On History, Race and Sexuality, Purple Toenails and All

In 1995 I came to America for the summer trying to make sure that I wanted to come and live here. Since people were extremely friendly, I thought it would be useful to ask the American people questions about how they solved their discrimination problems and maybe write a book to enlighten my people, whoever they are, but mainly for my soul, to understand what we've been through under communism. It was an exciting experiment.
I went home, transcribed some of the interviews, then I moved to America and for the next 10 years, life chewed me up, and spat me out only now.
It is a debt of honor to finalize this work I called "Are We Tooo White To Be Gypsies?". I hope it speaks to you. What you'll read now are snippets from the entire material, still in the works.

Stan Markowitz and Dottye Burt-Markowitz were my hosts in Baltimore.
Stan is a white Professor of American History, African American History and American Indian History at Community College of Baltimore County and social activist.

“My consciousness was being raised by the civil rights movement. I grew up in Newark, New Jersey which had a large black population, so I knew about segregation, about the tensions between blacks and whites. My parents were like most Americans racist in some ways. My father especially, thought black people inferior. My mother was not so much so.”
“How did they react when you started to be interested in civil rights? Or they didn’t know about it?”
“My father didn’t really understand it. We never talked about it, because we would argue. But I got into arguments with many people in my family. I had an uncle who was very prejudiced and who told me that he would move out of his house if a black family moved into his neighborhood. That he didn’t want black people there, they were lazy, they were dirty, they didn’t pay their bills, the schools would go down. We had very big fights and arguments to the point that we stopped speaking to one another. And there were one or two friends who I stopped speaking because we were argue about this, because they did not believe in civil rights.
“When I went back to college and then to graduate school, that had helped me see how much discrimination there was in this country and how terrible and unfair it was. It had made me understand the injustice of racism in a way that I had not as I grew up, because I had no one to tell me these things. Everybody who I grew up with had the same values basically and that was that black people were inferior to white people. So, I don’t know if I’m answering your question?”
“Yes - yes - yes.”
“In America a lot of Jewish people were involved in civil rights movement, probably a bigger proportion than of other people from other communities. I think that was because many Jews like myself understood in some way what it meant to be an outsider, what it meant to be viewed in a negative way just because I was Jewish. It didn’t matter what I was like, it didn’t matter what I did, for some people the fact that I was Jewish made me different and made them critical of me. I think that also contributed to my feeling that I wanted to do something to make black people free in this country, to have real integration and real equality.”
“Those are some of the things that helped me to decide that I wanted to be a teacher. In part because I wanted to teach history in a way that was different in the way I learned it. I wanted to teach values about community. I mean I hadn’t thought all of this out at that time, but I know that I was getting a real understanding that United States was not the democracy I had always been taught it was, that there’re many problems, and the black - white problem was the most obvious to me then, and to most people.
“Also, it just occurs to me, I think that growing up Jewish. Because even though when I talk about my experience as a Jew, and my feelings about it - they may be somehow different then other people than you talked to, we can talk about that later - I was very aware that there was anti-semitism in this country. I was very aware that being a Jew made me an outsider. I knew how other people in the working class community that I grew up in, Italians, and Irish and other people, other children, would say negative things about Jews. About Jews being cheep, and Jews being Christ killers and... Even though I had friends who were not Jewish and who seemed to accept me, I would discover in different ways that there were a lot of negative attitudes about Jews. Even when I moved to Newark where I lived from the time I was 14  and went to a high-school that was about 90% Jewish. My family moved to an area where the majority were Jewish. It was a very different experience for me, all of a sudden to be in a place where mostly people who I went to school with and be my friends were Jewish. But in many ways I still understood and could see and experience the anti-Semitism.
*
“I was surprised to find out that students - even in some of the classes at Howard where they had black teachers - didn’t talk about some of the same issues that I raised... and one of them was black sexuality and attitudes towards sexuality but also that one of the worst aspects of racism was that the standards of beauty in American society are white standards. So in order to be considered beautiful you have to have a European nose which is viewed as an English nose, narrow, and your lips have to be narrow, high cheek bones, blond hair and blue eyes. And I think it was the first time when I realized how awful an impact it must have on people to live in a society where they can never meet those standards, because their features, their hair texture, their skin color are unacceptable as ideals of beauty.
