REFLECT:

From Rabbi Shira Stutman (Sixth & I)

These last few months, many white Americans have acknowledged and been forced to confront what we’ve long known to be true, which is that our understanding of what makes us feel “secure” is based on a lot of assumptions that are not shared by people of color, and especially indigenous, Black and brown people. This admission is certainly true in the white Jewish community, which experiences policing in America in ways arguably unparalleled in Jewish history. Many white American Jews understand police as a force that keeps us safe; when there is a shooting at a synagogue, Jewish museum, Jewish Federation or JCC, police run towards the scene of the crime in order to offer assistance (in some cases they were already there, hired by the community as an added layer of “security'”) and not away. And it bears saying that this is not only in our imagination, that this is factually true, that whenever there is even a hint of an uptick in public antisemitism in DC, local police are in touch with Sixth & I almost immediately with offers of help and protection.

One of the most complicated parts of discernment, however, is recognizing that two things can be true at the same time: that DC police can protect Sixth & I as an institution and members of the police force–and policing as an institution itself–can terrorize Black and brown people, including Black and brown Jews. That some of the very same “protectors” whose presence make me, a white person, exhale with relief, cause BIPOC to inhale with fear. And that even though I feel safe when I see a police car outside our building, no Jew is truly safe until we have eradicated white supremacy in all its forms, including not only antisemitism but also anti-Black racism, not only in the streets but also in our government.

It’s all true. But until I decentered my own experience as a white person, and instead centered the experiences of people of color, I just couldn’t (wouldn’t?) comprehend what I needed to comprehend. I couldn’t see what I needed to see.

Perhaps even more honest, God forgive me–seriously, on these days of teshuva please God, forgive me–I have known for some time that there were many people of color who did not feel as safe as I did, whose reaction when they were driving and saw the police lights behind them was not “oh damn I’m going to be late for my meeting” but instead “oh damn what if they shoot?” But there already seemed to be so little time in the day. How could I possibly begin to piece together this complicated puzzle?

And then I heard George Floyd call out for his mother as he was being murdered, and, as we read in the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading, “God opened [my] eyes and I saw.” And I understood: by refusing to bear witness to the agony of others, and by putting only my own personal experience and needs at the center of my narrative, I was complicit in the terror. Until the words “serve and protect” are true for the way that police treat all of us, I have no right to stand down.

In 5781, may we not turn a blind-eye to pain and suffering around us.

LISTEN: 

Seeing White, podcast suggested by Imani Chapman:

For hundreds of years, the white-dominated American culture has raised the specter of the dangerous, violent black man. Host John Biewen tells the story of a confrontation with an African American teenager. Then he and recurring guest Chenjerai Kumanyika discuss that longstanding image – and its neglected flipside: white-on-black violence.