Breaking the silence

I'm being harassed.

I'm being harassed by a 23 year old white woman.

I'm being harassed by a young lady, who terrorizes me daily, and is relentless in her zealous pursuit.

Occasionally, she also has difficulty making her money stretch as far as it should and hits me up on Venmo.

I'm talking about my daughter. And she is responsible for this post.

You see, the crabapple has not fallen far from the crabapple tree. And like many young people across this country she has been moved by the events of the last two weeks. She has attended protests. She's speaking out online. And she's donating profits from her silk screened T-shirts (featuring the design above) to BLM.

Am I proud? Yes.
But, as she pointed out I should also be ashamed. Because while I'm often quite vocal on other issues, I've been relatively silent on this. Here's how our phone call went...

"Dad, you have a platform. People think you're smart. They want your opinion, your take on this. It's important that you use your blog to address the matter."

Ok, she's wrong on all counts. Nevertheless, I'll chime in knowing full well that anything I say has the potential of being criticized. You know because it comes from an old white man.

Actually, that's only partially true.

If you listen to or read the ramblings of the Klan or Neo-Nazis or even those ultra right folks on the not-so-far-end of the spectrum, I am NOT a white man. In fact, my Hebraic ancestry puts me among the "Mud People", their phraseology, not mine.

And I'm fine with that. I don't want to be associated with white supremacy. I don't want to be in the vicinity of white supremacy. These days, I don't want to be on the same planet as white supremacy.

I cherish being "the outsider." Mostly because it affords me a different perspective. Not a perfect one by any means, but different. One rooted in empathy. A great deal of that credit goes to my parents.

To my mother, who grew up poor and on the wrong side of the tracks in Glasgow. I'm not sure there is a right side of the tracks in Glasgow. And to my father, who grew up on the hardscrabble streets of the Bronx and spent a year of his youth in an Army brig (for smoking pot) and was one of a handful of white boys in a Southern prison dominated by African Americans.

Both grew up in the shadow of the Holocaust. And drilled into me an understanding of the unspeakable atrocites visited upon my people. With the warning that is familiar to every Jew in America, "Never forget, it can happen again." Adding, and keeping in mind this was during the tumultuous 60's, "If it does happen again, it will probably start with the Negroes (the vernacular at the time). But it won't end there."

In short, I was taught my heritage. And as someone whose people have been persecuted, and I am obliged to understand people who are currently being persecuted. If it can happen to them it can happen to us.

All well intentioned, but there's a serious, if not tribalistic fault in that logic.

And it was made clear to me by a touchy discussion on race that I had with an African American friend and colleague. He pointed out, and this was years ago so it has clearly made an imprint, I'm paraphrasing and shortening the story, "Rich, you don't get it. There is no Them and there is no Us, there is only We." 

Racism, anti-semitism, homophobia, misogyny are problems that belong to all of us.

Put another way, if Black Lives Don't Matter, and we don't take concrete steps to address racial injustice and racial inequality, then No Lives Matter.