Description: wonder, wisdom and whimsy from Rabbi Laura Novak Winer, RJE
Over the last couple years I have been on a deep journey of inner exploration, learning, and reflection about race, power, and privilege. In an effort to live as an anti-racist, to work toward the end of hate, discrimination and racism in my community, our country and the world, one part of my personal work has involved reading books by Black authors, about the Black experience, and about the dynamics of racism in America.
I embarked on this practice as a Jew living in America. I know that I “pass” as White in many spaces. Yet, at the same time, I consider myself to be “conditionally White,” for once my Jewish identity is revealed, the dynamics often change. I have experienced marginalization, other-ing, and hate. And, at the same time, I know I have power and privilege that my friends of color do not.
I have learned so much about my own implicit biases, which seem to have become imbedded in my psyche through societal osmosis, because I surely didn’t receive them from my family, and which I continue to battle with every day. I have learned about moments in American history which tragically I was not taught about as a child, even in the progressive and diverse public schools I attended in Los Angeles.