Race

Right now, I'm reading a book that I just can't put down (except to write my sociology blog!). It's called Middlesex, and it won the Pulitzer prize a few years ago. Anyway, as I was reading, one part reminded me of what we discussed in sociology a few days ago. One of the characters, Desdemona, needed to find a job. She's Greek Orthodox, and back in Greece, she worked with silk worms. She finds an advertisement for silk workers, and so she goes to try to get the job. The job is in a poor black neighborhood in Detroit, which terrifies her. The job itself is at a mosque, and they only hire black, Muslim workers. Even though Desdemona is Greek, they decide she's biracial: white and black, because they really want to hire her. It just goes to show how subjective race is.

Another thing, which I talked about in an earlier blog, is how race was perceived in South Africa, where my mom grew up. (Here's the blog: http://theaterbex.blogspot.com/2010/02/race-and-south-africa.html) One thing that I didn't mention in the blog was that in South Africa, during apartheid, you could petition to have your race changed. People were black, or colored, or Malaysian, or white, or whatever, but if they could get permission from the government, their race would be legally changed, and the way society treated them would change as well.

In this blog, I also wanted to talk about my recent experience with explicit racism. I'm Jewish, and I was walking down the halls of Stevenson one day, and I heard two guys having a conversation. One of them said, "I wish all the fucking Jews would go away. They make the school look bad." The other one agreed. Hearing the conversation upset me. Every ethnic and racial group has been through its own share of hardships. For Jews, that hardship has persisted for centuries. Back in Egypt, we were enslaved; later, our Temple was destroyed (twice), and we were banished from our homeland; for years, we endured discrimination in Europe and in the New World; and recently, Hitler (and all those who went along with him) killed six million Jews. Even though I have lived in America my whole life, and no one has ever directly threatened me, I'm still very scared of anti-Semitism. In Constitutional Law last year, we learned about the court case National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie, which ruled that it was unconstitutional to prohibit Neo-Nazis from marching through Skokie, an area that is mostly Jewish. I'm all for freedom of speech, but if I had been there, I would be terrified out of my mind. It seems to me that freedom of speech is important, as long as it doesn't cause ethnic and racial groups to feel persecuted and terrified.