If the Chumph has his way, folks on SNAP (or the old Food Stamps) will be getting Happy Meals instead of the Filet Mignon and Lobster he thinks those “black folks” are eating on $200 a month.
Considering the Great White Ghetto that voted for him – this could be amusing.
The Chumph’s white supremacy and making America white again….Driving While Black, long a method to harass and intimidate the American born black population, is used as an excuse to forcibly deport supposedly “illegal aliens” who are black, under a system of trumped up laws and regulations designed to rid the country of it’s immigrant black population.
Although only 7 percent of non-citizens in the U.S. are black, they make up 20 percent of those facing deportation on criminal grounds.
If it were not for the Canadian leaf tattoo on his wrist, Chris Gustave may not be behind bars.
In October, 24 year old Gustave was staying at a weekly motel in Phoenix when police arrived searching for his friend, who had violated parole. At first, “all the attention was on him,” Gustave told me in a phone interview last month. But then, Gustave claimed, an officer noticed the tattoo. “The dude just asked if I was Canadian, the next thing I knew I was in here”—“here” being the remote and sprawling Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Eloy, Arizona.
Gustave is one of more than half a million black unauthorized immigrants in the United States—about 575,000 as of 2013. Last week, The New York Times reported that the presence of immigrants from Haiti and Nigeria, who together represent roughly 20 percent of the foreign-born black population, vexed president Trump. The Haitians “all have AIDS,” Trump said in a June meeting with his top advisors according to the Times, while the Nigerians would not “go back to their huts” after seeing America, he said. (The White House denied the comments.)
Research suggests that because black people in the United States are more likely to be stopped, arrested, and incarcerated, black immigrants may be disproportionately vulnerable to deportation. The criminal-justice system acts like a “funnel” into the immigration system, said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a University of Denver law professor who studies the nexus of policing and immigration law. New York University law professor Alina Das said black immigrants are “targeted by criminalization.”
While the Obama administration prioritized immigrants with felony convictions for deportation, President Trump’s executive orders effectively made anyone in the country illegally a target for removal. Arrests of non-criminals more than doubled, and among those who have been charged with a crime, the top three categories are “traffic offenses – DUI,” “dangerous drugs,” and “immigration,” which means illegal entry, illegal reentry, false claim to US citizenship, and trafficking, according to ICE. In fiscal year 2017, almost 74 percent of people arrested by ICE had a criminal conviction—arrests the agency uses to argue “that its officers know how to prioritize enforcement without overly prescriptive mandates.”
But Hernández sees something different in the large number of criminal convictions among ICE detainees. “Racial bias present in the criminal-justice system plays itself out in the immigration context,” he said. “There are so many entry points” to deportation, said Das, “when you are a person of color who is also an immigrant, you face a double punishment.”
A 2016 report by the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic, where Das is the co-director, and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration found that although black immigrants represent about 7 percent of the non-citizen population, they make up more than 10 percent of immigrants in removal proceedings. Criminal convictions amplify the disparity: Twenty percent of immigrants facing deportation on criminal grounds are black.
Today, almost 10 percent of the black population in the United States is foreign-born, up from about 3 percent in 1980. As the number of black immigrants has grown, so, too, have the linkages between cops, courts, and the immigration system.
Aside from ICE’s splashier arrests within so-called “sanctuary cities,” most apprehensions nationwide happen inside jails once an immigrant has had contact with local police. This collaboration is a result of decades of legislation and executive action by both Democrats and Republicans. Two years after the passage of his controversial crime bill, former President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act in 1996. Known as IIRIRA (pronounced “ira-ira”), the law expanded mandatory detention and the number of deportable crimes. As the federal inmate population doubled, prison-like immigrant-detention centers rose up in tandem. In the early 1990s, there were around 5,000 immigrants detained each day; by 2001, the populationquadrupled. And the Trump administration wants to keep that number growing: The president’s 2018 budget called for increasing the daily detainee population to 51,000, a 25 percent bump over last year.
“Additional detention space does make Americans safer,”argued Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for stricter enforcement. Detention also ensures that undocumented immigrants don’t “disappear into the woodwork,” Vaughan said. “The benefit of keeping illegal aliens in custody,” she said, is that “it prevents the release of criminal aliens back into the community to have the opportunity to re-offend.”
While the prison population has begun to dwindle in recent years—the incarceration rate fell 13 percent between 2007 and 2015—immigration detention remains “one of the fastest-growing sectors of the carceral state,” said Kelly Lytle Hernandez, a University of California, Los Angeles, historian who studies the origins of U.S. immigration control.
ICE’s Secure Communities program—which began under former President George W. Bush; was expanded, then killed, under his successor Barack Obama; then reinstated by Trump—provides local police with a national fingerprint database to check suspects for immigration violations. ICE can also deputize local law enforcement to make immigration arrests, a power authorized by IIRIRA. Some 60 law-enforcement agencies across 18 states participate in that program.
“Local police are some of the biggest feeders into the immigration-enforcement system,” said Will Gaona, the policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona. “And that’s more true in Arizona”—where Gustave was picked up—“because of S.B. 1070.” That 2010 state law, which has since been emulated in dozens of states, requires police to ask about immigration status if they suspect someone is in the country illegally….
When a black person commits a crime -obviously they are depraved.
When a white person commits exactly the same crime…They are “misunderstood”.
TV is full of white criminal “masterminds”…The real world tells quite a different story,
How are white folks programmed to hate? A daily diet of racist stereotypes in the media.
Things really haven’t changed much since “Giant Negroes” roamed American cities.
News outlets continue a rich tradition of racially biased coverage.
On the afternoon of Aug. 9, 2014, a police officer fatally shot an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, in Ferguson, Missouri. Eyewitnesses said Brown was compliant with police and was shot while he was running away. Police maintained that the 18-year-old had assaulted an officer and was reaching for the officer’s gun. One clear thing, however, is that Brown’s death followed a disturbingly common trend of black men being killed, often while unarmed and at the hands of police officers, security guards and vigilantes.
After news of Brown’s death broke, media-watchers carefully followed the narratives that news outlets began crafting about the teenager and the incident that claimed his life. Wary of the controversy surrounding the media’s depiction of Trayvon Martin — the Florida teen killed in a high-profile case that led to the acquittal of neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman — people on Twitter wondered, “If they gunned me down, which picture would they use?” Using the hashtag #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, users posted side-by-side photos, demonstrating the power that news outlets wield in portraying victims based on images they select.
