Portside

No issue has proved more vexing to this nation than the issue of race, and yet no question is more pressing than how to overcome the politics of white supremacy...that threatens our ability ever to create a truly fair, just and inclusive democracy.

Two things can be true at once. Jews are individually and collectively victims of anti-Semitism - violence, hate speech, bigotry, and prejudice - and Jewish people are beneficiaries and upholders of the American system of white supremacy.

To have a chance at a just future, let’s find ways to push back against the raging tides of racism that have driven too much of our nation’s history and are now re-emerging in stridently blatant forms.

For those who say people kill not gun, I would say what really kills is white privilege, not guns. We are living in a time, where a black kid could be shot by the police for holding a toy gun and young Muslims can be sent to life in prison for daring to think of a gun. At the same time, white folks are actually, buying and carrying, machine, and assault weapons, threatening and intimidating neighbors, teachers, friends and classmates under the watch eyes of our law enforcements, as in the latest shooting at Parkland High School in Florida.

And people of color (and white accomplices) who call out such racism must do so without erasing our stories, identities, and existence.

When she was 30, Suzy Hansen left the US for Istanbul – and began to realize that Americans will never understand their own country until they see it as the rest of the world does. In college, she read James Baldwin, giving the sense of meeting someone who knew her better, than she had herself. This came as a shock, not necessarily because he said I was sick. It was because he kept calling me that thing: “white American”.

I often wonder whether even those who acknowledge the phenomenon of white privilege and work assiduously to obviate its impact on, specifically, black lives, know how widespread is its impact and how enmeshed it is in the very framework of life in this country.