In today’s conversation, April and Tracie unpack white Jews’ whiteness, the history of race and Jewish racialized identities, and the benefits of getting clear about who is actually in the ingroup. Using metaphors from physics to sanctuaries, we talk about historic and contemporary intersections of the social construct of race and lived identities of Jews.
In today’s conversation, April and Tracie unpack white Jews’ whiteness, the history of race and Jewish racialized identities, and the benefits of getting clear about who is actually in the ingroup. Using metaphors from physics to sanctuaries, we talk about historic and contemporary intersections of the social construct of race and lived identities of Jews.
- [Tracie] In today's conversation, we dig into the ways that race as a social construct has and does intersect with Jewish identities and how we can make sense of those intersections today.- [April] This is Jews Talk Racial Justice with April and Tracie.- [Tracie] A weekly show hosted by April Baskin and Tracie Guy-Decker.- [April] In a complex world, change takes courage.- [Tracie] Wholehearted relationships can keep us accountable.- Okay Tracie, I have an idea and I love that you love and trust me enough for me to say, okay, let's just start recording, I have an idea, let's go for it. And you're like, yeah, okay.- I'm excited to hear it.- So there's been some recent confusion and some interesting discussion, and I think it might be worthwhile for us to bring some clarity to a few things about whether Jews are white or not?- Oh! We're gonna have this one.- Yeah? Because I think that, not exclusively, but Jews of color in particular have for about two decades been working on sharpening our community's analysis here. And recently some statements were made in different articles or from Jewish institutions that I think created confusion. And so I thought it would just be worthwhile for us to take a few moments to clarify. Also for some context for our friends and listeners. First of all, thank you as always, we love you, and we have a lot going on right now. As a number of you may already know, we've recently launched a Facebook group and we're just starting to nurture and get that off the ground. And we launched, we finally launched Racial Justice Launchpad and...(both cheering) So hopefully you got that email or saw it through social media, if not feel free to look up more information on, at Jewish Justice's Facebook page. And you can sign up for our list to get more information or go to jewishjustice.com. But the information is out in the ether and we're offering a value pack master class, lots of exciting things. So a lot is happening right now. So I'm also hoping for this video may be, although at times I've endeavored this and we haven't achieved it, but this is just going to be a pithy, clear episode today.(April laughing) So yeah. So there's been some debate here and I just wanted to clarify a few things and I wanted you to clarify a few things, Tracie, and the first thing I wanna do is just to make a distinction between the way Jews have been classified over time, and that that changes over time. And I'm noticing some of this is getting conflated here, and just things are getting a little muddled and there's value and insight and real truth in parts of it, but things are getting blurred and I wanna clean it up a little bit. So as I often like to say, I'll start by saying, oh, and about whether Jews are a race or not. So first of all, as a number of folks may or may not know, race is a construct. It's a social construct, as are a number of things. And by basically all sociological standards, Jews are not a race. Jews are a multiracial people. We are known among, this is post my education, but I hear some young folks talking about how we're an ethno-religion. I really like the word people. Some rabbis have referred to us as a family, which to me is a variation on people. And we are a multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural people. And in today's modern age, the majority of Jews in America, so there's a significant portion of Jews who are Jews of color and then the majority around 70% or so, slightly more, slightly less, depending upon which statistics you look at, are white Jews. From my sociological analysis and education, at times to be more precise and to acknowledge some of the ambivalence Jews have about the subject, I will say Jews have been granted conditional whiteness in America, but they are still read and received as white. And as a number of Jews of color articulate, they experience racism that in some ways is different and also very similar between white Gentiles and white Jews. And so those similarities are worth noting. So I wanted to just clear, provide some clarity on that front. And then there are a few other pieces, Tracie I wanna, what do you wanna contribute to the conversation? There are a few potential entry points.