Days later, a Twitter user tweeted out a photo driving home another point: Media treatment of black victims is often harsher than it is of whites suspected of crimes, including murder.
This is by no means standard media protocol, but it happens frequently, deliberately or not. News reports often headline claims from police or other officials that appear unsympathetic or dismissive of black victims. Other times, the headlines seem to suggest black victims are to blame for their own deaths, engaging in what critics sometimes allege is a form of character assassination.
When contrasted with media portrayal of white suspects and accused murderers, the differences are more striking. News outlets often choose to run headlines that exhibit an air of disbelief at an alleged white killer’s supposed actions. Sometimes, they appear to go out of their way to boost the suspect’s character, carrying quotes from relatives or acquaintances that often paint even alleged murderers in a positive light.
Here are a few examples:
WHITE SUSPECT
That’s how the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal chose to present the story of Amy Bishop, a former college professor who eventually pleaded guilty to killing three colleagues and wounding three others at a faculty meeting in 2010.
BLACK VICTIM
And that’s the headline AL.com ran about the shooting death of a 25-year-old black man in Alabama in 2014.
WHITE SUSPECT
This is how the Staten Island Advance covered the case of Eric Bellucci, a mentally ill New York man who allegedly killed his parents.
BLACK VICTIM
Meanwhile, NBC News ran this headline during ongoing coverage of the Trayvon Martin killing in 2013.
WHITE SUSPECT
This Fox News headline quoted friends shocked that 15-year-old Jared Michael Padgett had entered his high school in 2014 heavily armed and killed a classmate, injured a teacher and taken his own life.
BLACK VICTIM
But in Florida, this headline in the Ledger focused on a police account that made the death of a black 19-year-old seem somehow expected, or at least unsurprising.
WHITE SUSPECT
In the wake of the mass shooting in Santa Barbara, California, in 2014, the Whittier Daily News offered a headline showing one man’s disbelief that Elliot Rodger could have committed such a crime.
BLACK VICTIM
In August 2014, the New York Daily News ran this headline, carrying comments by the Ohio attorney general that appeared to defend police after killing a black man at a Walmart.
WHITE SUSPECT
This was the headline given to an Associated Press story at Mlive.com about an Ohio teen who later pleaded guilty to a school shooting in which three students were killed and two were wounded.
BLACK VICTIM
But when an unarmed father of two was killed by a police officer while entering a vehicle that contained his own children, the Los Angeles Times served up this claim from officials.
WHITE SUSPECT
In 2008, 18-year-old Ryan Schallenberger was accused of plotting to bomb his South Carolina high school. Ohio’s Chronicle Telegram wanted readers to know that he was a straight-A student, running an AP story with this headline.
BLACK VICTIM
And according to the Omaha World-Herald, this is what you needed to know about Julius B. Vaughn, a 19-year-old gunned down in Omaha in 2013.
WHITE SUSPECT
Kerri Ann Heffernan was charged in 2012 in a string of bank robberies and stores. This headline at Wicked Local wonders how she’d come so far from her days as a smart high school student.
BLACK VICTIM
Of 22-year-old black man Deon Sanders’ killing in Ohio in 2014, WKBN’s headline said “gang member,” and that apparently was enough.
This ad, about how black mothers try to protect their children from a racist world is setting off fireworks. Now it is a fact, the most black moms (and dads) have this talk with their children at some point in their lives.
Racist conservative types, and their captive Uncle Toms are in full denial.
A new ad to be released next week by one of America’s biggest household products companies has drawn outrage — and praise — for addressing racial bias.
“The Talk,” a two-minute video by Procter & Gamble, depicts black mothers of different generations, talking to their children about racism.
“It’s an ugly, nasty word, and you are going to hear it, nothing I can do about that,” a mother tells her young son in an apparent reference to a racial slur. “But you are not going to let that word hurt you, you hear me?”
“Now, when you get pulled over …” another mother tells her teenage daughter.
“Ma, I’m a good driver don’t worry, okay?” the daughter answers.
“Baby, this is not about you getting a ticket. This is about you not coming home.”
The new ad builds on the company’s 10-year-old “My Black is Beautiful” campaign, which has produced audio interviews about bias. The company, which makes a wide array of products from laundry detergent to tampons to cough drops, says the stories they tell are meant to reflect the real-world experiences of many of their customers. It has also produced videos about gender bias, such as the Always #LikeAGirl and Ariel #ShareTheLoad ads.
“The Talk,” which appeared online two weeks ago, sparked a heated public reaction on social media, with some commending the company for addressing a difficult topic, and others accusing it of race-baiting and vowing to stop buying their products.
“Let the boycott begin on P & G!!! Cannot believe they would cut their noses off, to spite their faces,” a person commented on a YouTube page showing the ad.
“To all the people offended by this commercial … not every ad is target toward you,” another person wrote. “What’s wrong with a mother trying to protect her children and prepare them for a world that is not always (accepting).”
A website called Conservative101.com said the commercial attacked whites, adding, “In a cynical attempt to sell more soap and household cleaning products to the African American community, consumer giant Procter & Gamble decided to produce a commercial pandering to what they believe African-Americans think.”
While the advertising industry has been criticized in the past for a lack of diverse perspectives, in the past six months corporations have been bolder about supporting minorities, immigrants, and LGBTQ people, said Lee Ann Kahlor, associate director of the Stan Richards School of Advertising & Public Relations at the University of Texas, Austin.
His real name was James Isaac Moore but he adopted the stage name Slim Harpo. Just a shade behind Lightnin’ Slim in local popularity, Harpo played both guitar and neck-rack harmonica in a more down-home approximation of Jimmy Reed, with a few discernible, and distinctive, differences. Harpo‘s music was certainly more laid-back than Reed‘s, if such a notion was possible. But the rhythm was insistent and, overall, Harpo was more adaptable than Reed or most other bluesmen. His material not only made the national charts, but also proved to be quite adaptable for white artists on both sides of the Atlantic, Moore never really dedicated his life full-time to music, he owned and operated a successful trucking business in the 60’s, even while several of his songs took off and made the charts. His style was called the electric swamp blues and included elements of Delta Blues, swamp rock, and Country and Western.
Elmore James was born Elmore Brooks in Richland, Holmes County, Mississippi, the illegitimate son of 15-year-old Leola Brooks, a field hand. His father was probably Joe Willie “Frost” James, who moved in with Leola, and Elmore took his surname. He began making music at the age of 12, using a simple one-string instrument (diddley bow, or jitterbug) strung on a shack wall. As a teen he performed at dances under the names Cleanhead and Joe Willie James.During World War II, James joined the United States Navy, was promoted to coxswain and took part in the invasion of Guam. Upon his discharge, he returned to central Mississippi and settled in the town of Canton with his adopted brother Robert Holston. Working in Holston’s electrical shop, he devised his unique electric sound, using parts from the shop and an unusual placement of two DeArmond pickups
He is known as the King of the Slide Guitar.
