It worries me that I’ll be sending my mostly imaginary half-Dominican children to Orthodox day schools when I read articles like this one, Racial Comments ‘Shock’ Principals in Jewish Week.
Day School Obama Backlash
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Memoirs of a Jewminicana 
The kinds of comments going around day schools today are the same kinds of comments I heard in my day school years ago. In particular, I am recalling a discussion I had in class (almost 10 years ago) with someone who contended that “You would be more scared to see a Black person walking down the street [toward you] than a White person.” Since most of my classmates had no idea where I came from, the speaker couldn’t have known how quotidian it was for me to have a Black person walk down the street toward me. But, that was when it really became clear to me that a lack of exposure to people of different races actually makes a difference. It’s not “meeting” others that makes a difference, and it’s not having a token friend of another race. It’s about being so familiar with people of other races that encountering them feels mundane. When you have only one Black friend, encountering Black people as a whole is not mundane. When there are Black people in the neighborhood that you see around all the time, then you have been exposed to Black people and they are familiar to you, even if none of them are your friends.Of course, getting that to happen with yeshiva students will require hell to freeze over first, particularly because Orthodox Jews have xenophobia toward non-Jews in general, never mind people of other races.
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maybe your kids will help everyone else get a grip
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I find it interesting that in spite of the sentence, “But there are too many disturbing statements from “the mouths of babes” to deny or ignore the problem,” NOT ONE is quoted in the article! And as far as being more afraid of blacks than whites, that is firmly rooted in the disproportionately high amount of criminal activity amongst blacks. Let’s not confuse racism with realism.
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Serial killers are disproportionately white, do you suggest I judge all whites by the same standards? When we are not treating people as individuals, we will suffer from the divisiveness of hate (and racism).
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