“After one class, when we talked about some of these things, a black male student came up to me and his eyes were full of tears and was saying how he found himself attracted to white women and how difficult it was... I don’t know if he saw this as an example of self hatred, but this was as hard for him that he felt guilty about, but he couldn’t help it because all of his life beautiful women, were white women. How painful it was for him to find himself attracted to a standard that black women could never achieve. He had been socialized to think that women who are not like him were the only ones who could be beautiful.
“In seeing how painful this was for him, I understood better than I ever understood before how inhuman racism is - I knew it was inhuman in so many ways - but to make someone like this young man have to experience what he was articulating to me was a terrible thing.
“Many, many black men in this country’s history have been lynched, executed without a trial, without going to jail, or sometimes they got them arrested and whites had broken into jail taken them out, lynched them. Sometimes they’d just taken them and lynched them on the grounds that they had raped white women, or they had made sexual advances to white women, or they had looked in the wrong way at white women. One of the major justifications for segregation, was ‘to protect’ white women from the primitivism of black men, who more than anything else, according to these attitudes, wanted to have sex with white women. That black men desired white women and that that desire was so strong and so primitive that they couldn’t control themselves, because they were primitive and that white women, some white women who had sex with black men will enjoy it because of the passionate and primitive nature of black men.”
“Haha!” All seemed hilarious to me. I imagined white farmers having angry arguments over a beer at the end of the day in bars. “What shall we do?! They rob us of our women’s libidos!”
“It’s not amusing, because it has been so destructive to people’s lives and because as I just said black men were hanged, because whites acted out this insanity, and it wasn’t just insanity. A lot of whites believe this. The fact is that far more black women have been raped by white men in this country. That doesn’t mean just during the slavery period, black women were being raped after abolition as well. If most black people lived in the South until after World War Two, any black men who looked close at a white woman, knew that he was in trouble, so that black men kept their distance from white women. I don’t mean that there were never any instances when black men maybe raped white women, certainly there was rape in the black community, but far more white men raped black women because they could get away with it. So what is as horrible about all this as anything else, is that in fact it was white men who were behaving a lot more like the stereotype the black men. It was the white men who had the opportunity to rape black women and it was certainly as much rape in the white community as it was in the black community, proportionately. Attitudes about sexuality still helped maintain racism. In the American society there are a lot of stereotypes as well. Is that what you were referring to?”
“Yes. But it never crossed their mind that women... that they can fall in love?!”
“No, never love. Thomas Jefferson wrote in the only book he ever wrote - and he was a brilliant man, the most learned man of his time, certainly in this country - wrote that blacks are closer to orangutans. Wrote that blacks are more lustful than whites, wrote that blacks are not capable of love which is a human feeling and a feeling with sensitivity, they’re only capable of lust. This is Thomas Jefferson... And certainly Thomas Jefferson was used as a model by many whites. ‘Thomas Jefferson believes this and that’ reinforces the argument for sure.
“O, Thomas Jefferson! I had a lot of him at school.”
“They teach here Thomas Jefferson too, but they never taught that. As an example I would read pieces of that, and my students at Howard, they never heard anything like that of Thomas Jefferson, you know, I think it’s very hard for black people to hear that Thomas Jefferson literally compares them to animals. But at the same time most people, black and white, have not been taught about Thomas Jefferson, that in addition to writing the Declaration of Independence, which is an extraordinary democratic statement, he had these thoughts also and what do we make of that?! Doesn’t that have to help us understand that these issues are much more complicated then the simplistic kind of stuff that we often outcome in our history... So, it’s powerful stuff. You know we talk about...”
“Why I find it so amusing?”
“Yeah, well I guess...”
“It’ s absurd!!”
