Read White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son Online
Authors: Tim Wise
Tags: #History, #Politics, #Sociology, #Memoir, #Race
White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son (13 page)
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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On Tuesday, September 3, 1974, I had begun as a first grader at Burton Elementary, sent off to school with some very clear admonitions from my father. Rather than the traditional, “Be polite to your teachers,” or “Have a great day,” I was given two simple instructions: first, that I was to let no one spank me (corporal punishment still being quite legal all across the South at that time, and even now); and second, that I was to allow no one to make me pray—something that, despite Supreme Court precedent outlawing the practice for twelve years by that point, was still occasionally tried in public schools throughout the area. It’s hard to put into words the degree of entitlement that comes from knowing
even at the age of five
that your parents have your back, and that if some authority figure gets out of line, your mom and dad will support
you.
But that is what I was told, before I was told anything else about this thing called school. My parents were letting me know that injustice happens, and that they wouldn’t stand for it. And that I shouldn’t either.
even at the age of five
that your parents have your back, and that if some authority figure gets out of line, your mom and dad will support
you.
But that is what I was told, before I was told anything else about this thing called school. My parents were letting me know that injustice happens, and that they wouldn’t stand for it. And that I shouldn’t either.
So standing in front of Mr. Hood, I felt powerful. And while I would like to take credit for the bravery that animated me in that instance, it was white privilege that made the difference, far more so than some inherent courage on my part. After all, how many kids of color would have felt empowered enough to stand up to the school administration to protest the academic tracking that was relegating most of them to lower academic tracks than their white counterparts? How many would have felt empowered enough to stand up to the unequal discipline being meted out to students of color, relative to whites, even when rates of rule infractions were indistinguishable between the various racial groups? Likely not many.
In a very real sense, white racial privilege had empowered me to stand up for myself and for social justice more broadly. Knowing that my parents would go to bat for me had meant everything. But the fact that they would have done so had nothing to do with their love for me (which love was surely rivaled by that of the parents of the black kids with whom I went to school). Rather, it was predicated on the privilege that allowed even a lower-income white kid like myself to feel certain enough about my rights so as to challenge those who would abuse them. Yes, the story had been about institutional Christian hegemony and the marginalization of me as a Jew. But it was equally about the way that even Jews, with our historically inconsistent and situationally-contingent whiteness, can still access the powers of our skin in ways that make a difference.
INTERESTINGLY, MY IDENTITY
as a Jew had never really been something about which I’d thought until Moore. Around that time, in addition to the institutionalized Christianity that coursed through my school, there was also the day in May 1981, when a group of neo-Nazis and Klan members were arrested as they drove on to the grounds of the Temple with what they thought was a working bomb. They had intended to detonate it and blow up my house of worship in the process, only to discover that the device was a fake, planted by one of their number who was an FBI informant. Good times.
as a Jew had never really been something about which I’d thought until Moore. Around that time, in addition to the institutionalized Christianity that coursed through my school, there was also the day in May 1981, when a group of neo-Nazis and Klan members were arrested as they drove on to the grounds of the Temple with what they thought was a working bomb. They had intended to detonate it and blow up my house of worship in the process, only to discover that the device was a fake, planted by one of their number who was an FBI informant. Good times.
I was growing up in a mixed-faith home, in which my mom was a Christian, and my dad, though Jewish, was largely uninvolved in my religious upbringing. I would be sent off to Temple each Sunday (or Saturday, beginning in eighth grade), where the Rabbi would teach me what it meant to be Jewish; and if not the Rabbi, surely one of the several classroom teachers in the Hebrew school could accomplish it.
