THE DIFFICULTIES IN TACKLING RACISM
V THE CHAIR of the Board of Deputies’ commission on racial equality told a Limmud audience that he found rapper Wiley’s comments on Instagram “particularly shaking” during a conversation on racism and inclusivity.
Stephen Bush — political editor of the New Statesman — also highlighted the difficulties of heading the commission during the pandemic, in particular not being able to have physical meetings.
In conversation with Yavilah McCoy, a black American Orthodox Jew and campaigner, Mr Bush said that to begin to tackle racism, it was necessary to “de-risk people admitting that they have prejudicial impulses”.
Ms McCoy spoke about her own experience of “walking through the world as a Jew in a black body”, including being singled out, aged three, by her yeshivah teacher, who was incredulous at her knowledge of Torah.
“We have a tradition in which nobody has ever called anyone black as part of the description of who they are in our entire Torah,” she stated. “It was the name of your family, the name of your city and the ways in which your character was to be designated.” She added that there was a difficulty in tackling racism without playing into the “binary” labels of white and of colour. For her, “whiteness” was not a colour, rather a historical use of physical difference to deprive others of their humanity. “All of that is a big fat hairy lie. But I have to name the lie in order to tell the truth.”
Ms McCoy suggested that if all the different types of Jew were gathered in a synagogue, “we would look more like the United Nations than the United Nations itself”.
Nobody has called anyone black as part of who they are in our Torah’