“Well, it’s absurd at the very abstract level, but when you actually look at the impact it’s had, it’s no more absurd. Then the attitudes and racism is not unique to this country. These attitudes are prevalent in many parts of the world and they’ve caused tremendous destruction and pain as well as violence. Yea, at one level it is completely absurd how people can believe these things, but people do. Sex, it’s a simplistic statement, sex is a powerful thing in human society. In this country sex has been for a long part of our history very threatening. This is this idea of puritan heritage. That Americans are very, very closed and very inhibited about sex. And when you have a closed inhibited society like Victorian England about sex, you have a lot of perverse stuff going on and a lot of fears and assumptions about sexuality. I think that’s contributed to racism. That this society has a lot of difficulty dealing with sex in general, you kind of integrate that with racism, it becomes a very violent and volatile mix.”
*
“I talked to a journalist, he’s black, and he said ‘Do Gypsies exist? This is an ethnic group? I thought it’s just a derogatory term!’ He said that when you want to say that someone is cheating on you, you have even a word, as you said that ‘to jew’, you have also ‘to gyp’?!”
“Yea, it is the word ‘gyp’, it comes from Gypsy.”
“But how it got here?”
“Well, yes because there have been Gypsy people in this country. Probably some of them came as a result of the Nazis and what was going on in Europe, some were able to escape from Europe maybe in the ‘30s before Hitler started putting Gypsies to death the way he started putting Jews to death. They tended to live in large cities, and they were very easily identifiable, because they dressed in typical Gypsy clothing: bright colors, shawls and big skirts. They didn’t try to assimilate most of them. My parents had a paint wall paper small store in Newark in a black neighborhood and they had a number of customers who were Gypsies. Maybe six or eight Gypsy families that came in. One of those Gypsy families were living in the same area that blacks were living, and so black people knew who Gypsies were, and we knew about Gypsies, because even if they were just a small number of them, they generally tended to live in a community. They did not interact with other people, they were very insular, they stayed with each other, and I don’t know what their attitudes towards blacks were but when they were coming into our store you knew immediately that they were Gypsies because of how they were dressed and the pierced ears and make up and everything. My mother always would say to me ’Okay, Stan, stay over there and watch them. Make sure they don’t steal anything.’ Which she didn’t say about black families coming in. Always when there a Gypsy family came in. And they were very loud and in fact they did try to steal stuff, and they were constantly trying to get things more cheaply than my parents wanted to sell them, and they were always arguing, very much the kind of thing that people say about Jewish people! Yea, and my parents were crazy about that because they would spend two hours on one sell and that would be next to nothing. They would spend more time with this Gypsy family for $10 than they would spend on somebody else who came in and spend $100 and they would spend half an hour! So I grew up with some real stereotypes about Gypsies. But there were Gypsies in New York, there were Gypsies in New Jersey and a lot of large American towns. They tended to live in areas where black people lived.
“One thing about prejudice is that people who are discriminated against, are not always more sensitive to other people who are ’less then them’ in the kind of hierarchy, so I’m not surprised to hear stories about blacks who thought Gypsies were all these terrible things. Many years ago, when my first marriage was ending I was going to a psychologist. She was very informal, and it was the summer. She came in to one of our therapy sessions with sandals and her toe nails were painted purple. Purple nail polish. This upset me. I happen to like nail polish on people’s toes but something about my therapist, who was helping me figure out my life at that time and she was wearing purple painted toenail, bothered me and I couldn’t figure what’s going on there.”
“And she sensed it?”
“No, I didn’t say anything then, I just knew it was bothering me but I didn’t say anything. And in between that meeting and the next meeting I had these dreams about Gypsies, and I went back next time and I said ’you know, I was really upset when you came in with your toenails painted purple!”
“I didn’t know why this was bothering me, I’m a very progressive person, haha! I realized that I associated her and those purple painted toenails with Gypsies! And this was all subconscious level, that somehow this woman who was helping me straighten out my life, was behaving like a Gypsy and it was interesting, it was a lesson for me about how deep some of these stereotypes are. Because all of my experiences as a young person with Gypsies are in my mind negative, because they were always associated with Gypsies coming into the store, trying to steal things, trying to get things cheaply, having my parents very weary of them and having negative things to say about them. Then delivering stuff to their homes... They were always living 10 or 12 people in the small apartment, and there always seemed to be smells that were different than those I was used to, much of them was food. And they were little scary!”