And last but not least – Sonny Boy Williamson -He first recorded with Elmore James on “Dust My Broom“. Some of his popular songs include “Don’t Start Me Talkin’“, “Help Me“, “Checkin’ Up on My Baby“, and “Bring It On Home“. He toured Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival and recorded with English rock musicians, including the Yardbirds, the Animals, and Jimmy Page. “Help Me” became a blues standard.
I have written about Michael Twitty before, and his explorations into African-American slave cuisine, and how it impacted what Americans eat, even today.
He has written a new book about the road he travelled – The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South
Michael now works in Colonial Williamsburg, where the demonstrates not only the cuisine, but the methodology the slaves used to raise and prepare it.
The New Jim Crow in many Republican dominated states is not only to incarcerate drug offenders but to incarcerate people (particularly minorities and black folks) for being poor.
The legal system is already massively tilted towards the rich. The Chumph would often stiff his small contractors on work they did for him, confident in the knowledge that as small businesses they could not afford to go to court and pay the lawyers.
Florida’s legal system is rigged so that in a Civil suit you must have a lawyer to submit any documents to the court. A lot of scumbag companies “court shop” specifically for legal systems in states which have rules making it too expensive for their victims to defend themselves.
In Mississippi this legal Jim Crow went to locking people p for up to a year because they couldn’t afford lawyers to defend themselves. You would be right in guessing most of these folks were black.
The New Jim Crow – Just as bad as the Old Jim Crow, with the same racist goals.
A U.S. federal judge has ordered four central Mississippi counties to appoint public defenders for arrestees when they are detained instead of jailing them for months without providing legal counsel, civil rights groups said on Wednesday.
The order accompanies the settlement of a federal class action lawsuit challenging one county’s practice of detaining people who cannot afford a lawyer for as long as a year without formal charges and appointment of counsel, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center said in a statement.
The settlement and court order require Scott, Neshoba, Newton and Leake counties to hire a chief public defender, a rarity in rural Mississippi, to ensure that defense lawyers no longer serve at judges’ whims, the statement said. The chief public defender, not judges, would supervise all public defenders, the statement said.
A spokeswoman for Attorney General Jim Hood, whose office handled the case, did not respond to a request for comment.
The ACLU and MacArthur Center sued Scott County in 2014 on behalf of Josh Bassett and Octavious Burks, who were detained there for eight and 10 months, respectively, without being indicted or being appointed a lawyer.
Unlike in federal courts and most other states, Mississippi places no limit on how long a person can be held in jail before prosecutors get an indictment. Obtaining an indictment in the four counties often takes up to a year, the statement said.
The order, issued this week by U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate, mandates that the four counties, which make up Mississippi’s Eighth Circuit Court district, appoint public defenders at the time people are arrested.
Mark Duncan, who was sued while district attorney for the four counties and is now a circuit judge, said by telephone that he was unaware of the settlement.
(Reporting by Ian Simpson in Washington; Editing by Colleen Jenkins and Steve Orlofsky)
Race in America is a amorphous thing. Most likely what “classification” you fall into will be based on your looks.
I have a family relationship with the Shinnecock Tribe, and from the pic below, knew this author’s mother, and possibly her father. The Reservation is pretty small, and all of the teens often gathered together at the beach. There was a NYC connection as well. I am not Native American (Not one drop according to my DNA test), however one of my Uncles married a Native American and lived on the reservation. I spent a number of summers both working and visiting the Reservation and am an Honorary Member of the Tribe. Which doesn’t mean anything in terms of identity, but does mean because of my Uncle’s marriage I have a few cousins there.
My family has everything from blonde haired, blue eyed to deepest ebon. The first of which caused a lot of problems back in the day. As a teen, I struggled with the existence of both black and “white” relatives. To understand that, you have to understand the historical context of the 60′ black “awakening”.
I don’t share Ms Joseph’s thoughts about Donezal. The only thing I see there is a tragedy.
I am white, I am black, I am Native American. And I know what it’s like for people not to see all of who I am
On a hot, humid New York City morning in 1980, I stood with my mother in the checkout line of an A&P supermarket near our home. As she pushed our groceries along the cashier’s belt with me trailing behind, mom realized she had forgotten her wallet at home, but she had her checkbook. Leaving me standing alone in the line for a moment while she saw the manager to have her check approved, the clerk refused to bag our groceries and hand them to me. She was black, and I was white. “These groceries belong to that woman over there,” the woman nodded towards my mother. “They ain’t yours.” Confused, I said, “But that’s my mother. I’ll take them for her.” She looked me up and down. “No,” she said, her voice cold.
The clerk refused to believe that indeed I belonged to, and came from, my black mother, until mom returned to find me choking back tears. She gave the clerk a tongue lashing, which was not her style, and we left the market. Later, mixed Native American and black children threw stones at me near my home on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation as I rode my bike. They yelled, “Get off our land, white girl!” These painful and strange experiences gave me my first taste of racial prejudice, and they have stayed with me all these years.
I am a child of many nations. I am white, I am black, I am Native American. I am West Indian, German, Irish. Brown and light together — integrated, not inter-racial, because race means nothing when you come from everywhere.
This Sunday’s New York Times Race-Related section ran a fascinating piece on DNA and racial identity by West Chester University professor Anita Foeman. For the past decade, she has asked hundreds of people to take part in ancestry DNA tests, and to date, over 2,000 have participated. “But first,” she wrote, “I ask people how they identify themselves racially. It has been very interesting to explore their feelings about the differences between how they define themselves and what their DNA makeup shows when the test results come in.”
Those results are often startling to the subjects and rife with racial stereotypes, Foeman found. According to her studies, some who came up with surprise Asian heritage in spite of looking white or brown noted, “That’s why my son is good at math!” Others who explored African heritage responded, “I thought my biological father might be black; I heard he liked basketball.” Many of us harbor deeply-rooted prejudices that we aren’t even aware of, until it matters to us.
I don’t remember what mom said that day in the supermarket, but I can tell you that while she had been the object of many, many racist remarks and challenging situations in her life, she was not entirely prepared for what happened that day. That’s not to say she didn’t talk about the reality of how our family was different from others. To try to address the dearth of literary references to kids who looked like me, my mother physically altered my childhood books, using markers to make one parent brown and other other white, while the child originally drawn remained white-appearing, like me. But the scene in the supermarket still took her by surprise.
