I Am Not Black
By: Anthony Fieldman
Tags: Prejudice, White Privilege, BlackLivesMatter, Racism, Chance Encounters

My mentor and me © Mathew Guido 2019

Until I moved to the United States of America at the age of eighteen — for college — I had no idea that I was white.

I know how utterly ridiculous that sounds.

But it’s true. Growing up, I never once thought of myself as white, any more than I thought of my high school as diverse (it was), or that my social circle was, too. I didn’t realize that we looked like one of those Benetton ads — or even that the ads were making a statement. I didn’t realize that my black and Japanese family members were anything other than family. I didn’t realize that my very best friend was black. To me, he was just Nick. And until my eyes were opened following my move south of the border, and I began to discuss these discoveries with my mother — whose home framed my foundational understanding of other people, as a child — I never knew that my own grandmother had once asked her in confidence, “Doesn’t Anthony have any white friends?”

I learned about it in college. And I was dumbfounded.

Forget the fact that I did have white friends, and still do. The point I’m trying to make is that my friends and I were color-blind. And while I’m at it, we were also religion-blind, and orientation-blind. I had no idea that some of my friends were Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian, any more than I knew that two of my close friends were gay, and that one of those was also black. I’d never have known, either, but for the fact that twenty years after we left high school — an experience that scarred him, deeply — we reconnected on Facebook, and he wrote me a long and intimate letter explaining his childhood trials, and to thank me for being his only friend.

It’s one of the most precious things anyone has ever written to me.

I had absolutely no idea about any of this. It never once entered my mind. I learned most of it upon leaving my childhood home and community, once I’d begun to set new roots in a nation that I quickly learned defines itself, by and large, by people’s differences; and that furthermore, these differences were seen as weapons on both sides.

It was, to say the least, disturbing. And honestly, thirty-three years later, it’s only gotten more so.

The seeds for my relationship to cultural, economic or ethnic difference were planted by my mother and mentor, Andrea. To her, ever and always, people were people, and you treated them on the basis their own individual merit. To her, every human was valuable, and our job was to recognize their virtuous qualities for what they were, without foisting our own egos or beliefs onto them. She was — and remains still — the most steadfast defender of goodness, and acceptance. The superficial things by which most of us define ourselves and others — ethnicity, religion, intellect, status, wealth and trappings — were to her, distractions from what truly mattered — someone’s character. Character, to my mother, was blind to every one of these things. It came from deeper within, and connected all of us, if only we were able to tap into it adequately. The universal truth of humanity — that we are all, at our emotional and spiritual cores, indistinguishable from one another, beneath the accretion of experience, outward capacity and cultural inheritance — was the greatest lesson I ever received. And for the 51 years that I’ve known her, she has never wavered in this. It has informed every action.

To provide just one small example, I recall the years that she ran the lunch program at my elementary school, as a parent. I saw her daily. Her job was to make sure we kids didn’t run amok. Except that she didn’t care a whit about that. Rather, she methodically collected all the uneaten food — good food that my fellow students invariably tried tossing out — and every day, she’d deliver it to certain waste bins near our home, where she’d observed a homeless person rifling through the trash daily, looking for scraps. For years, she fed this person, and on occasion would also add bags of used clothing in what she thought was their size, without ever once letting them know that she was behind it, or was committed to improving their lives in the quietest way she could. She is, by a giant margin, the most virtuous person I ever met. She has always given everything of herself in exchange for nothing, for no reason other than it was the right thing to do.

This was the value system with which I grew up.

I learned about the Americans’ cardinal prejudice against African Americans, and that they were thought of, at varying turns, as property, sub-human, and dangerous. I learned that Japanese Americans were rounded up after World War II and put into concentration camps, in the very country that helped to liberate Europe from a similar injustice — the targeted persecution of the ‘other’. I learned that stereotypes existed for every single group, including my own, and that these were liberally used in conversation, as though they were truths — as though one could generalize about any two people, let alone a whole race. Pejorative monikers — ethnic slurs — were lavished on everybody, for their race or culture, from n*gger to k*ke to w*p to d*go to ch*nk to w*tback to kr*ut to r*dskin to c**lie to d*nk to fr*g to hym*e to j*p to p*lack and even to sand n*gger — a double pejorative about North Africans — and a good two dozen other disgusting names.