*
“Did you assimilate?”
“Well this kind of gets into the whole issue being Jewish... My mother was a very nationalistic Jew. She identified very strongly with being Jewish, my father never said much about it and I don’t think he particularly did identify strongly. They weren’t very religious, I was bar mitzvahed. Do you know what this is?”
“No.”
“In Jewish tradition when you are 13 you become a man and you accept certain male responsibilities, and it’s one of the biggest Jewish ceremony. My parents generation, and before, 99% of Jewish boys were bar mitzvahed and some families girls called bat mitzvahed, but it’s not considered as nearly important as the bar mitzvahed. Like almost all religions Judaism is very sexist. So I went to Hebrew school, and I studied and I had to do the ceremony. I hated it all but I wasn’t crazy about school at all in those days whether was Hebrew school or regular school...
“So I grew up with certain Jewish traditions, and in a family where my mother really believed that she was better than other people... and ‘Jews are more honest, Jews are smarter, Jews didn’t have as much divorce, Jewish men didn’t drink, Jewish men were hard workers.’ She believed that a Jewish family and the Jewish culture were superior cultures and families. I think since I had a very difficult relationship with my mother, and she was so strongly identified with Jewishness and wanted me to identify with Jewishness, I rebelled against that.
“I don’t know why this was so early in my life, I didn’t like the idea of saying that Jews were better than other people, why was that? That it’s not right to feel that one person is better than another. Maybe I felt some of that because I experienced some feelings of being an outsider and I had experienced some hostility because I was Jewish, and so, it made me feel like I wouldn’t like treat somebody else that way. Or may be primarily just rebellion against my mother, that I was angry at her for some things and so I rejected things that she believed in. But we were pretty Americanized family otherwise, my father spoke perfect English, came here when he was five so he didn’t speak with an accent, my mother was born here, they believed in the values of America, hard work, not just America, but they were law abiding citizens. I was a pretty I guess normal kid, I wanted pretty much what everybody else wanted. And I think it wasn’t till I was considerably older when I started having a lot of political consciousness.”
“Why Dottye said that you have a special position to your Jewishness?“
“I think what Dottye meant is that I don’t identify with being a Jew, I don’t deny it, I don’t rejected, it’s just that’s how I was born. I have no real connection with Jewishness, with Judaism, religiously or culturally and I’m probably very critical of it. I think there is a very strong - because there’s a whole history of hostility towards Jews that goes back millennium not just centuries, by the time of Christ, because Jews were dispersed and didn’t have their own country, they lived in so many other countries and were generally not viewed positively and didn’t have certain opportunities and felt endangered in many of them which is why a lot of them came to United States - there is a real feeling among Jews of sticking together, even if they didn’t live in the same neighborhoods. When you’re a Jew you meet another Jew - there is an immediate connection just because both are Jewish and share a sense of being outsiders and a common heritage.
“I didn’t have that feeling, I didn’t feel like I wanted to be a part of the Jewish community. I wasn’t religious. When I was 13 years old I was bar mitzvahed and for a couple of months I thought ‘well, maybe there is something to this, maybe I should...’ I was going to synagogue or temples on Saturdays, and then the holiest of Jewish holidays, which is called Yom Kippur came and I went to this temple in my neighborhood, and I wanted to worship on Yom Kippur The man at the door asked if my father was a member of the temple, and had he purchased the seat for Yom Kippur, and I said no, he wasn’t a member of the temple, he hadn’t purchased the seat. So he told me I couldn’t go in the temple. And I remember that made a big impression on me, I said ’You mean that because my father hasn’t purchased the ticket in this temple, you’re not gonna let me come in and worship on the most holly day of the Jewish religion?’ I said, ‘I’ll stand in the back, I won’t sit; I’ll just stand in the back of the temple,’ he said ‘can’t come in.’ and I left that temple and I never went back to a temple again. I decided that any religion that required a 13 year old to have his father pay for seat in a temple, before I could go in and worship, on the holiest day of that religion, I didn’t believe in that religion. Now I suspect I was able to make that decision partly because I didn’t have any strong commitment to the religion I had grown up.
