Anti-racist assembly

[liv]

So my Jewish Sunday school have asked me to do an assembly on #BLM. Would anyone like to give me some advice?

Sunday school assembly is a 15-minute talk to about 20-30 children, aged 5-13. And it takes place over Zoom because we're in a pandemic. This in itself is a problem; it's very difficult indeed to provide an engaging 15 minute session on any topic in those circumstances. Interaction is all but impossible, and we can't do the sorts of group bonding things we'd do in an in person assembly, like communal singing or showing a particular class' work. And even in normal circumstances that's a very wide age range. Also, we encourage parents to attend and while they're at home they often do so, which means ideally I should have something to say to adults as well.

It's a Jewish community, which means the majority of us are ethnically Ashkenazi and would count as white in the American race relations paradigm. Many of us have at least some family who are unquestionably white. There are a few children of colour, an adoptee from East Asia, a family with a South Asian parent, but they're visibly the minority, even more so than in a typical Cambridge school class, and Cambridge is really a relatively white town. There are also a bunch of immigrants or children of immigrants, mostly from white-majority countries.

The other context is that last week's assembly (not led by me) was about Jewish humour, and involved a bunch of examples pulled from a quick internet search which were not really vetted for appropriateness, and some parents complained that some of the jokes were verging on racist. I'm not sure which specific ones caused offence, I was vaguely of the opinion that the selection was in poor taste, and one of the leaders has a propensity to put on 'funny' accents which I don't really approve of but I don't recall anything that stood out to me. But anyway, we are in a situation of tension and upset within the community, let alone the global situation.

I very much don't want to do the thing where I say, "we" white Jews should acknowledge our white privilege and be less racist, because that utterly sucks for Jews of colour and that's not a theoretical issue for this particular audience. I also don't want to upset the tinies; white fragility in adults is one thing, but for five-year-olds who may still think the world is a basically safe and decent place I want to take a gentle approach.

Also, I have 15 minutes; I can't cover the whole topic of racism and anti-racism and all of the race-relevant aspects older and recent history. My rough plan at the moment (concocted when I couldn't sleep at 4 am last night, but I don't have a lot of time to refine it before Sunday) is: tell the story of Miriam's slander against Moses' Ethiopian wife Tziporah. This is to emphasise that Jews of colour have always been part of our community, at the same time as saying that racism is bad and can be committed by extremely important figures like the first prophet and sister of Moses.

Then I want to talk about the trans-Atlantic slave trade, without going into too much graphic detail but making clear that we-the-British committed atrocities. (And that is, and always has been, a difficult 'we' because plenty of us don't have British ancestry that far back, but it does to some extent feel like part of 'our' history.) Connect that to the invention of modern racism as a justification for slavery. Then Britain abolished slavery legally, but the US had become independent by this time and continued to practise slavery until the mid 19th century. I want to counter the myth of evil enslaving Americans versus virtuous abolitionist Brits.

Even after formal legal slavery ended, the idea that people with darker coloured skin were inferior persisted. Even though most people understand that it's wrong to directly attack someone based on their skin colour, many of us are influenced by the idea that there are separate races and white is better. This can lead to systematically unfair treatment even into the modern day. In the 1960s America experienced the Civil Rights movement, where many African-Americans and their allies protested against laws which were unfair towards POC. Some famous rabbis were important allies in the Civil Rights movement – Jews should always take the side of the oppressed because we ourselves went through slavery and have been victims of racism. Nowadays it is illegal in the UK as in the US to discriminate against someone based on their race, but we know that discrimination and racism are still happening. The American police have killed many African-Americans including children and young people. As a result, many African-Americans are protesting again, as they did in the 60s, using the slogan #Black Lives Matter, and we in the UK are supporting them, partly from solidarity and partly because there are problems of racist violence here as well.

We want to live up to our proud Jewish history of fighting racism. It's hard to act, because the situation is violent and scary, because we want to avoid spreading or catching coronavirus, and also because when you're a child you don't have much power. But can you make a change in your own life to make things more fair for people of colour? Can you ask your adults to help you to take action?

Thoughts? I'm very open to being told, don't even go there, you're too white to do anything but harm here. But I'm inclined to think that a #BLM assembly, even imperfect, is better than ignoring the issue.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

Kids are very open to understanding that adults can be unfair, so I think that's a good ending for a child audience. It might be worth mentioning specifically that the British police have also been unfair to people who are not white - that's one thing that black Australians (indigenous or African) have been asking us to keep in mind, it's not just a US problem.