Confrontations over race can still catch Americans unprepared, such as when Rachel Dolezal, the now-former head of the Spokane, Washington chapter of the NAACP, appeared on the media radar. Dolezal, who stopped by Salon recently to talk with me on her book tour, was born white but identifies as black and calls herself “transracial.”
Dolezal was “outed” two years ago by her biological parents for not being black as she had claimed, and subsequently resigned from the NAACP. She became a polarizing figure under heavy media scrutiny as she appeared to dodge questions about her unconventional chosen identity. She has been unable to continue to work as a university instructor of African and African American art history, and to this day is despised by many observers, black and white, for posing as a black person.
My Salon colleague D. Watkins, an African American writer from Baltimore, wondered why Dolezal couldn’t just “use her whiteness to advocate for black people,” rather than making up and living in her own fantasy world where race and ethnicity no longer cause any social or political delineations. He is one of many to hold this opinion, and it’s one I agree with.
Rebecca Carroll wrote for Dame in 2015 about what she calls Dolezal’s “apocalyptic, White privilege on steroids” with a palpable anger shared by many people of color. When I talked to my childhood writing mentor Barbara Campbell, a former New York Times reporter who is African American and has two multiracial sons, she wondered about Dolezal with a mix of anger and genuine confusion. “What is wrong with that woman? I feel empathy for her, because she is clearly delusional, but she can step out into the world as a white woman any time she wants to stop being ‘black.’ Black women don’t have that luxury.”
Campbell explained that growing up in St. Louis, she had many light-skinned relatives who resembled Dolezal and could “pass” for white, but otherwise lived their lives as people of color. “They would go to ‘work white,’ because they could earn more money and get better-paying jobs, but then they would go home and be black.”
But this Dolezal thing — this is a horse of another color entirely. Why, wondered many, would someone white want to live within the very real challenges of being black in America, when she had a choice? Dolezal’s explanation? She doesn’t define herself by race, just a feeling of affinity with the black culture she’s always had.
As one might expect, the last few years have been tough since her exposure, she told me, noting her newly adopted legal name, Nkechi Amare Diallo, which she claimed was a “gift” to her by a Nigerian man. When she arrived at our offices, it was hard to know what to think, or believe. Frankly, it was hard to feel any animosity at all, despite the vitriolic sentiments many of my dark and light-skinned family, friends and colleagues had for Dolezal. She arrived carrying her beautiful, light brown baby son, Langston Hughes (Yes. Stop. That’s his name. What can you do?), who was cared for by her adopted black sister, Esther. Dolezal appeared like any other tired, working mom. I offered her coffee, and empathy, rather than taking an adversarial approach.
I did suggest, however, that some of the passages in her new book, “In Full Color: Finding My Place in a Black and White World,” were outrageous and possibly specious. Dolezal shrugged. “I don’t expect everyone to agree with or believe me,” she said. Among her claims: she grew up living in a tee pee in Montana (my Native American percentage shudders). She was beaten by her parents and forced to weave and wear a coat loomed from dog hair. She identified with people of color from an early age, after reading her grandmother’s National Geographic magazines, and spread mud on her face to try to feel what it was like to have brown skin. Dolezal has said some very polemical things, some — dare I say — dumb things, that do not make her a sympathetic figure. Comparing her white Montana childhood to what chattel slaves experienced, even if indeed she was miserable, is a stretch by any measure, and engendered rightful animus from real black folks…Read the Rest Here
Black folks can be Jewish. Some claim black folks from Ethiopia were one of the original tribes. This fascinating history is about the formation of what was probably the first black Jewish Congregation in America.
A plantation houseboy grew up to be a prophet—and inspired a religious movement.
More than 1,000 men and women gathered this past week in coastal Virginia to celebrate Passover and retell the ancient story of how Moses led the Israelites from bondage to freedom. They were observing holiday traditions that Jews all across the world observe—only these celebrants were not Jews.
Their memories of slavery and liberation concerned not a distant past in Egypt, but a story set in the United States. Their prophet was an African American man born into slavery. He preached to a Christian audience, telling them to incorporate Hebraic practices into their faith out of a desire to return to the true Church as he envisioned it, and based his new Church on both Old and New Testaments. Their Promised Land was a plot in Virginia where descendants of black men and women could gather and be safe from the scourge of white supremacy.
Temple Beth El in Belleville is the headquarters of the Church of God and Saints of Christ, the largest and oldest organization of Hebrew Israelites in the country. Hebrew Israelites are people of color, mostly African American, who identify as descendants of the biblical Israelites. Passover is among the holiest weeks on this group’s calendar. Members travel from across the country and abroad to spend days in near-constant worship in a place they call Canaan Land, after the land promised by God to Abraham in the book of Genesis.
“Just as Israelites of the Bible had their Land of Canaan filled with milk and honey, this is our land of milk and honey,” said Melvin Smith, 46, a fourth-generation congregant from nearby Portsmouth, Virginia. “This is our refuge.”
The group remains little known outside its own ranks, despite over a century of history, tens of thousands of members, and outposts that fan across America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Religion scholars are given scarce, if any, access to the organization’s archives. Leadership guards the legacy of the group closely. Photography is rarely permitted inside sanctuaries. Internal materials, like the group’s unique hymnal, are not to be reproduced or shared with outsiders.
“The Church of God and Saints of Christ is one of the most important religious bodies in America that few people have ever heard of,” said Jacob Dorman, professor of history at the University of Kansas and author of Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions.
At an evening service last week, hundreds of congregants filed into pews. The sanctuary, opened only on special holidays, was filled nearly to capacity. Saints, as members call themselves, were dressed in the formal garb that has been part of their tradition for generations. The men wore sashes across their shoulders, long-tailed suit jackets, black kippahs, and white gloves. Some wore thin white prayer shawls, or tallits, on their necks. The women were dressed in sashes, brown pleated skirts, and brightly colored headdresses fixed with glittering brooches.
At the center of the room was a large Torah ark decorated with a fabric banner that read “Shalom” in Hebrew, flanked by two seven-pronged menorahs. The chief rabbi, a retired math professor named Phillip E. McNeil, stood behind the pulpit. At 75, he exudes a quiet authority. He spoke lightly into a microphone and the crowd hushed. They had been worshipping together for a week straight. “Are you tired yet?” McNeil joked. “There’s nothing like worshiping the God of Israel, is there?”