“Also by that time I was really already getting some feelings about class differences... The differences money made in life. Because my parents were, my mother in particular, always complaining about how little money we had. She was always worried about not being able to pay the bills. So I don’t know why that happened but it happened and so added to my feeling of non identifying with Jews as a group and not finding Jewish culture particularly having anything appealing to me except food, which I loved, which is basically East European anyway. So I very early in life dramatically disconnected with religion. And most Jews do not, most Jews make that connection with culture, feel the sense of being part of this group, and that the importance of sticking together ‘because there are people out there who are hostile to you, and the society at large, in some cases stopped you from some opportunity because you’re Jewish.’ I never denied being Jewish, if somebody ever asked me, but I didn’t identify with being Jewish.
“As I got older and became more political and more progressive, I basically became agnostic or atheist and just didn’t pay attention to religion at all, I always objected to the notion that there is something superior about Judaism. I haven’t met a religion that I particularly liked.
“I think that while I was happy to see Israel formed - Jews have a place where Jews can go if they wish to go - I think even then, in the early stages, I was concerned about the way in which Israel was created, that it was not a good idea to take the land from one group and give it to another, which is what seems to be the case. Then as Israel evolved I had a much less strong identification with Israel. The vast majority of American Jews are very connected to Israel and I feel don’t really see Israel’s faults because this strong attachment. For me Israel’s racist policies towards Arabs, there is a lot of sense among Israelites that Arabs are inferior, and the fact that Israel seemed to have a policy that... ‘we will allay with anyone who can help us, regardless of who they are, because we’ll never let what happened to us before happen again.’ So Israel allied with South Africa!
“Israelis focus tremendously on what happened to Jews before and during WWII - that makes sense given that six million Jews were exterminated because they were Jews. Israel’s policies often seem to be justified on the grounds that Jews will never let what happened before happen again - ‘never again’ is a phrase Jews often use when they defend Israel’s policies. I thought that Israel, and Jews in general, would have a higher kind of humanity because they would look at what happened to them and they would try not to do this kind of thing to anybody else. But at times Israel can justify policies it shouldn’t justify by claiming that the policy is based on what happened to Jews in the past.
"Then Israel had dealings with South Africa the country was dealing with a nation that was similar to Nazi Germany. What happened to Jews in the past should not justify that policy. So it’s disappointing when Israel didn’t seem to have the higher humanity that some other countries. Not that they have a lower humanity, but they just behave like everybody else in many ways.
“And I think that many Jews today have become very reactionary on racist issues, in recent years Jewish have been very opposed to affirmative action in large numbers and...”
*
“Can you talk about black anti-Semitism?”
“Yea. I think it’s a combination of things... As immigrants came to this country each immigrant group assimilated, became more part of the country and was able to be more successful and then another group came in. When the Italians came in a lot of the stores and business that were own by Germans got in their hands, and then the Greeks came in and the Italians were moving out. The immigrant group that was at the bottom just before large numbers of black people began moving up from the South, were the Jews.
“Jews had a lot of the stores and businesses in black community, so I think there was some tension as a result of that. My father and mother had a store, they always hired blacks, but they did not pay them very well. I think he took advantage of them, for the most part he did not have a very high opinion of black workers. I worked with them, I got to know them and actually got to like some. But I know that some of them at least, resented my father, resented the fact that he wasn’t paying them enough, and took advantage... But during the civil rights movement, in the ‘60s there was a lot of positive feeling between the blacks and Jews. Then in the beginning of 1980s, a lot of the most prominent speakers against affirmative action have been Jews and I think that’s alienated blacks.”
“Why are they against it?”