- Yeah, there's a... I mean, there's a lot, there's a lot of entry points. I feel like the two things that are occurring to me, one is I wanna reiterate something that actually you have said, April, which is that, the question when white Jews say, I'm not white, I'm Jewish, they're buying into the binary of white or not white. And it's actually, it's more complicated than that. There is conditional whiteness. The other thing that I wanted, that's coming out for me is that I recently had this, you know I love my metaphors. I recently had a metaphor come to me that was really helpful for me. So maybe this will be clarifying, from science, where we know that if you only understand light as particles then you totally miss what wavelengths, light wavelengths do, light waves do. If you only think about light waves then you miss what photons, I think light particles are called photons. Then you miss what photons can do, right? And it's both, right? And sometimes it behaves like a wave and you can use the physics of waves to describe it and sometimes it behaves like particles and you can use the physics of particles to describe it. And I think Jewishness, and therefore the things that follow Jewishness including antisemitism are also like that, where sometimes it behaves like just like a religion. Sometimes it behaves just like an ethnicity, but specifically Ashkenazi or Sephardi, Mizrahi, like those are the ethnicities, it's not Jewish. It's more granular than that.- And sometimes even more granular than that when you start to get into national or like regional around Indian versus West African versus Chinese.- And language and yeah.- Language systems.- Culture.- And similarly with antisemitism then it follows and sometimes antisemitism behaves like religious bias and sometimes antisemitism behaves like, more like an ethnic or racial bias.- Oh, that's so good.- Race being a construct, as you say.- I love your brain, Tracie, so good.- And for me, when I kind of made that connection between light and Jewishness, it like, it just really helped me sort of see like those of us who were arguing like, no, it's a religion and others are like, no, it's a culture. Like it is both.- Right, exactly.- And therefore it has the, and sometimes it interacts with other religions and sometimes it interacts with other cultures.- Or races.- And like it just, yeah, or ethnicities. And so that sort of recognizing that--- Oh, you mean sometimes it embodies. I thought you meant like the Jewish people were interacting with people of other races or other, you meant at times that--- I mean like sociologically, like when people, obviously it's people, it's people who are carrying--- No, no. I just, I'm... I thought you were saying something different, but anyway, so yeah. So sorry, please continue.- I mean, I think that I've, that that's basically the metaphor that I wanted to articulate that for me, and this is just within the past couple of weeks that I kind of had that connection thinking about, and I was actually, it started for me thinking about antisemitism and I realized that it's not that antisemitism behaves like a wave or a particle, it's actually that Judaism does. And therefore the biases against it behave like waves and particles. Anyway, so that's both of those things. One, that it's not an either or white or not white, there is such a thing as conditional whiteness, because race is a construct. And two, it's a wave and a particle.- Yeah. And it goes back into what we've talked about in other episodes too about, I think some of the complexity and the denial and the difficulty that white Ashkenazi Jews have at times with their proximity and assimilation around their oppressor and a resistance around acknowledge, around being very aware that isn't, there isn't full integration from the outside. And even from the inside in certain ways of what, the conversations I've heard around the table of, ah, well, you know, things are as they are or, like that's a statement and alignment that aligns with whiteness, right?- Mmhmm.- So that's one piece. And then the last thing I think, or I'm endeavoring it to be the last thing is... I know.- It's never the last thing.- I know.- There's always one more thing.- I know. Second to last thing, we should start saying second to last thing is, second to last thing is also, I just wanted to name something about timelines that I've, I'm timeline.- Yeah.- And some of these concepts over time and the importance to get clear that something could have been contextualized in a particular way at a specific point in time, and that we can acknowledge and honor that and also grapple with. And I think this is also part of, at the heart, which made the situation recently with Whoopi Goldberg so complicated for some folks because there's a way in which that can be unpacked and honored. And we can also hold that in contemporary times, in this moment there is a very, a vastly different reality. And as I spoke a lot about it in the video, what makes that complicated is because energy and feeling wise for a lot of Jews, there's still a lot of unhealed pain and trauma around the Holocaust. But something that I want to say very lovingly and thoughtfully is that, was that weird for folks when I just totally changed my tone, went into a different zone? Yeah, switch, switched up. Code switching in real time. Energy, vibe switching is... I'm still chewing on this. I thought a few about a few things related to this, but I saw a lot of people online saying, here's what the Nazis said we were. And what I wanna put forth is, yes, that is worth witnessing and acknowledging. And that doesn't necessarily mean that that is, that that's how we should, that that should be the basis for how we think about our sociological identity. It's one thing to understand, and I think more of that will come with more healing over time, but like there's a way in which I