Anti-racist assembly
Jun. 16th, 2020 10:28 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo 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.
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.
