A little girl, back in the ‘30s, sent to Sunday School from age three, advised by her beloved father to “always think for yourself,” yet surrounded by virulent racism and anti-Semitism, finally speaks up to her father, who yet again has spouted something noxious about “the Jews. Thelittle girl says, “But Daddy, Jesus was a Jew.”
The reply is an eye exchange between the parents, silence, and then, a subject change. Later challenges are answered, “You’ll understand when you grow up.”
But she didn’t—and still doesn’t— understand why culture, religion or skin color should cast a person as inferior, or dangerous, or otherwise less than human.
The little girl, grown to high school age, has a difference of opinion with friends. Her answer: “This racism will end when there’s widespread intermarriage— across perceived racial and religious lines.”
A teenager’s naive answer? Perhaps, but with a glimmer of truth?
Later, the young corporate wife, responding to the hatred of a young southern mother who blames her child’s measles on “those Negro children who were forced into my little girl’s classroom.”
“Is there not an epidemic among white children in your community?” is the reply—perhaps not a corporately acceptable response, but…
How many of us grew up in similar environments? How many of us have absorbed those hatreds and fears? How many of us disagree, but laugh at the racist joke, or go along with the aspersion assumed to be the agreed-upon norm, thus reinforcing the racism? How many of us say nothing when a clerk waits on the white person ahead of the person of color who has been waiting longer? How many of us are comfortable at a whitesonly club…or church? How many of us question that standard?
Can one person make a difference? Can one person raise the consciousness of perhaps just one other? Will it make a difference? Is it worth the try?
If any one person withdraws in the face of such “soft racism,” that person and his or her talents may be lost to the larger society. Doesn’t our society need all the talents it can get? And on a simple humanitarian basis, why harm another by a careless remark, a useless joke, an omission or a commission?
The Undoing Racism
workshop I attended helped me understand more fully the history of our racism, and how deeply imbedded it is in our society, how institutionalized it is. Struggling together with others at the workshop reinforced in me the courage to try to make a difference, gave me the courage not to laugh at the racist joke, gave me the courage to ask, as a friend role-modeled in response to a racist joke, “I don’t understand; could you explain that to me?”
I really do believe each of us makes a difference. I believe unreason can be confronted by reason, just as that little girl did.
To paraphrase Margaret Meade, “Change can happen one person at a time; it’s the only way it ever does.”
Eddie Hertzberg is a member of a group
that meets monthly on the second
Thursday of each month at 6:30 p.m. at
Chicago Bay Marketplace in Hovland. She
and other group participants will periodically
provide information on Undoing
Racism in our community. To learn more,
contact Bob Carter at (218) 387-2111
or via e-mail at drydoc@boreal.org; or
e-mail Bea Sorenson at bbsorens@boreal.
org or e-mail John Morrin at jmorrin@
boreal.org.
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