Confessions of a Middle-Class White Woman

I was born in 1947 in Kansas City, Missouri, into a Jewish family, and I spent my first 13 years in a white middle-class neighborhood in the southwest part of town. In 1960, we moved into a house in the suburbs, across the state line in Prairie Village, Kansas.

Growing up, I experienced a few instances of anti-Jewish bigotry, such as seeing the swastika that someone spray painted on our synagogue and being denied access to a country club in Leawood, Kansas, a suburban town next to Prairie Village. Realtors in those days wouldn’t show homes in Leawood to Jewish clients (making up some excuse to mask their discrimination), but there were plenty of pleasant middle-class neighborhoods in Prairie Village, so that’s where we built our house.

The extent of diversity on the blocks where I grew up was the fact of Jews and Christians living next to one another. We never had poor, black, or Latino neighbors. Therefore, I was mostly isolated and sheltered from the realities of life for people of different classes and races.

About the only black people I met as a child were employees of white people. In the 1950s, many middle-class white families could afford to hire black housekeepers, and that’s what my mother did. Some of these women worked for my family long enough to grow quite close to us, but I remained largely uninformed about what their lives were like when they went home at the end of the day.

My first memory of being exposed to this aspect of their lives was when I was about six or seven years old. A young black woman employed by my mother volunteered to take me to a parade downtown, and my mother agreed. After the parade was over, this woman took me to her home to meet her family. My family was far from wealthy, but we lived a solidly middle-class life in a comfortable house with plenty to eat. My father owned a business, and my mother stayed home to raise the children–pretty standard lives for middle-class white Americans in the 1950s.

Kansas City was an extremely segregated city back then. There were no black kids on my block and maybe one in my elementary school. Visiting that young woman’s home in a lower-class black neighborhood was the first eye-opener for me regarding the realities of race and poverty in my city.

Like many white Americans, I like to think of myself as an open-minded, enlightened person. However (and this is confession time), I have made a few embarrassing mistakes in dealing with people of color over the years, especially in my teens. When I was in high school, my Senior Girl Scout troop participated in a Girl Scout event in Swope Park (similar to City Park in Denver) which was attended by troops from all over the Kansas City area. I met a number of  black senior scouts at that gathering, and I asked one of them what high school she attended. “East,” was her reply, and I said, “Me too,” assuming that she meant Shawnee Mission East, my suburban school. The two high schools in that district at the time were Shawnee Mission East and Shawnee Mission North, so students in the district just called them “East” and “North” most of the time.  The girl at the park corrected me, informing me that her school was East High School in northeast Kansas City, Missouri, a school that was mostly, if not totally, attended by black students. Busing for desegregated schools in the city wouldn’t happen for another decade, while “white flight” into the suburbs preserved the de facto segregation of the schools for quite awhile longer. When I was in high school, my knowledge of the inner-city schools was practically nonexistent.

Then, at 18, after graduating from high school, I went off to the University of Denver in 1965. Here I met a few more nonwhite students. I also experienced some instances of stereotyping and misinformation directed toward me as a Jew, mostly by Christian students from small towns and rural communities. For example, one man thought that Jews still practiced Temple sacrifices, and a woman from rural Kansas was actually looking for my horns.

These experiences, however, pale beside the ignorance that the few black students at DU encountered. Unfortunately, I contributed to this with at least one clueless remark to a black woman in the locker room after a swimming class. I don’t remember what started our conversation, but I recall saying something to her about us both–Jewish and black–being descendants of slaves. I don’t remember what she said; I think she only laughed at me, which now I see as letting me off the hook gracefully. At that time, I hadn’t though about the fact that Jewish enslavement in Egypt, if it happened at all, occurred thousands of years before the enslavement of Africans in America, or that the latter is so much more historically documented than the Torah story of Jewish slavery in Egypt. In addition, I hadn’t known or considered the reality of African-Americans descended from free black people or later immigrants from Africa.

