After the Rittenhouse verdict, I as a privileged white man, feel simultaneously unable to appreciate the burdens of racism in this society as well as the obligation to make the attempt. So, I’m forced to go back and think of events that have given me a semblance of possible understanding. Just vague shadows I’ve glimpsed at.
I was in college, and we were assigned to read the Merchant of Venice. The subject of Antisemitism came up and I, as a Jew, remember clearly the gaslighting the professor did. There was nothing antisemitic about The Merchant of Venice or Shakespeare and that anyone who thought it was there had a poor understanding of the play. I remember being mystified at the time as I knew what I was reading. To me it was black-letter text. In your face, no doubt about it. I remember how the Christian “Hero” of the story was abusive to the Jewish “villain”, Shylock, for years. When this anti-Semite later asks for a loan, Shylock agrees to lend him the money with the proviso that should he fail to pay it back, Shylock could extract a “Pound of flesh” as payment. When he does fail to pay him back the judge, who is a friend of the defendant in disguise, rules that he can extract his pound of flesh providing that he does not spill a drop of Christian blood. There’s a strong subtext that spilling Jewish or heathen blood is just fine. Then she really goes off the rails and decides that if he’s unable to adhere to this impossibility he should lose everything, including the right to practice his religion. There’s so many antisemitic messages here:
- It’s ok to use force to “convert” Jews.
- Christian blood spilled is a tragedy, Jewish blood spilled isn’t.
- It’s ok to try Jews in sham trials. Something being practiced in the Spanish inquisition at the time.
- When the judge ruled that “The quality of mercy is not strain'd, It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven. Upon the place beneath” she made it clear in her ruling that this quality only pertains to Christians. For Jews there was no mercy at the time, just cruel torture, and inquisitions.
Yes, the contract was evil, and NEITHER should have agreed to it. However, the just conclusion should have been to void the entire thing. But Shakespeare and his audience weren’t interested in justice but in making sure that the Jew wanting revenge for abuse was punished for the desire. Those that defend Shakespeare, point to Shylock’s “Do we not bleed?” speech but the judge and Shakespeare made it clear that Jewish blood was worthless, Jewish anger was wrong and Christian hate towards Jews is justified in that she ultimately rewards the anti-Semite. But all this was ignored by my professor because he couldn’t accept his favorite author was anti-Semitic.
He's my favorite author too, but the antisemitism isn’t arguable. It’s staring you right in the face, yet this guy, a college professor was insisting the opposite. Of course, the name Shylock is used to this day as slur against Jews, so anti-Semites certainly think it’s anti-Semitic.
Yet, for me this is ONE instance of clear antisemitism being denied. A shadow of what black people endure and have endured for hundreds of years. Racism has been pervasive in movies, plays, literature, popular entertainment, and no matter how obvious it is, there’s always constant insistence that it isn’t there. Yes, Gone with the Wind is fucking racist, as was Dumbo as was Song of the South. As discussed in my other Diaries, Woke and Woke Fiction the fact that all our heroes, until recently have been white men is racist. Yet still this plain reality is denied. White people will still insist these movies were just depicting “the way it is”. I can avoid antisemitism in literature by basically not looking at ONE play. Once in a VERY great while there’s an antisemitic depiction. But racist depictions aren’t “once in a while”. They are pervasive and have been so. Furthermore, any attempt to address this racism is summarily dismissed with the bigoted refrains of “Woke”, “PC” or “SJW”. When you say “Black Lives Matter” the reply of “All Lives Matter” rings hollow when it’s clear that a black people are valued less in literature, film, politics and in everyday existence.