[ghoti]

I might actually start the conversation by talking about some of the cringey things that happened with the jokes ... something about stereotypes that can segue into how police racially profile, and how that's wrong.

[fanf]

This video is a great example of how to tackle the issue - https://youtu.be/45ey4jgoxeU

And this is is an amusing and instructive protest sign https://twitter.com/michaelglflood/status/1271316901189148672?s=21

[seekingferret]

If you're going to talk about we-the-British being involved in the slave trade, you should also acknowledge that we-the-Jews were involved in the slave trade, too.

[adrian_turtle]

For a 15-minute talk about something as current as BLM, I wouldn't talk about the Atlantic slave trade at all. "Of course you all know there used to be slavery in the US, and British ships used to sell slaves there. Everyone knows how horrible it was, and that's why slavery was abolished in the 19th century. You might think that made it all better, but it's not nearly so simple." For US teens, I'd spend 2 minutes, maximum, on Jim Crow, lynching, and the KKK. I have no idea how to adapt it for a 6 year old in the UK.

But I think it's important to focus on modern times. Nobody involved in Black Lives Matter was ever a slave or a slaveowner. Most of them (on both sides!) are too young to remember the explicitly racist laws that were on the books before the civil rights movement. I might give a sentence or two about that for background, but I would want most of the talk to be about more current problems like "driving while black," and "stop and frisk," as well as the deadly police abuses that has people in the street.

You can introduce white privilege in the frame of "that person looks like they don't belong here." Store security thinks a black customer must be a shoplifter. The police think a black jogger must be a rapist. The ER doctor thinks the black patient in the middle of the night must just be looking for drugs. You can talk about how Ashkenazi Jews have acquired more white privilege over the years, how you "look like you belong" more than your grandparents did at your age. That's a good thing, and we need to expand the idea of belonging even farther, and so on

[liv]

Thank you, this is helpful. I think you may be right that trying to cram in the historical context is too much and I should stick to contemporary. My thinking was that I wanted to give an explanation for why many people are racist, without even slightly hinting that it might possibly be true that there's something wrong with Black people. Thus, I'm starting with, racism was made up to justify slavery, we all know slavery was bad, therefore we shouldn't buy into racist theories.

I'm probably not going to talk about Jim Crow, lynching or the KKK because that sort of thing is too easy to dismiss as a purely American pathology. But maybe on the same argument I should leave out the Civil Rights movement and talk about the racist discrimination faced now on both sides of the Atlantic.

Talking about Ashkenazi Jews gradually acquiring white privilege is a good idea, but many of the relevant grandparents were not in fact Ashkenazi. Some were unconditionally white, and some were POC. Assuming one Jewish story, that everybody is descended from people who 'came over' from Eastern Europe in the late 19th century, is one of the issues that Jews of colour complain about the Jewish community getting wrong.

[hilarita]

I think also note that this kind of racial profiling is common in the UK - where Black Professors are assumed to be secretarial or cleaning staff, and are more likely to be stopped by the police.

[melannen]

Honestly, the thing that stuck out to me was wondering why you were mentioning the American civil rights movement and not the British one - which was also transformative, but has been much more erased than in the US. That would relate more to your younger students' lives and the current protests and politics in the UK, and it would probably cover things that the parents and older students don't know as much about and might find interesting.

[nanila]

Have you considered handing some of your platform over to a person of colour to speak?

[liv]

Definitely worth considering, thank you for the suggestion. The problem is it's not much of a 'platform' - I lead a couple of assemblies a term as part of my job as a Sunday school teacher. Asking anyone else to do it would be asking them to put together a talk on a difficult and sensitive topic at about three days' notice, and asking them to engage a bunch of children who don't already have a relationship with them. Maybe what I should do is look for a video already made by a JOC and show that, let me see if I can find anything relevant.

[liv]

Blessed CBBC! Today they released a lovely 2 minute video of British Black kids talking about the current situation and I can amplify them without needing to ask any POC to put in extra work. Really glad you made this suggestion or I wouldn't have gone looking.

[watersword]

I would very strongly second this.

[sonia]

Do you have a reading list you can suggest to people as a followup? I don't have a lot of kid-friendly suggestions I've read myself.
Here's a book aimed at teens that I read in 2010: https://curioushealing.com/2010/10/totally-tolerant-by-diane-webber-and-laurie-mandel/

However! A recent email sent me to this resource list, compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker and Alyssa Klein.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X1cITmQMAkwtW5_pbWENqpmYoq5hYFPftHRfuEL-ZBs/edit

which has a kid-friendly section at the bottom of the reading section, including https://www.embracerace.org/ which looks like it has a bunch of info.