But I guess I wasn’t a very good student, because I never learned much. I learned vaguely about Jewish perspectives on various social issues of the day, but it seemed as though most of the lessons were about victimization: the Holocaust of European Jewry, or mistreatment at the hands of the Egyptian Pharaohs. Besides that I can’t recall much, except being constantly hit up for Tzedakah money by the school director, so as to help plant trees in Israel. Tzedakah is a Hebrew word often translated as charity, though actually it’s meant to refer to justice. It’s somewhat similar to tithing by Christians, although I’ve never heard of Catholic churches guilt-tripping eight-year-olds into coughing up a percentage of their allowances so as to plant trees in Vatican City. Not to mention, since those trees were likely being planted on land confiscated from Palestinians (whether in 1948 or 1967), Tzedakah money for such a purpose would likely run directly counter to the cause of justice. But as a kid, I would have known nothing of that.
I also remember being berated and bullied by the Hebrew teacher, who was fresh from her last job with the Israeli Defense Force. I simply could not learn the language, nor did I understand the importance of doing so. Even then it struck me as odd that Jews would be trying to recapture the language of the Torah for everyday use (as in Israel), when frankly, Yiddish had served most of our ancestors just fine for centuries, and before that Aramaic, following the Babylonian exile. Later, of course, I would learn that to many in the Zionist movement, Yiddish was a shameful peasant language, associated with the diaspora, and so it was to be spurned in favor of the language of King David. If we reclaimed the ancient language we could reclaim the ancient greatness, the ancient power, never to be oppressed again (or so the story went). The modern Hebrew movement, was, in a real sense born of a deep shame at having been so mightily oppressed throughout Christian Europe and exiled from our ancient homeland. At some level, the reclaiming of Hebrew and the post-
shoah
cry of “never again” both seemed as much internally-directed self-affirmations as outwardly-pointed warnings to the rest of the world.
shoah
cry of “never again” both seemed as much internally-directed self-affirmations as outwardly-pointed warnings to the rest of the world.
I got along with virtually no one at Temple. Most of the kids there went to private school, and their dads were doctors, or attorneys, or professors, or businessmen. Most all of their parents had college degrees. And while I played ball at the Y with my black friends, they played at the Jewish Community Center, surrounded by other Jews. It seemed a very cloistered environment, very clubby, and I couldn’t stand it. The few kids there who I went to school with were okay, but I wasn’t really close to any of them.
It took me years to figure out why I’d been so miserable at Temple, why I never felt as though I fit in. Though I wouldn’t have known it at the time—nor even the meaning of the word to describe the problem—in retrospect I can see that it was principally the classism of it all. While there are far more working class and even poor Jews in the United States than most people realize—estimates place the latter number at around fifteen percent, or about one in seven American Jews—in places like Nashville, lower-income Jews are almost completely invisible. While working class Jewish communities and neighborhoods are common in larger cities like New York, in places with much smaller Jewish communities, economically marginal Jews are pretty much out of sight, out of mind. They can’t afford the cost of Temple or Synagogue, or even if they can, they can’t swing the additional expense of participating in the civic events put together by the Jewish Federation. So, absent the financial resources to make themselves people worth knowing, they are effectively excluded from Jewish life.
As one of the few Jews at Temple in those days from a lower-income, non-professional family, I struggled constantly with the nature of my Jewishness, as I think my father did. I’m certain that the reason he rarely ever set foot in the Temple, typically coming only for services on High Holy days, was that compared to all these other families, ours seemed a relative failure. The internalized oppression—a concept about which I would learn many years later as it relates to people of color victimized by racism—was, in this instance, finding a home in me as well. It was bad enough to be economically struggling when you were white, and expected to succeed. But to be white
and
Jewish, and still be struggling was a double-whammy. What was wrong with us, with me? Much like the Asian kid who isn’t good at math or science and thereby finds him or herself coming up short in relation to the Asian archetype constructed largely by non-Asians, so too was I seeming to fail in relation to the archetype of acceptable Jewishness: good with money, successful, hard-working.
and
Jewish, and still be struggling was a double-whammy. What was wrong with us, with me? Much like the Asian kid who isn’t good at math or science and thereby finds him or herself coming up short in relation to the Asian archetype constructed largely by non-Asians, so too was I seeming to fail in relation to the archetype of acceptable Jewishness: good with money, successful, hard-working.