know and I at times have taught and I do teach historically the ways, and I think part of this also, I'll just briefly say, I think is also about proximity, an epiphany I had the other day when I was riding in the car with my partner, which has nothing to do with it. But that's just where I had the epiphany. I remember we were driving through a puddle and I was like, ah, something clicked for me of like, oh, but the Shoah, the Holocaust was a lot more recent. So black folks have the advantage of having had more time and closer proximity to earth-based cultures and different things that allowed for healing. But what I'm trying to say here is when I put it on myself in my, there are certain ways, and I, again, so I educate people around this. That's where I was going. And I'm very aware of the ways that slave masters and captors described black identity and often wretchedness and other things, but that's not what I use, that's not what black people use today as a basis to sociologically analyze that they, that is contextualize the context of a history of their experience. But that is not used to be a part of the predominant narrative when advocating for how we should be seen by the world.- Right, right. Our oppression is a part of who we are, that experience of being oppressed, but I don't want it to define who I am.- That's what I'm trying to get to. Thank you.- Yeah. Yeah. So it needs to be acknowledged and witnessed and hopefully healed. But I do not want it to, I don't want it to define who I am or how I show up.- And there's not a rush around this. It's not a tomorrow thing, but I think it's important that we clean this up, because I think our lack of clarity externally to the broader world, for those who are listening and have some analysis, can be a little confusing.- Yes. I think it also can make for problems internally, right?- Yes.- When you use the phrase return, default to factory settings when people get agitated, which I think is a really great like telegraphing of what happens, part of factory settings when we get scared is a, like a primordial reliance on in group and out group preference, right? In group preference, out group bias. So that we prefer people who are in our group because they're safe, right? But for Jews, if we don't recognize that in group status is not about how we look, like we are destined to tear ourselves apart and in the end like exclude and further marginalize--- Our own people.- People who are our in group and I think that... So I think that feels like a real important thing to acknowledge that it is to, it is human and normal to have in group bias. It is part of our like survival strategy from, you know, from way back, from pre-language days, but we're not pre-language. And we need to, as a people, embrace the fact that our in group is not about people who look like me. I'm speaking directly like, look like me with white skin and dark hair and Ashkenazi features, like that's not it. That can't be it.- It's not only it, it's a lot more. It's been a lot more historically, it will be a lot more in the future. Tracie that was really good.- Thank God.- And so good. And thank God in the sense that humanity is amazing. And one of the things, one of the many, many, many things I love about Judaism and our Jewish people is that Jews truly encapsulate the beauty and the breadth of the entire human experience. And increasingly we are moving in the direction, and I want us to continue to move in that direction of steadily embracing that more and more. And the more we embrace it, as is often the case with inclusion, it is not just about, oh, it's nice for them. It is feeling and empowering and opens up different narratives and insights and analysis and humor and possibilities for what it means to be Jewish and human today.- The metaphor that's coming up for me now is about like the, I don't know the word. What is it? Nusach? Is that the name of like the song, the melodies? Like I know that Cantors faced a lot of pushback when they tried to introduce a new melody for one of our liturgical songs. I know you do.- Yeah, for real.- I know. And also like, I think about how my worship experience has been enriched when I have learned new melodies and am not singing the same Lekha Dodi every single week. Like it's... It feels like a very resonant metaphor that like sometimes it's a little uncomfortable because this other thing is--- Our brain needs to get used to it.- Other melody is super familiar. You gotta get used to it, but it is so much better and richer when there are other, you know, other ways of expressing, even if it's the same words. It just changes the whole experience and opens up new insights and new--- Avenues for connecting with the divine, for connecting with each other, for connecting across lines of religious and people-hood difference.- And for the record, I am not particularly musical. So if I misstated something like it's, it is ignorance, but I do enjoy, like liturgical singing is absolutely my favorite time for me to sing. And I know that my liturgical experience, my worship experience is enriched when I'm not singing only the melodies that I learned when I was 10.