Best wishes with this presentation and the followup in your community! Sending lots of supportive thoughts. No matter how it turns out, opening the conversation is a positive step.

[ayebydan]

I'm a white atheist. Stating this more for anyone who sees this comment than you who knows.

But maybe the answer here is not to tackle it from a standpoint of your own religion? Maybe just tackle it purely from why BLM. Just start from how and why black people (in the UK if that is easier) found themselves in a position where they were downtrodden and lacked privilege and why that was wrong. Talk about how people were enslaved at one point, denied entry to pubs, rental accommodation etc at others. You might even be able to finish that up by saying many will recognise that in your own (Jewish) history and so why you should stand side by side as you mentioned?

[crystalpyramid]

I recently got in a weird Facebook argument with an Israeli who has more ties to the UK than the US where she insisted that slavery never really existed in the UK, just in the US, and everyone believed her until I looked it up. So, thank you for doing this -- I think having more education on this topic is important.

(She also claimed that because she and her family know lots of Ethiopians and volunteer to help Ethiopians that means they're not racist. Such a huge gulf between helping people-of-race-assumed-to-be-poor-because-of-race and actual mutual respect, but my argument wasn't getting anywhere.)

[siderea]

The way I got this as a very little child – which I like to think was a good and successful way because it pretty much instantly radicalized me – was that for millennia, other people have hunted us, stolen from us, and murdered us for a variety of reasons, such as not liking our religion or thinking of us as foreigners and not like foreigners. But one of the reasons they came up with to attack us was this notion of "race". They said our "blood" was different, and we belonged to a different "race" and that it was inferior to their race, and that that justified them doing horrible things to us. And now, mostly that's not happening to us, because the same sort of people who used to pick on us are now picking on these other people instead. We need to stand up for those people the same way the Righteous among Nations stood up for us, because we love justice and fairness.

That's what I got somewhere around the age of 4. I might further elaborate on it by explaining that the term for it, when people use the idea of "race" to say "we are one race, but those few people are a different race, so let's gang up on them and do bad things to them, because we outnumber them and they can't stop us", is called "racism". I might explain that the number one way that people who want to be racist convince other people to gang up with them on minority races is to spread lies – lashon hara! – about the minority race. They tell lies that the minority people did bad things – that they committed crimes – or are bad people. They go around spreading these lies to get the other people all angry at the minority race, so they are willing to hurt them. Sometime they spread these lies by whispering them as secrets. Sometimes they spread these lies by making up false news reports. Sometimes they spread these lies in fake science reports. And sometimes, they spread these lies in nasty little jokes.

One of the kinds of lie they use is the lie that all members of a so-called "race" are the same in some way. For instance, a lie that used to be told in Europe about Jewish people was that they were all killers. This kind of lie is called a "stereotype". Stereotypes can be very dangerous. Because non-Jews believed that Jews were killers, if someone went missing, especially a child, non-Jews would often assume that Jews must have killed them. And they would go kill a bunch of innocent Jews in revenge.

Today, right now, there are a lot of people who believe similar stereotypes about black people, and it's getting innocent black people killed. In America, police who have believed terrible stereotypes of black people, have killed black people, including black children. This has been going on for a long time. Now many, many people are so angry about these murders, they are protesting in the streets around the world. In America, in many cities when people have protested, police have attacked protesters for saying it is wrong for police to murder people just for being black.

There is a movement that is trying to fight these lies and stop police from murdering black people. This movement is called Black Lives Matter. It's called that because police are killing black people like their lives don't matter, and they're saying, "yes they do matter!"

It's hard to fight lies. It's hard to convince people not to believe lies told about you, when they want to believe them because they want to attack you, and it gives them an excuse.

We have to be careful not to believe lies about black people. We have to be careful not to believe lies about any people. A good rule to follow is that any claim that all of a sort of people are the same, especially any claim that they're all the same in a bad way – that they're all of them dangerous, or all stupid, or all mean, or all wicked, or anything like that – that's almost certainly a nasty lie that shouldn't be believed.

We have to be careful not to believe lies about black people, and we need to help them fight the lies about them. We know how terrible it is to be lied about this way, and have innocent people killed because of those lies; it's happened to us. Because of that, we should always stick up for people who are being lied about and fight for them. The first part of that must be never passing on such lies. Not even as jokes.