A younger evangelist followed McNeil onto the stage and picked up the Passover theme, which ran through almost every sermon. “I’m here to remember that day we came out of Egypt,” Frank Johnson said. “In every age, He’s still passing over, still executing judgment, still demanding that the oppressed go free.”
A choir of hundreds broke into song, complex four-part a capella sung by heart. The lyrics of the songs are composed by congregants and delivered to them, it’s said, through divine dreams. This evening’s choir master pumped his fists in the air, readjusting the kippah on his head as music filled the sanctuary.
Collin McGhie, from North Carolina, sang along, shifting his weight from right to left and clapping. McGhie was raised a Seventh-day Adventist and joined this organization six years ago. “I come here for a spiritual recharge,” McGhie said.
This past week, it seemed that not only McGhie but the entire congregation had come to spiritually recharge and regain its balance. Last year, the group’s leader, Chief Rabbi Jehu August Crowdy, died suddenly just before Passover. He was only 46. The organization reeled. McNeil was quickly selected to take his place. This Passover marked a year since McNeil assumed the position.
The late Crowdy was the great-grandson of a man named William Saunders Crowdy, who founded the Church of God and Saints of Christ in 1896. He was born in Maryland in 1847 and spent his childhood as an enslaved houseboy on a plantation where his mother was a cook. As a free adult, Crowdy was one of a generation of spiritual leaders who taught that African Americans were descended from the Israelites of the bible—and that they should return to this ancient way of life….Read More About This Fascinating Group Here…
Two black Judges found dead in two days. The second under mysterious circumstances.
To tell the truth, after the sleazebags went to extremes to force the illegitimate Gorsuch on the Courts, and with the appointment of Sessions as AG…
I really don’t doubt the possibility of their murdering Judges to whiten the Courts.
Cook County Associate Judge Raymond Myles
Chicago police have arrested a man in connection with the shooting death of a Cook county judge in what police described as a “targeted robbery.”
Joshua Smith, 37, turned himself in to answer detectives’ questions Wednesday and was later charged with first-degree murder and other charges in the death of Associate Judge Raymond Myles, who was shot multiple times outside his home at around 5 a.m. on Monday.
Ballistics evidence matched a gun used in a January robbery where a victim was shot and wounded, and surveillance video captured the license plate of a vehicle seen leaving the scene, Chicago Police Chief of Detectives Melissa Staples said at a press conference.
“The motive of this crime is robbery, which we do not believe is random — nor do we believe Smith acted alone,” she said.
A female friend who worked out with Myles had first encountered the gunman on Monday morning. Words were exchanged and she was shot in the leg, police said. Myles was coming to her aid when he was fatally shot, although he was not the target of the robbery, NBC Chicago reported, citing police.
Smith was convicted of armed robbery with a firearm in 2003 and served six years in prison, Staples said.
Staples at Wednesday’s press conference would not say who the target of the robbery was or how many other people may have been involved, citing the ongoing investigation. She said more details could emerge at a bond hearing scheduled for Thursday.
Associate Judge Sheila Abdus-Salaam, the first African-American woman to be appointed to New York’s Court of Appeals, was found dead on Wednesday in the Hudson River.
She had been reported missing from her home in Harlem.
The New York Times reports:
“Officers with the New York Police Department’s Harbor Unit responded about 1:45 p.m. to a report of a person floating by the shore near West 132nd Street in Upper Manhattan.
“Judge Abdus-Salaam, 65, was taken to a pier on the Hudson River and was pronounced dead by paramedics shortly after 2 p.m.
“The police were investigating how she ended up in the river, and it was not clear how long Judge Abdus-Salaam, who lived nearby in Harlem, had been missing.
“There were no signs of trauma on her body, the police said. She was fully clothed.
“A law enforcement official said investigators had found no signs of criminality. Her husband identified her body.”
Abdus-Salaam became the first female Muslim to serve as a U.S. judge when she joined the New York State Supreme Court in 1994, according to Zakiyyah Muhammad, the founding director of the Institute of Muslim American Studies, as quoted in The Times.
In 2013, Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D-N.Y., appointed her to the state’s highest court, known as the Court of Appeals.
In a statement, Cuomo said Judge Abdus-Salaam was a pioneer with an “unshakable moral compass.”
Her nomination was part of a push by Cuomo to diversify the court.
When Judge Rowan Wilson joined the court this year, it was the first time the state’s highest court had two African-American judges serving on it.
In a statement, Chief Judge Janet DiFiore said Abdus-Salaam’s “personal warmth, uncompromising sense of fairness and bright legal mind were an inspiration to all of us who had the good fortune to know her.”
The Court of Appeals has been on recess since the end of last month. The court is due back in session in less than two weeks.
Talk about hitting it over the fences out past the parking lot! This set of quadruplets was accepted (every one of them) at Harvard and Yale – as well as a list of some of the best schools in America. WTG Wade brothers!
(L-R), Nigel, Zach, Aaron and Nick.)
Nick Wade was at track practice late one afternoon last week when he found out. The 18-year-old checked his phone and learned that he had made it into the Ivy League.
“One by one,” he said. “I found out I had gotten into my schools.”
Wade is a quadruplet, though, with three brothers on his high school track team who had also applied to Ivy schools. So about that time on Thursday, they were learning their fates, too.
There was Aaron, who was in the locker room when he logged on. And Nigel, who was stretching out when his brothers told him to check. Zach was going to wait until practice was over, but his brothers weren’t having it.
“It would have taken like 20 more minutes,” Zach said, who said the siblings checked for him. “But they couldn’t wait that long.”
That is how the Wade quadruplets, of Liberty Township, Ohio, learned that all four had been accepted at Harvard and Yale universities — offers that added to a pretty impressive pile of potential college destinations.
“We’re still in shock, honestly,” Aaron said this week. “I don’t think it has sunk in yet.”
“I just felt blessed at that moment,” Nigel said. “It was an unreal feeling, I guess.”
“Honestly, to have one child from a family be accepted to a school like this is amazing,” Zach said. “But for all four to be accepted — I just don’t, I don’t know how it happened.”
The Post reviewed screenshots of admission notifications and copies of letters the Wades received to confirm their authenticity.
Besides Harvard and Yale, the Wade brothers have loads of options for the next four years. Nick got into Duke, Georgetown and Stanford. Aaron is in at Stanford, too. Nigel made the cut with Johns Hopkins and Vanderbilt, and Zach with Cornell.