A few years later I was working at a store called Jennifer Convertibles. A furniture store that typically only has one worker there a day. A co-worker at a location I’d never worked at was fired the day before, so I was asked to work at that location as an emergency. I got there and, because the previous worker was fired, they had changed the security code for the Brinks system. So, I’m in the store the alarm is blaring at 80 decibels and some cops drive by 5 minutes later. I go to the window, smile, wave, and these cops- who had never seen me before- thought that was enough for them and just drove off. For all they knew I could have been clearing out the place loading up furniture in the back and had the register till in my pocket, but they saw a white face and never bothered to check. Later, I joked to a black co-worker that if it were him there’d be guns drawn and you’d hear the words “On your knees mother-fucker!” This was in the days before cellphones were ubiquitous so the horrific slate of video after video of black people being slain by cop after cop didn’t exist. I don’t think I’d be able to make that joke today, and I doubt if either of us would find it funny now.
In my white privilege, the other reality didn’t occur to me and, to be honest, hadn’t until I started writing this diary. That If I’d been black, the cops might not have bothered with an “On your knees, mother-fucker” but could have elected to just start shooting. After all, in Cleveland where I was at, the cops thought little of gunning down a black twelve-year-old playing with a toy gun. Perhaps my white skin is the only thing allowing me to blindly pontificate about the black experience. Of course, I’ll never know. When the alarm went off, I wasn’t afraid, nor was I concerned when the cops came. The entire time my only emotion was annoyance that I couldn’t get the fucking alarm off and that no one had given me the new code. I suspect that if I were a black man or woman that would not be my main emotion. Undeniable white privilege.
Yet too few recognize this. There are white people insisting that white racist cops and the vigilantes that mimic them aren’t what they appear. No matter how obvious it is there’s someone who will vomit “If he’d just comply” or, when they do comply, but don’t do it in just the right way and still get shot they’ll still come up with some way to justify it. While these conversations aggravate me to no end, I don’t have skin in the game. If It’s infuriating to me, I can’t imagine how it is to a black person. The racism is so obvious, so blatant, so in-your-face that we shouldn’t be having a conversation about it. When we go to put out a house fire, we don’t first have to establish that the house is on fire. That should be obvious. Yet somehow a significant portion of white America and a micro number of black people who are ALWAYS given a megaphone are insisting that the fire of racism isn’t raging.
So, when a horrific verdict like Rittenhouse’s occurs accompanied by the endless regurgitations of “It has nothing to do with race!” I’m left saddened and frustrated and unsure of what to do or say. Is it presumptuous for someone who is annoyed rather than horrified at alarms going off and police arriving to even try to empathize with the black experience? I remember very clearly believing that Trump was far too racist to ever get elected and my black friends insisting I was wrong. I can’t say it will get better when there’s no evidence that that’s the way it’s going. I would like to say “We shall overcome” however I don’t see any evidence of that either. All I’m left with is, I’m sorry. Sorry I’ll never know what you endure, sorry you keep enduring it, sorry that all words of hope are hollow. Sorry that I can’t truly be there with you, just observe from afar and try to use imagination as to what it’s like. Even as I protest in solidarity and write these words, I know that I’m still going to walk out in the safety of my white skin. All I have to offer is an endless hollow and growing mourner’s Kadish of our unjust society.
Sorry white people elected a racist like Donald Trump, not despite of his racism, but because of it.
I’m sorry white people can get away with murder because they’re white.
Sorry about George Floyd.
Sorry about Daunte Wright.
Sorry about Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, the endless string of deaths to come and all the white people who will insist that you’re not seeing what you know you’re seeing.
I wish I could say it will get better or that we’re on the right track but that feels like a lie today.
Fifty years after Martin Luther King had his dream, we wake to find Donald Trump, a man racist enough to make George Wallace blush, was President and a majority of white America still wanting him back. King said the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice. It seems he was wrong. The moral universe isn’t an arc but a cruel Mobius loop. Bending and turning but always circling to the same spot. Curve upwards and see another unjust killing, curve down and view an unjust verdict, an upward curve will bring another racist politician elected, curve downwards and we arrive at another racist judge making a verdict and then we get to the same spot we started from and do it all again.
No justice, no peace, no escape. Just an endless loop with no way off.