Content Warning: This article uses the word “Negro” and its common usage well until the mid 60s as an acceptable term. 

One of the most remarkable moments in television history did not take place in a scripted drama or on a playing field, on the moon or under the sea. Instead, it was a brief televised speech, given before a very skeptical Senate committee, by a radically apolitical children’s show host, famous for his nurturing neighborhood. His goal was to persuade them not to slash the budget for public television in half, and thereby keep educational programs like his own afloat. The chairman of the committee, Democratic Senator John Pastore, was initially brusque and impatient, and had indicated beforehand that he had little desire to keep such funding in place. 

Mister Rogers did not bother with facts and figures, bottom lines or the minutiae of expenditures. Instead, he spent just seven minutes unpacking one crucial point. He explained to the committee that we must allow children to name their feelings, that is, to express what is going on for them internally–be it anger or sadness, disappointment or jubilation–because naming is the first step towards understanding oneself and being understood by others. That is why, he gently argued, shows like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood are indispensable.

In his immortal words that day “what is mentionable is manageable.” In addition, alluding to the fact that troubled children become troubled adults, Fred Rogers also prioritized acts of reconciliation over violence: “I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger — much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire,” he told the senators. 

I recalled Mr. Rogers’ performance recently when thinking about the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer recorded on video kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than eight minutes. Many parties have commented on this event, including spokespersons for Jewish institutions, who have expressed sympathy for the pain and anguish of Mr. Floyd, his family, and the African American community. There have been requisite denunciations of the “ugliness of racial hatred,” and many references to all human beings having been made “in the image of God.” Irrefutable as these assertions may be, they fail to acknowledge any prejudicial attitudes that exist within Jewish communities. The lack of awareness that is implied when there is not even a trace of self-scrutiny, as though one’s own biases are unspeakable, is truly a missed opportunity for us to reflect and change. 

Over the course of four decades, I have heard racist statements uttered in countless Jewish contexts, often but not exclusively from older people who grew up with a different sensibility towards particular kinds of comments or jokes. Many of the Jews who deliberately or unwittingly communicate these slurs may certainly be good people by other benchmarks, but have a clear blind spot when it comes to those whom they perceive as “the other.” 

But even those of us who consider ourselves adamant opposers of racism, often possess our own casually absorbed biases. In Black Skin, White Masks, the political theorist Frantz Fanon repeatedly mentions an anecdote in which a white child, not yet schooled in his parents’ hypocrisy, comes upon a black child and unselfconsciously announces “Look, a Negro!” Seemingly an awkward statement of fact, the phrase of course reveals deeper levels of assumed prejudice and, for Fanon, is one of the most insidious of racial insults. 

There is a seeming innocence in the white child’s gawking assertion, in which nothing violent or hostile is meant; doubtless the child and his parents would protest against even the slightest insinuation that they are racists. But this brief but unbreakable fixing of the identity of the other–“Look, a Negro”!–imprisons through its gaze. It is a “thing to be noticed.” Further on this continuum, when white people edge away from a black person in a store or on a bus, or cross the street because of perceived danger, we are silently but gently pressing our knee on their soul. 

(As an aside, millennials are often labelled entitled, ignorant or narcissistic, but what is less acknowledged is their enthusiastic embrace of the central ethical values of our age – equality; fairness; allowing people to be who they are without fear of reprisal or exclusion. These are all resoundingly important moral qualities, and their natural absorption of such principles is something from which we could all learn).   

When American politicians who oppose any form of gun control mumble incoherently “thoughts and prayers” after yet another mass shooting, the gap between sympathetic chirping and actual social change becomes too heartbreaking to ignore. It has become far more important for many in our midst to virtue signal their righteousness than to even change the smallest of attitudes, and I do not exempt myself in any way from that critique. Rav Yisrael Salanter correctly noted that it is harder to transform a single character trait than to master all of the Talmud. 

It is time for all Jewish communities to confront the prejudices in our midst, rather than tossing vanilla grenades into the body politic to assure everyone we are on the right side of an issue. In the same way that children need to talk about their feelings, Jewish collectives must discuss out in the open some of the more entrenched attitudes among us when it comes to race (as well as gender and sexual orientation). Without naming what we think and what we are carrying inside, there is little chance for productive dialogue and communal transformation. We must mention it so we can manage it.