That list does not cover all the schools that offered them admission. But you get the idea. These seniors at Lakota East High School are in high demand.
“The outcome has shocked us,” Aaron Wade said. “We didn’t go into this thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to apply to all these schools and get into all of them.’ It wasn’t so much about the prestige or so much about the name as it was — it was important that we each find a school where we think that we’ll thrive, and where we think that we’ll contribute.”
Harvard said it doesn’t comment on the admission status of prospective students, and doesn’t formally track how many students are admitted as twins, triplets, quads or other multiple-birth sets. Yale said in an email that as a policy, the university doesn’t discuss admitted students.
More than 32,000 people applied for Yale’s Class of 2021, according to the university’s website. Of them, 2,272 were admitted. Harvard said 2,056 students were admitted this year out of an applicant pool that exceeded 39,000.
“When we would joke about it,” Aaron said, “it was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to be the one who gets rejected. You guys all have fun at Harvard.’ ”
This is not the first set of quadruplets that Yale has admitted. A few years ago, Kenny, Martina, Ray and Carol Crouch learned that they had earned early admission slots with the university. All four ended up picking Yale, according to the New York Times.
Darrin Wade, 51, father of this year’s quartet of academic stars, said that when his wife, Kim, was pregnant, the couple was initially told they were having twins. A few weeks later, they learned that was incorrect.
“I remember they were doing an ultrasound and they said, ‘Mr. Wade, you better sit down.’ I said, ‘What’s going on?’ They said, ‘There’s not two. There’s four,’ ” Wade said. “It was really at that point in time that I tried to figure out how we’re going to pay for school.”
Darrin Wade, who works for General Electric, and his wife, a school principal, have saved some money for their sons’ educations. But the father said it’s not enough to fully fund four sets of tuition for four years at full price at elite private universities. The mother and father are mindful of their own need for retirement funds, too.
“We have to make sure that we’re helping them down the road by not being a financial burden on them when we get older,” Wade said.
Like a number of other elite schools, Harvard and Yale pledge to meet the full demonstrated financial need of the students they admit.
This school year, Yale charges more than $64,000 for tuition, fees, room and board, (before taking into account financial aid). The comparable price at Harvard is about $63,000.
“Financial aid is going to be a big player in our decision,” Nick Wade said.
Here are a few notes on the boys from the father.
Aaron is the most artistic of the bunch, and the father described him as comfortable in his own skin. He was the first born of the fraternal quadruplets.
“Aaron has classic first-child syndrome,” he said. “He’s a minute older than his brothers, two minutes older than everybody else, maybe. And he’s a classic first child.”
The most segregated places in America are oddly northern midwest cities. In that list are Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland.
According to a Study by Johns Hopkins a a few years ago, racism in America quite literally lops off about $2 trillion of our GDP. Just the loss of GDP due to racism in America is larger than the GDP of all but 10 countries in the world.
Racism has other impacts on the social fabric and economic activity in this country, some of which are discussed below in the attached article.
China is now the world’s largest economy. The US is number 2. And it will remain so indefinitely until we make better use of our resources. The racist Trump, and his supporters in the white right, including the Republican Party value their racism more than their country… Which means we could soon be #3. Wow! That’s a “great” way to “Make America Great Again.”
The Chicago area is the fifth most racially and economically segregated region in the nation. A new study by the Metropolitan Planning Council and the Urban Institute examines how segregation affects the region financially and the price that all residents pay in “lost income, lives and education.”
The Cost of Segregation argues that reducing Chicago’s segregation could result in higher incomes, greater educational achievement and fewer homicides across the region. Incomes for African-Americans would rise an average of $2,982 per person per year and the Chicago region’s gross domestic product, a key indicator of economic performance, would jump by $8 billion.
Alden Loury, director of research and evaluation for the Metropolitan Planning Council and an author of the study, talked to the Reporter about its findings.
What makes this study unique is that it explores how segregation affects economic growth and the quality of life for an entire city and region. We’ve read stories about Back of the Yards, Austin and other communities of color defined by high poverty rates. What prompted researchers to frame the inequality in those communities from a regional and citywide standpoint?
The Metropolitan Planning Council a couple of years ago, long before I got there, embarked on this journey with essentially two questions. [First], we’re very aware that we are a very segregated region. We’re a segregated city within that region. … There also was an understanding that in order for us to really address segregation and really commit ourselves to addressing segregation maybe the region needed more people to feel impacted.
“So is there a way we can kind of quantify those costs?” That was the first question. The second question was, “So what do we do about whatever we find?”… That kind of launched us on this path. We reached out to the Urban Institute, which had done similar work.
The premise of the study is that the region would do better if we addressed segregation in three areas: lost income, lost lives and lost opportunity, with a focus on education. Let’s start with the city’s homicide rate, which ranks 8th out of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest murder rates. The study states that the Chicago area could have boosted its economy simply by being “a safe place to live.” How is that?
When [the Urban Institute] conducted its analysis, it found a statistically significant relationship between Chicago, and between all of the metro areas, their level of black-white segregation and their rate of homicides.
If the Chicago region were to fall from 10th, which is where it ranked [in black-white segregation] to the median between 50 and 51, the Urban Institute determined that we would see a 30-percent reduction in homicide. That’s based on the lower levels of homicides that are generally found in regions that have less segregation than Chicago.
We wanted to find out what does that actually mean in real-life costs in the Chicago region. So we leaned on supplemental research, in particular research done by the Center for American Progress just a couple of years ago, where they actually asked that question: “What would happen if eight major metros saw a 10 percent or a 25 -percent reduction in the levels of homicide?”
For Chicago what the Center for American Progress found was lower policing costs, lower corrections costs and earnings [that would have occurred] if there were fewer victims of homicide. And there would also be a boost in residential property values based on research that the Center for American Progress conducted, which found that growth in homicides equated to a decline in residential property values. We took those numbers that the Center for American Progress developed and extrapolated them based on the Urban Institute’s prediction that the Chicago region would see a 30-percent reduction in homicides. … What that equated to was $65 million of policing and fewer policing cost, $218 million fewer corrections cost and the $6 billion bump in the residential property values for the entire region.
Between 1990 and 2010, two-thirds of the nation’s largest regions reduced their economic segregation more than Chicago did. Chicago declined by 10 percent, but to keep up it would have to decline by 19 percent in terms of economic segregation, 28 percent in terms of Latino-white segregation and 36 percent in terms of African-American and white segregation. Why did other cities make more progress than Chicago in reducing segregation?
