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.
