Identity: Not So Black and White (Summer Reading 2015)

Each summer, as students engage their assigned summer reading, the entire JCHS professional community (educators and staff) also have assigned reading. This summer’s reading was Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria: And Other Conversations About Race. Her language can be stark at times, but it is also instructive.

Tatum’s framework of domination and subordination brings to mind a Talmudic legend about a vision that comes to Rav Joseph during a near-death experience. In his vision, he sees the dominant and subordinate in society switch places.  He sees those who are dominant in his world inverted to become subordinate in his vision, and vice versa. In the midst of his inversion vision, one group stays in the same, respected place in both worlds -- righteous scholars. When R. Joseph wakes his
father explains to him, “My son, your vision was of the world as it should be [of the true or corrected world].” (Pesachim 50a)  

Tatum, an African-American woman, mentions a personal example to illustrate what happens after “subordinates” show a positive quality typically associated with “dominants.” She describes giving a presentation to educators after which a white man (assumed dominant) approached Tatum (assumed subordinate) to compliment her on being so articulate. “You know,” he added, “if I had had my eyes closed, I wouldn’t have known it was a black woman speaking.” The truth, writes Tatum, “is that the dominants do not really know what the experience of subordinates is.” (Tatum, p.24) 

Tatum elaborates on the corrosive impact of domination and subordination in terms of both social power and individual identity formation. Her analysis and perspective about the development of personal identity resonates with research and analysis about the formation of Jewish identity. In both settings, a teen’s social environment -- at school and in the community -- provide the vital context and relationships with others necessary for the developmental tasks that frame or resolve ego strengths such as hope, purpose, and integrity.

The ideal of commitment to a just society resonates in both Tatum’s book and the Talmud. In Tatum’s words, social messages about assumed superiority or inferiority color perceptions of reality and influence interactions with others. Citing psychologist Janet Helms, Tatum explains that in a race-conscious society, the task for people of color is to resist negative societal messages toward developing “an empowered sense of self,” while the task for whites is to develop a positive white identity based in reality, not on assumed superiority. “In order to do that each person must become aware of his or her whiteness, accept it as personally and socially significant, and learn to feel good about it, not in the sense of a Klan member’s ‘white pride,’ but in the context of a commitment to a just society.”  (Tatum, p.91)

But it is not so black and white at a school like JCHS. 

The Jewish people’s experience in the Bay Area, North America, Israel, and the world is a confounding and empowering mix of dominant and subordinate. Each posture informs our school’s mission to be a “premier learning community for Jewish high school students integrating deep learning, universal wisdom, and the enactment of Jewish values toward empowering each student to delight in lifelong learning, deepen her or his unique Jewish identity, generate empathy and compassion, and improve the world.”  

These goals -- identity, integration, and inclusion -- are not products, they are a process. In the year ahead, the JCHS professional community will continue to draw on Tatum’s work. We will also continue to deepen conversations among students and ourselves about the corrosive impact of racial bias and the positive power of inclusion.