The analysis gives us more of the what than it does the why. And so in the second phase of our work, we are seeking input from a whole host of experts and stakeholders around what policies and strategies we should recommend to address the segregation. We also want to take a look at some places that have seen a sharper drop in economic segregation, that have seen stronger progress in terms of mostly black-white segregation. And then also looking inward because Chicago has seen declines across the board and is in fact the only metro area of those 100 metro areas that saw from 1990 to 2000 and from 2000 to 2010 minor drops in all three of those measures of segregation.
There’s a difference in the segregation gap between African-Americans and whites and Latinos and whites. Why does it vary so much in Chicago?
The level of black-white segregation is measured by something the Urban Institute used called the spatial proximity index. In Chicago in 2010 that number was 1.87. That number was 1.5 for the Chicago region in terms of Latinos and whites. And so there are differences. And across the nation, generally speaking, the levels of black-white segregation were higher than the measures for Latino-white segregation.
It’s not 100 percent clear at least from the research why that is. [Surveys in Chicago] have shown among the white respondents that there is a greater willingness to live next to Latino neighbors than to African-American neighbors. Some of the other things that may play a part in that is that as Latino migration has increased dramatically over the past 40 years or so, there are greater entry points and perhaps more opportunities that have been explored by Latinos.
In Chicago the way that’s played out is Latinos initially were migrating to the city. But increasingly over the last 20, maybe 30 years or so, that destination has trended toward the suburbs. As a result, that has produced a kind of a lessening of segregation because Latinos are found throughout the suburban regions of Chicago far more often than you’ll find African-Americans. African-Americans are largely in two clusters to the south and to the west in suburban Chicago. Latinos are far more spread out, and their numbers are higher in the suburbs and in more places.
To some degree, at least through the surveys that we’ve seen, there is perhaps less of a reaction to Latino neighbors. But that’s not to say that there isn’t white flight in response to Latino migration or other challenges. … While we don’t present any statistically significant findings of the cost of Latino-white segregation [in the study], we see greater amounts of gentrification in Latino neighborhoods that are seeing an influx of white residents. And while Latinos are more suburbanized, they, generally speaking, are more likely to be segregated in more deindustrialized and declining communities in the suburbs. And Latino children are more likely to be in largely Latino schools serving low-income students.
They are black and brown…So don’t expect any national outcry.
A bit of an untold story here, of Ronald Reagan’s daughter adopting a child from Uganda.
Ronald Reagan’s First Wife, Jane Wyman, and her granddaughter, Rita at Maureen Reagan’s Funeral
Sometimes a story grabs hold of you and won’t let go. President Reagan’s valiant fight against Alzheimer’s disease is in that category for me. I wasn’t a fan of Reagan’s policies, but there was something about the man, and the way he played the role of a lifetime. A visitor to his Century City office after he left the White House told the story of reminding Reagan that he was once President, and he asked, “How’d I do?”
Newsweek did a cover story on “the long goodbye” in the fall of 1995 when Reagan was still in the earlier stages of the disease that would take his life a decade later, in 2004. During the course of my reporting the story, Mrs. Reagan told me that one of the things that gave her husband pleasure was teaching the newest addition to the family how to swim in the heated pool at their Bel-Air home.
“Rita is a real ‘water baby,’ thanks to our pool and my husband,” Mrs. Reagan wrote in a written response to questions, describing then 10-year-old Rita Mirembe Revell, the child that her stepdaughter, Maureen Reagan, and her husband Dennis Revell, had adopted from Uganda. Newsweek asked for photos. We didn’t get them, but I always wondered what happened to Rita.
The last public sighting of her was at her mother’s funeral in 2001. Rita was 16; her mother was 60 when she died after a five-year battle with melanoma that had spread to her brain. Maureen Reagan was Reagan’s daughter with his first wife, the actress Jane Wyman. At her mother’s funeral, Rita was seen holding tight onto Wyman, who looked frail and distraught.
That’s more than 15 years ago, and Maureen’s siblings from Reagan’s second marriage to Nancy, Patti Davis and Ron Reagan, who knew Rita as a child, have not seen her since Maureen’s funeral, and don’t know where she is or what she’s doing. Ron Reagan, who was traveling in Europe when I reached out to him, responded in an email that “my late wife, Doria, and I knew her as a vivacious child when she first came to the U.S., but over the years–difficult years, many of them, for Rita, or so I heard secondhand –we lost track.”
He points out that when she lost her mother, Rita was a teenager, “a phase that is confusing and painful for many young people, even under the best of circumstances,” and that Rita drifted away. She did not attend Mrs. Reagan’s funeral last year, and her adoptive father, Dennis Revell, Maureen’s husband, did not include her name in a statement he released upon Mrs. Reagan’s death, in which he recalled spending many Christmases with his mother-in-law.
“That said, she may be thriving,” Ron Reagan wrote about Rita. “She was always bright and personable. There is no guarantee, however, that her story is positive or edifying.”
Rita is on Facebook with the surname Reagan and in her profile photo and the few pictures she has posted looks every bit as vibrant as the child Ron Reagan remembers. Her page is not fully public, and she did not respond to a message that I left explaining my interest in finding her. Dennis Revell, who heads a public-relations firm in Sacramento, responded to my email saying neither he nor Rita wish to cooperate in any story about immigration.
In a recent post on Facebook, she tells friends wondering what she’s up to, “I have been hiding and being sanctified.”
She’s certainly entitled to her privacy, and perhaps in due time she will tell her story. In these times of division and partisanship, the story of how President Reagan’s Ugandan grandchild became a permanent resident of the United States is worth telling, and worth hearing. It shows people of goodwill pulling together and overcoming barriers within a legal system that those in power can tweak to do the right thing when there is a common goal.
It begins with Maureen and her husband and their support of the Daughters of Charity orphanages in Uganda. They first met Rita when she was three years old. When Dennis made a return visit, this child who had been abandoned in Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and whose actual date of birth was unknown, clung to him and wouldn’t stop crying after he left.
“And I said, ‘Dennis, I think she’s adopted you. What do you think about that? And he says, “Fine with me.’ It took us five years, but we got her,” Maureen told ABC’s Barbara Walters in 2001, when what’s known as a “private bill” in Congress recognized Rita as the couple’s “immediate relative child.”
Uganda had very restrictive adoption laws, and the Revells initially gained custody as Rita’s legal guardians. They brought her home to California on a student visa. She was eight years old and attended a private parochial school in Sacramento.
By the time it was established under Ugandan law that Rita was an orphan, and eligible for adoption by the only parents she knew, Maureen was battling cancer and too ill to make the trip to Uganda to finalize the adoption.