It was there, within that context, that I learned, in high-definition, that I was considered white; and that my ability — the sheer luxury — not to think about race was a privilege. But while I knew I was Jewish, that we were persecuted throughout the centuries, and that a third of my people were systematically murdered just forty years earlier, I didn’t know that I was white. I think that’s partly because of others’ perpetual confusion over whether I am part of a religion or a race. Well, I don’t practice any religion; and my DNA — I now know, thanks to Ancestry.com — is genetically (ethnically) distinct from that of non-Jews. Another discovery! Maybe this is why I never knew which box to tick on application forms that queried my ‘race’. For years, I kept looking for ‘Jewish’. I saw ‘Middle Eastern’ and thought maybe that was me; or the word ‘Arab’ and thought, “Well, we’re ‘cousins’, so maybe I should fill out that one, since there isn’t a box for me.” I was confused, because I’d never been made to look at myself in the light of difference, apart from having ancestors who were driven out, or socially or ethnically cleansed.

And so here I was, a first timer in the United States at eighteen, learning that my open-mindedness and ‘everything-blindness’ meant I was privileged. And measured by my newly discovered whiteness, I was; because unless I elected to offer up my religious background to anyone who asked, I was seen as white, and therefore considered a member of a group that is largely — almost entirely — free of entrenched prejudice.

And so given that I was now living in an environment of visible prejudice for the first time, I kept my mouth shut about my religious parentage. You know, as post-World War Jews do.

I also learned that other people don’t have it so good. I learned that many human beings who belonged to a group that is marginalized by the American public have had a pretty sh*tty life — made to endure consistent harassment or exclusion, or been beaten or killed, at the hands of the in-group, because of their color, their traditional clothing, their accent, or the sex of the target of their affections.

I learned that people were lazy, insofar as instead of looking — really looking — at the people they met, white and otherwise, and in lieu of engaging people in mutual conversational discovery, they they glanced at one another, and sometimes not even that, and then pre-judged everything about them by utterly superficial preconceptions.

So Instead of hating xenophobia, they practiced it.

Instead of attacking bigots, they became them.

Instead of fighting intolerance, they championed it.

Instead of indulging curiosity, they shut their minds.

Instead of presuming others’ innocence, they baselessly declared guilt.

And instead of seeking similarity, they focused on difference, and used it as a weapon.

I had reached adulthood, to be pummeled by a waterfall of ugliness.

So, no, I am not black. And because I’m not black, I cannot understand what it is to be black. Never mind the people in my life whose stories I’ve heard, and whose company I’ve kept.

Empathy is not experience.

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It never will be. The best I can do — the best we can do — is to be curious, and to exercise that curiosity by spending time with others whose story is different from ours. Even if we do this intuitively, as I mostly have, we need to do more than just hang out with a diverse group of people; because while my relationships are still broadly diverse, by and large, it is not enough to simply be blind to others’ difference. Rather — and this is the nut of it — until we exercise willful curiosity about what makes them different; until we solicit and internalize the personal stories they tell us — stories of persecution or hardship, and at the same time, cultural inheritance or pride — we cannot possibly become champions for their causes and join their fight for acceptance, on their terms.

That’s because to not be part of the problem is very, very different from being part of the solution. And to be part of the solution, one has to have a certain quality of empathy — the kind of empathy that only comes from intellectual and emotional intimacy.

It’s very easy to tell ourselves ‘this is not our problem’. One of the most brilliant and well-known confessions ever written was penned by a German pastor named Martin Niemöller, following the end of World War II. He wrote it as a cautionary tale about our responsibility to one another, as human beings who share a community and a higher order of purpose. It is called First They Came… Here is the version we usually see:

First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out for me

With that said, it’s worth sharing the unabridged confession — one few of us have seen, in full — because it is illuminating and insightful, especially in the context of today’s intolerance, and inaction:

“… the people who were put in the camps then were Communists. Who cared about them? We knew it, it was printed in the newspapers. Who raised their voice, maybe the Confessing Church? We thought: Communists, those opponents of religion, those enemies of Christians — “should I be my brother’s keeper?”