Later in my freshman year, I joined a group of students (all or mostly white, as I recall) in a voter registration drive in the largely black Denver neighborhood of Five Points. It was a good cause, but we were pretty naive about what we had to offer the residents of the neighborhood. As it turned out, we had much more to learn from them than they had to learn from us. We stayed in their homes, ate their food, learned to do the stroll to Motown music, and listened to stories about their lives. This was undoubtedly one of the best lessons I learned in all my years at the university.

Over the years since then, I have participated in many more projects and events which served to educate me about the realities of black and brown lives–living and working as a volunteer and then a paid worker and teacher in Denver’s near westside neighborhood, attending a civil rights conference in Chicago sponsored by the student YM-YWCA, joining a diverse group of people in social and political change campaigns and projects. I visited the poorest public housing in Chicago, tutored many inner-city children and teenagers, learned how to roll into a ball to protect myself from police batons, and discovered how much more I needed to learn, what I call remaining humble and teachable.

So this is what I think have to offer today and the most important message I have to convey:
White Americans, don’t pretend that you are “color blind,” or you will be lying to yourselves and others. You can’t grow up in this country without internalizing some racial prejudices, stereotypes and misinformation. Some of us are better informed than others, and some of us have been exposed to more nonwhite people and their experiences than others. None of us, however, are color blind or free of misconceptions about race, conscious or not.

The best we can do is remain humble and teachable, listening to what people of other races tell us about their lives and concerns, and being willing to work within our own communities to confront racism boldly and help educate other white people. We can also support people of all races in their struggles, recognize the pervasive, systemic racism in our society, and speak out against it, whenever we have a chance.

My Complicated Responses to a Horrendous Event

Confession: I would make a lousy extremist, because I’m too good at considering other people’s points of view. As I read each online article and post reacting to the massacre of cartoonists and others at the Charlie Hebdo headquarters, I think, “That’s a good point,” and then I think it about the next point too. It’s a complex issue, and I’m a complicated thinker, but I think that now I have distilled my thoughts into a few points I want to make.

First, a point about which almost everybody agrees is that shooting and killing people is not an acceptable response to being offended by what they say, write, or draw, even if what they express is offensive to many people. 

Second, another generally accepted point is that freedom of speech and of the press is a fundamental principle of Western civilization.  It makes democratic nations possible.  Censorship is not the answer to provocative speech.  Even if I find your expressions repugnant, I defend your right to express them, because that is the only way in which we all enjoy the freedom to express ourselves.

Then we arrive at an idea upon which more people disagree, the opinion that religion in general or Islam in particular is the problem, that which leads people to acts of violence, and if we eliminated religion, the world would be a more peaceful place. I’m one of those people who disagrees with this. Throughout history, many acts of violence–wars, crusades, massacres, persecution, torture–have been committed in the name of religion, but I don’t think religion per se is really the cause.  Fanaticism, fundamentalism, desires for power, prestige, money, or revenge, for example, are human impulses that can lead to violent acts but exist outside of religion as well as in it.

Finally, a point has been made by some commentators on this issue that has been given scant attention until recently, but may be given more now.  Renowned Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan, interviewed on Democracy Now! on Thursday, January 8, 2015, noted that Western society is not a level playing field when it comes to the media targeting of religious groups. He stated that there are double standards in Western nations such as France regarding the ridiculing of Muslims versus Jews and Christians, for example.

Rabbi Michael Lerner wrote something similar in Tikkun Magazine when he pointed out that no media outlets complained about Western civilization being destroyed or freedom of the press being threatened when right-wing fanatics sent him death threats for his articles criticizing Israeli policies.

And now, as the majority of French Muslims join with other citizens in condemning the killing of the Charlie Hebdo staff and others, they are fearing an anti-Muslim backlash in their country.  None of us condone either murder or censorship, but there are other issues here which must be addressed.

For links to the articles and reports I cited, see the following:

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/8/scholar_tariq_ramadan_harpers_rick_macarthur#

http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/mourning-the-parisian-journalists-yet-challenging-the-hypocrisy

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/1/9/french_muslims_fear_backlash_increased_islamophobia