That’s when Congress went to work. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch sponsored the private bill in the Senate to grant Rita permanent residence in the United States as did Texas Democrat Sheila Jackson Lee in the House. Republican James Sensenbrenner chaired the House Judiciary committee then, as he does today, and Congresswoman Lee, a member of the committee then as now, entered into the record a statement about the facts of the case and, noting Maureen Reagan’s grave illness, and her inability to travel, that the only way to “assure that Rita remains a part of their family in the United States is through this private bill.”
The bill passed by unanimous consent in the House and Senate, where Hatch chaired the Judiciary Committee, and President George W. Bush signed it into law on July 19, 2001. “Rita is so excited because, like so many adopted children, her one wish was to have a family… Now, she not only has a family, she has a whole country. But also, she knows this news is the best medicine her mother could have received right now,” said Revell. Maureen Reagan passed away just weeks later on August 8, 2001.
From the time they first met Rita in the orphanage, the Revells had provided support for her, and they did everything they were supposed to in accordance with the legal systems in both countries, the United States and Uganda, first gaining legal guardianship, then a student visa, and finally, through the intervention of Congress, permanent residency for Rita.
In addition to having a compelling case, as the daughter of a president, Maureen Reagan had the clout and the connections to get legislative relief. Private immigration bills sponsored by lawmakers are not as common as they once were, and in the toxic political environment around immigration issues today, they hearken back to an earlier, less contentious time.
Jewish people suffered under discrimination for a long time after coming to this country. Through hard work, financial success, and becoming major players in a number of industries… Jews in America became “white”. A few even joined groups which promoted discrimination agains non-whites.
The Chumph administration with a number of virulently anti-Semitic staff and extremist “pro-christian appointees, is set to push that back to the last century to a time when they used to lynch people for being Jewish.
Those who believe that America will remain a safe haven for Jewish people under Trumpbest remember the lynching of Leo Frank
Trump’s election has reopened questions that have long seemed settled in America—including the acceptability of open discrimination against minority groups.
When Stephen Bannon called his website, Breitbart, the “platform for the alt-right” this summer, he was referring to a movement that promotes white nationalism and argues that the strength of the United States is tied to its ethnic European roots. Its members mostly stick to trolling online, but much of what they do isn’t original or new: Their taunts often involve vicious anti-Semitism. They make it clear that Jews are not included in their vision of a perfect, white, ethno-state.
On the opposite side of American politics, many progressive groups are preparing to mount a rebellion against Donald Trump. They see solidarity among racial minorities as their goal, and largely blame Trump’s election on racism and white supremacy. Three-quarters of American Jews voted against Trump, and many support this progressive vision. Some members of these groups, though, have singled out particular Jews for their collusion with oppressive power—criticisms which range from inflammatory condemnations of Israel to full-on conspiraciesabout global Jewish media and banking cabals.
These are rough sketches of two camps, concentrated at the margins of U.S. political culture. On the extreme right, Jews are seen as impure—a faux-white race that has tainted America. And on the extreme left, Jews are seen as part of a white-majority establishment that seeks to dominate people of color. Taken together, these attacks raise an interesting question: Are Jews white?
“Jewish identity in American is inherently paradoxical and contradictory,” said Eric Goldstein, an associate professor of history at Emory University. “What you have is a group that was historically considered, and considered itself, an outsider group, a persecuted minority. In the space of two generations, they’ve become one of the most successful, integrated groups in American society—by many accounts, part of the establishment. And there’s a lot of dissonance between those two positions.”
As pro- and anti-Trump movements jockey to realize their agendas, the question of Jews and whiteness illustrates the high stakes—and dangers—of racialized politics. Jews, who do not fit neatly into American racial categories, challenge both sides’ visions for the country. Over time, Jews have become more integrated into American society—a process scholars sometimes refer to as “becoming white.” It wasn’t the skin color of Ashkenazi Jews of European descent that changed, though; it was their status. Trump’s election has convinced some Jews that they remain in the same position as they have throughout history: perpetually set apart from other groups through their Jewishness, and thus left vulnerable.
From the earliest days of the American republic, Jews were technically considered white, at least in a legal sense. Under the Naturalization Act of 1790, they were considered among the “free white persons” who could become citizens. Later laws limited the number of immigrants from certain countries, restrictions which were in part targeted at Jews. But unlike Asian and African immigrants in the late 19th century, Jews retained a claim to being “Caucasian,” meaning they could win full citizenship status based on their putative race.
Culturally, though, the racial status of Jews was much more ambiguous. Especially during the peak of Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many Jews lived in tightly knit urban communities that were distinctly marked as separate from other American cultures: They spoke Yiddish, they published their own newspapers, they followed their own schedule of holidays and celebrations. Those boundaries were further enforced by widespread anti-Semitism: Jews were often excluded from taking certain jobs, joining certain clubs, or moving into certain neighborhoods. Insofar as “whiteness” represents acceptance in America’s dominant culture, Jews were not yet white.
Over time, though, they assimilated. Just like other white people, they fled to the suburbs. They took advantage of educational opportunities like the G.I. bill. They became middle class. “They thought they were becoming white,” said Lewis Gordon, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. “Many of them stopped speaking Yiddish. Many of them stopped going to synagogue. Many of them stopped wearing the accoutrements of Jewishness.” Jews think about questions of race in their own lives with incredible diversity. There are many different kinds of Jews: Orthodox, secular, Reform; Jews by birth, Jews by choice, Jews by conversion. Some Jews who aren’t particularly religious may identify as white, but others may feel that their Jewishness is specifically linked to their ethnic inheritance. “If you’re a secular Jew, how are you a Jew? It has to be through your cultural or ethnic identity,” said Gordon. “Whereas if you’re a religious Jew, you would argue that you’re a Jew primarily through your religious practices.” As Jews assimilated into American culture, “ironically, investment in religiosity paved the way for greater white identification of many Jews,” he said, allowing more religiously observant Jews to think of themselves as white, rather than ethnically Jewish.
Goldstein sees it differently. “‘Whiteness’ and engagement with the categories of ‘white’ and ‘black’ are a reflection of a level of acculturation into a larger society,” he said. The Orthodox are “not just religiously different [from other Jews], but … socially separated,” he added. “They tend to see the world through the lens of their own community.” In other words, their categories for understanding themselves and others might not be “white” and “non-white”; they’re more likely to be “Jewish” and “non-Jewish.”...Read the Rest Here…
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The New Jim Crow, More Sneaky Than the Old
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