[liv]

Thank you thank you thank you. This is exactly the framing I was looking for. Racism is telling lies about groups of people and using those lies as an excuse to hurt people. I really like the unmissable focus on the falseness of racist theories. Also you've really held the balance that I was groping for of addressing Jews as both victims and beneficiaries / potential perpetrators of racism, without assuming that all Jews are ~white Ashkenazim. I really really appreciate your suggestion, it lets me walk the line I was anxious about missing.

[siderea]

You're very welcome. Some other important subtleties I'm proud of sneaking in there:

• The concept of racism was invented to oppress Jews, specifically. (After the expulsion from Spain, the state needed a justification to continue to oppress conversos who seemed faultless in their Catholicism.)

• Racism = discrimination + power

• Minorities have intrinsic difficulties defending themselves against majorities

• The explanation I gave of stereotypes is fully portable to all forms of oppression, not just racism, so this is now also a jumping off point for sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.

• The explanation allows for, but doesn't go into, the toxicity of "positive" stereotypes.

• I dodged talking about discrimination, because that typically gets misunderstood and misplaced in this discussion. Discrimination is often framed as why stereotypes are bad, which leads to the dead end of "okay, discrimination isn't fair, but it's not that bad". Discrimination is properly understood as one of the bad outcomes of stereotypes, and one of the mechanisms of by which stereotyping leads to other bad thing, but there are many much worse things stereotyping leads to, up to and including genocide.

• I asserted a moral responsibility to stand up for oppressed others, and then insisted the first place we look for their oppression is within ourselves.

• Since you mentioned the precipitant was jokes, an implicit preëmptive explanation of why it's not "just" a joke when someone makes stereotype jokes.

• I decided not to get into it here, but provided the hooks to Jewish moral teaching about responsibility to fight for justice and the healing of the world. If somebody wanted me to sermonize their synagogue's children, I would be headed right for "that which is hateful to yourself..." and "If not me..." and a whole lot of "AS JEWS WE".

• I also made the tactical call that the first introduction to this topic is not the place to bring up, "There are Jews who think, 'Phew! Thank goodness it's somebody else getting picked on now, and we Jews are safe.' There are even Jews who think that because it's some other people getting picked on, we should join in on picking on others. Those people are both stupid and wicked. Stupid, because a bully turning on someone else doesn't mean we're safe, and we must fight injustice anywhere, lest it become injustice towards us, yet again. Wicked, because even if we were somehow ensured to never be targeted again, we would be failing to love justice and uphold the mitzvot if we let it continue without objection." You might want to have that up your sleeve.

ETA: Oh, right, and if you use this tack, I think I can promise somebody is going to ask you a very obvious question: "But why? Why do people spread lies and pick on people? Why are there bullies? Why are there racists?"

A perfectly fine answer to that is, "I don't know." There are some unfine answers (like anything that tries to explain white privilege). It is also great to go right into whatever your explanation for evil in the world is. Be careful of psychological explanations. "Tribalism", e.g., is a covertly racist or racism-apologetic non-explanation.

Personally, I'd go with: "There are a number of reasons people do this. Sometimes they do it to make themselves feel better about themselves, by putting other people down. Sometimes they do it quite simply as a trick to make themselves richer by stealing – for instance, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, they were given so little time to prepare, they had to leave a lot of valuable things behind, and of course their houses and land and livestock, all of which the King of Spain seized. Sometimes people are mean and just want to hurt other people. What all the different reasons have in common, is that they are forms of doing evil: they are all forms of knowingly hurting others for purely selfish reasons."

[liv]

Well, I did the assembly along the lines you suggested. I kept my original plan to start with Miriam's racist slander of Tzipporah and I added in some video of British Black kids talking about police murder and their general experience of racism in this country. But the bulk was according to your plan. The Zoom format makes it hard for people to ask questions, so I didn't have to deal with 'why are people racist' but I'll bear in mind your points in case anyone does ask me.

It's always really hard to read the audience in a webinar but I think I was getting attentive listening at least. It feels like it went well.

[serriadh]

I am listening to Reni Eddo-Lodge's book on racism at the moment and one thing she talks about, as a black British woman, is that most English/British people have a conception of 'race issues' as an American problem - we know about the slave trade, Martin Luther King Jr, etc. than we do about our own history. So perhaps something about how BLM isn't "just" about American black people's fight for justice, but about what we have forgotten here and what we can do to make things better.

(long-time lurker - hope you don't mind me commenting!)

[sfred]

I don't think I have anything useful to add, but I'm really glad you asked this because I'm finding your post and the comments very useful. Thank you. I hope the assembly goes well.