“Because they felt that this would get special treatment to blacks and that might prevent Jews from getting positions... Israel’s policies contributed to anger among many blacks, especially Israel’s alliance with South-Africa. And I think that many black people have the same stereotypes about Jews. They grew up in this society, and they share some of the attitudes towards Jews, that white non-Jews have. And Jews had become a pretty successful community economically in this country, because Jews tend to be more educated then other populations. A larger percentage of Jews go to college, a larger percentage of Jews are professionals, and so Jews had been quite successful, and as they’ve been successful, they’ve grown more out of touch with poor people and working class people.
“Also in the last 15-20 years there’s been a revival of the ideas that there are certain Jews with money who control a lot of things, just like Hitler argued, and that a lot of the wealth and power in the society is in the hands of Jews.
"Any people who have been oppressed are trying to understand why they are oppressed and how they are oppressed. I think for some blacks Jews are seen as one of the sources of their oppression - maybe even a major source. I don’t think Jews are responsible for racism in U.S. - the political, economic, and social system that oppresses African Americans and discriminates against them. But I do understand the factors that have convinced some black people that Jews are ‘the enemy’..
"If you take some of the history, if you take some of the attitudes about Jews that are shared with other members of the community, and if you take a group that has been quite successful, in the eyes of people who have not been terribly successful, you are the potential for tension.
“Also Jews and blacks live in some of the same areas like New York and there’ve been conflict between them. For many years Jews voted for liberal causes, now in New York Jews are becoming more conservative, they’re voting for things that blacks are not in favor of it and they’re helping to elect people who are not gonna do the kinds of things that black people would like to see done.
“Also the Black Muslims have been very openly anti-Semitic, and they often appeal to young people in particular, who are the worst off economically in this country and who respond to demagogues, just the way poor people in different times in history have responded to demagogues.
“So I guess, some of the reason for this has to do with just historical things, some of it has to do with things Jews have done, some of it has to do with typical attitudes of anti-semitism that some blacks share along with whites. You should ask some black people about it, maybe it’s interesting to hear what they have to say. It looks like you are the one who’ll fall asleep.”
“We have five more minutes of tape. Tell me why do you think a young Jewish person doesn’t want to recognize that he’s a Jew?”
“There’s still anti-Semitism in this country, and Jewish people have dealt with anti-Semitism in different ways. Some deny that they are Jews or keep it a secret, because they think that if people know that they are Jews, that would change what they think about them. A young person who’s ambitious, a young person who wants to move ahead in their profession might feel that if people know that he or she is Jewish that will prevent them from getting promoted. If there’re aren’t a lot of Jews in the community, a young single man might feel that it would be difficult for him to meet women if they know he’s Jewish, and it might be easier to meet somebody and if you have a good connection with them and you think that there’s some future for the relationship, then you can tell the person that you’re Jewish after they gotten to know you, but that if people know in the beginning that you’re Jewish they may not be interested. There are still many families, Christian families, particularly Protestant families, if they knew that their daughter or son were marrying a Jew would be very upset.
“This person may have had discovered in life that when people knew that they were Jewish it did in fact change things about their relationships, it did close some doors to them, it did make them less popular, it did mean that people couldn’t confide in them, it was an obstacle to becoming good friends with people. You’re always like an outsider, you never became the best friend, you never were taken into the inner community. There are lots of reasons why a young person who is Jewish might try to keep that from people.
“It also might be that they are ashamed of being Jewish. That kind of self hatred, or shame that often comes with coming from a community that the larger community thinks is inferior or somehow bad, you internalize those things. Where does that come from, why do we have a low self esteem? It comes from a lot of things but one of the things it can come from, is our racial background and all the messages you’ve gotten.
“It could be a combination for a person of that age, or even for a person older, there are very real reasons, the things I was describing do happen. But it also can be that a person, because they believe these things might happen, could be an obstruction to their own success, it will affect relationships, even if that’s not the case, a person may think that that’s the case, it may not want to take the chance that’s not gonna be the case... and you know, why tell somebody that you are Jewish, why put it out there? If people don’t ask, people don’t know.