Then they got rid of the sick, the so-called incurables. I remember a conversation I had with a person who claimed to be a Christian. He said: Perhaps it’s right, these incurably sick people just cost the state money, they are just a burden to themselves and to others. Isn’t it best for all concerned if they are taken out of the middle [of society]? Only then did the church as such take note.

Then we started talking, until our voices were again silenced in public. Can we say, we aren’t guilty/responsible?

The persecution of the Jews, the way we treated the occupied countries, or the things in Greece, in Poland, in Czechoslovakia or in Holland, that were written in the newspapers. … I believe, we Confessing-Church-Christians have every reason to say: mea culpa, mea culpa! We can talk ourselves out of it with the excuse that it would have cost me my head if I had spoken out.

We preferred to keep silent. We are certainly not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in the year 1933 or 1934 — there must have been a possibility — 14,000 Protestant pastors and all Protestant communities in Germany had defended the truth until their deaths? If we had said back then, it is not right when Hermann Göring simply puts 100,000 Communists in the concentration camps, in order to let them die. I can imagine that perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 Protestant Christians would have had their heads cut off, but I can also imagine that we would have rescued 30–40,000 million [sic] people, because that is what it is costing us now.”

Niemöller’s words are prescient not only because he understood that silence (inaction) could lead xenophobic people to send innocent groups of people to their slaughter, but also because he understood that a bad seed planted early could lead to disaster later, while conversely, timely virtuous acts could (have) avert(ed) a future catastrophe. As the saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

We know better now. We have had recent enough holocausts — the Rohinga, the Bosniacs, the Tutsi, the Kurds… — to know what happens when we keep silent — when we turn a blind eye. And yet: few of us, sadly, will make short-term sacrifice for long-term gain, in any sphere, interpersonal, environmental or economic; and even fewer of us will make personal sacrifices, or take personal risks, for something from which we perceive ourselves to be personally exempt, even if doing so is right, is virtuous, and will make a better community for all of us.

But that doesn’t make it any less important. It doesn’t excuse us from acting with virtue, kindness, understanding, humility and empathy.

Children know this intuitively. They are naturally drawn to one another’s emotional qualities, in lieu of their trappings. It is we who teach them otherwise—to corrupt the purity of their interactions, and color-indifference.

Beyond color© Anthony Fieldman 2016

Doing so admittedly takes practice — lots of it, especially if we aren’t used to actively soliciting a deeper understanding of ‘the other’. It takes a high dose of curiosity, willfully exercised in an act of deep discovery of people who are unlike us. It also takes the investment of our sustained focus, so that we can internalize their lessons. And it takes the recognition that this type of investment is a foundational human virtue — one that pays incredible dividends in the form of insights, to which active listening, internalized, leads.

Said another way, we don’t need to be color-blind; we need to be color-sensitive.

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So no, I’m not black. I frankly don’t know what I am. Sometimes my feeling about the answer changes. Certainly, over the years, it has evolved. There are so many dimensions to someone’s character. We are kaleidoscopes of values, features and descriptors. And while some do not change, others can become unrecognizable from what they were, just a few years earlier. But what I know is this: I know what I am not. And I know that for every vilified person whose traits I don’t share, I am privileged by not having to walk in their shoes. But I know more than that — something equally important. I know that for everything I am not, I am also disadvantaged, because there are insights I may never have into things that would expand my understanding of the rich nature of difference. There is beauty in diversity, whether it’s ethnic, religious, cultural or sexual. Diversity — of thought, of action, of cultural inheritance, and yes — of physiognomy, too — is among the greatest qualities of our species.

Diversity is to be celebrated, not hidden, misunderstood, or tyrannized.

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We cannot celebrate what we don’t know or understand, intimately. And without an adequate investment in building that intimacy with ‘the other’ — or the benefit of the insights that emerge from it — our world remains very black and white.

It loses all of its glorious color.