To be the broke Jew was to grapple with self-doubt as a matter of weekly routine. It was to fail to fit in within your own community, even as the other community—the gentile community—was reminding you, in any number of ways, that you weren’t one of theirs either. My Jewishness wobbly at best, I would more or less abandon it in any formal sense after my freshman year of high school, right after Rabbi Falk (who had been something of a civil rights legend in Nashville) threatened to fail me in Hebrew school if I didn’t attend at least seven Friday night services per school semester. Though I tried to explain to him that I couldn’t attend that many Friday services—weekends were when I went out of town for debate tournaments, and debate was going to be my ticket to college, not being a Jew—he persisted in his threats. Having been taught not to sit idly by and suffer fools gladly, nor the petty injustices often meted out by said fools, I did the most Jewish thing I could think to do in that situation: I staged a walk-out, telling him I was done—with him and Temple, roughly in that order.
I COULDN’T WAIT
for the first day of high school. To be done with John Trotwood Moore would make Hillsboro seem like heaven, no matter how much more inviting it actually proved to be. Yes, as a freshman I’d be on the bottom rung of the ladder, but I didn’t care. There would be new people to meet, new activities in which to get involved, and since it had been the school to which both my parents had gone (and from which my dad had graduated), I felt like I belonged there. It was almost as if I could claim some ownership over the space, if only because a mere seventeen or eighteen years earlier my mom and dad had walked those halls, and some of their old teachers were still there.
for the first day of high school. To be done with John Trotwood Moore would make Hillsboro seem like heaven, no matter how much more inviting it actually proved to be. Yes, as a freshman I’d be on the bottom rung of the ladder, but I didn’t care. There would be new people to meet, new activities in which to get involved, and since it had been the school to which both my parents had gone (and from which my dad had graduated), I felt like I belonged there. It was almost as if I could claim some ownership over the space, if only because a mere seventeen or eighteen years earlier my mom and dad had walked those halls, and some of their old teachers were still there.
Hillsboro was a “comprehensive” high school, which is just fancy talk for a school that viciously tracks its students, some into a college-prep track and others into a vocational track. I’ll leave it up to the reader’s imagination to guess the racial and class demographic of each in turn. Of course, the teachers there (as with most places) would deny to the death that there was anything the least bit racist about this arrangement, or their own disparate treatment of the students. Rather, they would have said (as teachers most everywhere do) that they “treat all kids the same and don’t see color.”
Putting aside the absurdity of the claim—studies indicate that we tend to make very fine distinctions based on color, and that we notice color differences almost immediately—the fact is, colorblindness is not the proper goal of fair-minded educators. The kids in those classrooms
do
have a race, and it matters, because it says a lot about the kinds of challenges they are likely to face. To not see color is, as Julian Bond has noted, to not see the
consequences
of color. And if color has consequences, yet you’ve resolved not to notice the thing that brings about those consequences, the odds are pretty good that you’ll fail to serve the needs of the students in question.
do
have a race, and it matters, because it says a lot about the kinds of challenges they are likely to face. To not see color is, as Julian Bond has noted, to not see the
consequences
of color. And if color has consequences, yet you’ve resolved not to notice the thing that brings about those consequences, the odds are pretty good that you’ll fail to serve the needs of the students in question.
To not see people for who they are is to miss that some but not all students are dealing with racism. It is to privilege the norm, which is white, by assuming that “kids are kids,” and then treating the kids the way you’d treat your own. But with more than eight in ten teachers in the United States being white, the children in the care of teachers for eight hours a day often look very different from the kids to whom those teachers go home at night. To treat everyone the same is to miss the fact that children of color have all the same challenges white kids do, and then that one extra thing to deal with: racism. But if you’ve told yourself you are not to see race, you’ll be unlikely to notice discrimination based on race, let alone know how to respond to it.
BOOK: White Like Me: Reflections on Race From a Privileged Son
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