“And you behave in ways that are not the way Jewish people are supposed to behave. So, if you go out to dinner with people, you make sure that nobody gets the impression that you’re cheap, so you pick up a check. Or you always make sure you pay for your share or you don’t order the cheapest things on the menu, or you make sure that you’re a good tipper. You don’t behave in ways that are stereotypes for Jews, I’m not sure what all that means. People often said to me when they found out that I was Jewish that ‘you don’t behave like a Jew,’ and then when I would ask them, which I usually do, ‘what do you mean, how Jews behave? How is it that I don’t behave?’ and usually they really had no answer, because they were surprised that I asked them that, and they were embarrassed to say. More often they didn’t know what they were talking about, there was just this notion that Jews somehow are different and that you’ll be able to see it when you will look at them, like if someone is gay you’ll be able to tell just by looking at them, which of course is also not true. And if they did say something, they generally said ‘Jews are cheap, and you’re not, you seem to spend money no problem, you are very generous and Jews are not like that. And the Jewish males are kind of nerdy, they’re kind of intellectuals, with glasses, they read a lot, they don’t play sports, they’re bookish, they’re accountants and doctors and they’re not real people, that play ball and drink beer, and smoke cigarettes and kid around and do the things that normal people do.’ And I’m not like that ’cause I drink and, I don’t smoke but I play ball, and I like sports and I kid around and somehow I just don’t behave the stereotype of Jews is for many, many people... I don’t know why your friend, specifically behaves the way he behaves but those are some of the reasons I think why he might behave that way... When I was in the army, I remember once the sergeant said to me, a sergeant who was Polish thought I was Polish, and because he thought I was Polish I got some special treatment, he gave me a free pass once to go home. I never told him I wasn’t Polish!”
“I mean, I didn’t feel like I needed to say ‘Oh, no, I’m not Polish, my father was from Poland but I’m Jewish!’ It was obvious to me that he knew I was Jewish I wouldn’t get that special treatment, and I figured, you know, why bother, what am I gonna gain by telling him I was Jewish? If he asked me, ‘are you Jewish?’ I would say, ’Yea, I’m Jewish’ but since he didn’t ask, and I’m in the South and I’m the only Jew in this whole battalion, and is a lot of anti-Semitism in the South, what’s to be gained by announcing that I’m a Jew? In the army if somebody didn’t like you, an officer or a sergeant, they could you to do stuff that wasn’t particularly pleasant. You could be getting kitchen duty, you couldn’t get time to get off, you had to work later hours, and if they were your superior you could do that. Why give people some information that’s going to result in their treating that way if you don’t have to, so in that regard, you know, I didn’t hide it, but I didn’t announce it.”
“What do you think will happen in the year of 2,000 and I don’t know what they say that the black population would be the majority.”
“Who said that?”
“Statistics.”
“Well.”
“What?”
“Not the blacks. By the year of 2,050 the majority of Americans will not be, will not trace their ancestry to Europe, so if you combine the non-European people who have been generally viewed as the minorities, that the minorities taken together will be a larger population than Europeans. But the Hispanic population would probably be larger than the African- American population and they are very different in many ways. The black population is now about 12% and probably by that time maybe 20%.”
“Well, nevertheless, what do you think it would happen? You said that the civil rights movement was followed by a disillusion... What will come if the proportions change?”
“This is not an easy answer. The short answer is that I think that the next 15 to 20 years this country will have to take a major turn to the left, not socialist, not communist but what I would call more humanistic community oriented society, where will be a significant distribution of wealth and power. Or would become - and this is just as possible, maybe more possible - would become a state that is increasingly violent, where there are people armed in the streets, where wealthy people will be putting walls around their homes, where poverty will increase, and there are a lot of things that would happen but it would not be a place to live, but a very dangerous, very unequal, unjust, very violent community. I think that that’s a real possibility. So that’s the short version. Which may be enough.”

 

Well, here you have it: If you’d like to throw a bit of money my way to keep my endeavors going, and also enable me to spread the money to my various causes, speaking up against racism being one of them, I’d be grateful.

April 6th, 2013
New York