- Word up. So here's what I would say is that I think... I think a part of a point was missed with Whoopi, and I get why, cause there's a lot of pain in history there. I think if she just rephrased it and said, they were both peoples of European heritage. I think that's really what, that's a different way of saying what she was trying to say. And what I would say, so based upon, to kind of draw everything to a close now, a lot of American Jews are white, and if it makes you more comfortable to say conditionally white, even better. Even, even better for bonus points in the coming years if you're willing to go on a journey with us and with other folks around starting to disassemble and release some of the parts of that whiteness and more fully embrace Jewishness outside of a paradigm of racism and start to embrace a different liberatory approach. That's amazing. And in the meantime, a bunch of us are white. The descendants of the Shoah who survived are classified as white in America today and or conditionally white to the point that a lot of people are making at times online, I would say it in a slightly different way and agree. Historically, or during that period in Germany, even though oftentimes the same, there was a similar, at times even ethnic, but not exactly ethnic, but a national and regional identity, right? Like, you know, people shared European heritage. Jews were classified, were dehumanized and were explicitly described as not being white. But I noticed that when people talk about it online, they're kind of blurring then and now, and they're very different moments and dynamics playing out. So that's the clarification for me, as I'm not saying people are all wrong, but I'd love for us to have a bit more precision. Yes Tracie.- Well, I just wanna come back to your point that race is a social construct. And so it's constantly changing in the same way that like in, you know, in Jim Crow South, like race changed even if you cross state lines because in one state they would describe it as, you know, one great grandparent and in the state next door it was only one grandparent or whatever the specific details were. But because it is a social construct you could be, you know, at certain times in America you could be one race in one state, cross the state line, you're considered a different race. That's how completely constructed it is. And to the Germans, to the Nazis... To the Nazis, Jews, it was a race, yes. That's not the way that today in America--- Jews are...- We are treated.- Jews of European or so European heritage are racialized in an American context today.- As, yeah. Well, the American construction of race is much was granular than the Nazis' was. It's--- In part 'cause of more diversity, right? Like that's, but this is a whole other episode. But I think it's fascinating 'cause I think you can look across different parts of the world and where things play out differently like in South Africa versus the states versus Germany around the time of the Holocaust. In general, race actually is pretty, racism is relatively consistent. It just morphs in certain ways, there are certain categories morph so that the power group, right, it gets more granular right in Germany where, you know, it's about the different specifics once you look at things. So like for instance in a lot of parts of Africa, in certain parts of Africa like in South Africa I would be classified as colored or basically very proximate to white because that serves racism in that context because most people are black. So in that scenario they want to include as many people as they can as a part to buffer, to serve as a buffer, whereas in the states since at least... So I would, the last piece we can finally end on is for future reference I would bet, I would guess not bet, I don't bet, I don't gamble but I would guess, I have a hypothesis that as America begins to diversify and I think a number of sociologists, I can hear them in my mind saying this is already happening. That certain groups of people who have been traditionally categorized as people of color will also start to gain access to conditional whiteness to keep the power dynamics occurring, which doesn't mean that we're still not gonna ultimately triumphant and lovingly, gently overthrow all of this oppression, but people are going to try in different ways because it's a classic playbook move from all, global from patterns that I've seen around how racism manifests globally in different parts of the planet. So all of that being said, race is a construct, but what is not a construct, the world 'round are cultures and histories. And I like to end a positive note, so squeezing this in the last few minutes. So if you're like, oh, this is all, ech, folks are interested in that, let us know. You know, like... We get to lean back on our culture and our histories and our narratives that bring us joy and take time and heal and reflect upon the parts that have been painful and the meaning and the purpose that we are drawing from that. And those things overlap with, but also can exist entirely outside of a paradigm of racism. And we get to claim that and hold that and carry that forward as we continue to move in the direction of collective liberation. Thanks for tuning in. Our show's theme music was composed by Elliot hammer. You can find this track and other beats on Instagram at Elliot Hammer. If this episode resonated with you, please share it and subscribe. To join the conversation visit jewstalkracialjustice.com where you can send us a question or suggestion, access our show notes and learn more about our team. Take care until next time and stay humble and keep going.