The Stars and the Cookie Jar

I'm still working through massive racism issues. Of course I don't think of myself as a racist -- I went to Brandeis for heaven's sake, where equality and social justice are on the shelf next to the Pop-Tarts.

But my grandmother still calls people of a different skin shade schwarzers, and my mother bought a boxer when we moved (out of public housing and into a white, white neighborhood) to our house in Birmingham because "it's the kind of dog they have at pawn shops and black people are afraid of them".

If we wanted my mother never to visit us again, all we'd have to do is move into a (middle-class, perfectly safe, decently gentrified) subdivision whose majority inhabitants were any shade of brown at all.

I'm absolutely not proud of it. I've never understood why one marginalized group (American Chasidim) has such entrenched feelings of fear and distaste about another marginalized group with such a similar strong sense of family and community, often in similar, straitened economic circumstances.

And don't get me started on whether Judaism is a race or not, please.