopped me thought I might be a car thief. Castile told Yanez that he had a licensed gun in the car; the cop in my situation wanted to make sure I did not have a gun tucked into the waistband of my pants. Philando Castile died because Yanez thought Castile was reaching for his gun, not his wallet; the cop who stopped me gave me the chance to prove I didn\u2019t have a gun, and I walked away with my life. Castile was Black, I sat in my car thinking after I\u2019d parked and turned off the radio. I am white. Is that fact the only reason I\u2019m alive today? Do I literally owe my life to the color of my skin?<\/p>\n The question may seem melodramatic at first. After all, my being white might have had nothing to do with the fact that those officers did not shoot me; it\u2019s entirely possible that they would have treated a Black version of me in the same way. What makes the question a valid one, however, is that there\u2019s no way to know for sure. To take it from another, less dramatic perspective, ask yourself why the cop who spoke with me didn\u2019t write me a ticket. My guess is that your first impulse would be to say because he and I were both white. Again, to be fair to him, there\u2019s no way to know for sure. He might have chosen not to write the ticket because I was young and he wanted to cut me a break, and it is certainly within the realm of possibility that he would have made the same choice for a young Black man. I\u2019ve always wondered, however, if he didn\u2019t write me the ticket because he didn\u2019t know I was Jewish. Because, in other words, he didn\u2019t know he had before him a chance to give a \u201ccheap Jew\u201d at least some small measure of what all cheap Jews \u201cdeserve,\u201d i.e., to be made to pay.<\/p>\n I have no doubt that most people who aren\u2019t Jewish will say that I am being melodramatic, and maybe even some Jews will too, at least at first. I\u2019d be willing to bet, however, that if you asked those Jews a second time, most of them would say something like, \u201cThere\u2019s no way to know for sure, of course, but I wouldn\u2019t be surprised to learn that Richard is right.\u201d Because Jews know about antisemitism what Black people, and all people of color of course, know about racism, that it is not merely an unhappy accident which some white people escape and some don\u2019t. Rather, it is a meaningful and functional part of our culture that lives in everyone who calls our culture home. Everyone. The only real question is where you position yourself in relation to the lines that racism and antisemitism draw.<\/p>\n When that Jewish academic claimed to know what Black people feel, I think it\u2019s clear he was trying to declare his own disloyalty to white privilege. However, by asserting his Jewishness as that which gave him access to Black people\u2019s feelings, he was also asserting that a line exists within him beyond which, because he is Jewish, and despite the fact that he was born into a white body, he ceases to be white. To put it another way, he was claiming that, because he is oppressed as a Jew, he does not experience\u2014the full implication is that he has never experienced\u2014what white privilege feels like, i.e., that physical sense of being at home in and with the color of your own skin, while at the same time doubting that anyone who isn\u2019t white can ever have that same experience<\/p>\n To give whiteness a body in this way\u2014and for my purposes here, I don\u2019t think it matters whether you believe whiteness to be constructed or to signify a genetic race into which people are born\u2014to make it not just about ideas, but about feelings, is to give it also a metaphysics, an ontology, and an epistemology. It is to propose, in other words, that whiteness both asks and offers answers to the question of what it means for white people to be in the world; of what white people can know about that world; and of how we are able to know it. In a book called White<\/a>,<\/em> Richard Dyer argues that whiteness roots the answers to these questions in the medieval Christian idea that a body\u2019s value is defined by the quality of the spirit that inhabits it. The souls of men, for example, were understood by the Church to be superior to the souls of women, and so men\u2019s bodies were valued much more highly than women\u2019s. Similarly, the souls of Christians were understood to be far superior to those of the Jews, and so Christian bodies had more value than Jewish bodies.<\/p>\n Dyer asserts that this ability to imagine different bodies as being different in essence, not just in form, is a prerequisite of the racist imagination, and he lists some of the ways Christianity has imagined such differences in racial terms:<\/p>\n the persistence of the Manichean dualism of black:white that could be mapped on to skin colour difference; the role of the Crusades in racialising the idea of Christendom (making national\/geographic others into enemies of Christ); the gentilising and whitening of the image of Christ and the Virgin in painting; the ready appeal to the God of Christianity in the prosecution of doctrines of racial superiority and imperialism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Dyer does not argue that Christianity is itself racially white, pointing to the Black church in the United States and the growth of Christianity in Africa and Latin America as obvious evidence to the contrary. Rather, he insists that Christianity \u201chas\u2026been thought and felt in distinctly white ways for most of its history.\u201d This notion, that whiteness, and therefore racism, cannot be understood apart from its roots in the same Christianity from which antisemitism emerged suggests to me a new avenue for understanding the relationship between these two forms of hatred. Unfortunately, though, I do not have the time right now to walk down that avenue even just a little bit, As I said, the new semester starts very soon, and I need to prep my classes.<\/p>\n I know, Jonathan, that these letters were not the kind of response you were asking me for when you messaged me about that Jewish academic\u2019s submission. Nonetheless, I am happy and grateful that your message to me about him moved me to write. The letters have forced me to push my thinking about race and antisemitism further than I have pushed it in the past, and I have learned some things about myself in the process. I hope you have found the letters thought provoking and useful as well.<\/p>\n Best,<\/p>\n Richard<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" (The beginning of this post has been edited, twice, because I accidentally posted, and then sloppily edited the first time, the wrong draft.) I’ve been trying to write something in response to Charlottesville for the past two weeks, but I’ve … Continue reading