Dr. Caroline Light of the Program in Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University talks with host Gilad Halpern about her recent book, That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South. It analyses the circumstances that led to the establishment of a sizable Jewish charity network in the American South in the post-Reconstruction period.
This is a segment from The Tel Aviv Review: Listen to the full show.
“Everybody [here meaning Jewish resident] has a “W” by their names [in the census] which signifies whiteness….[much effort was spent] proving themselves worthy of whiteness [in the Jim Crow South].”
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The foil here, as the interview notes, was to be distanced from blacks. This happened outside of immigrant Jewry as well. My maternal grandmother was 1/2 Cherokee, my mother 1/4. The family hid this in a small rural but county seat town in Jim Crow Arkansas to such degree that, even in my mom’s adulthood and my own upbringing, no talk was made of my maternal grandmother’s past. Indeed, although in retrospect I can see hints, I did not know what truth remained (the family of that generation dying off) until my mother was basically near death. In consequence of this necessary hiding, family history has largely been erased, relatives of my cohort agreeing.
One hint of that past occurred when I was about 10 to 12. My mother came into the living room while I watched a movie where Indians on horseback whooped while chasing a train or stagecoach, firing their rifles, being shot off their horses by their ostensive prey. My mother said something like “See, that’s what they think Indians were like. All they do is show them being killed. It was nothing like that. I wouldn’t watch this.,” walking out of the room. I of course, rather confused, continued to watch the whooping fallen. But that is about as close as I can recall her getting to expressing her feelings on her mother’s and her background.
My mother was quite racist. There was no public doubt she was white, and, although working a cloistered life, I knew she had no sympathy for the Civil Rights movement. I did not like her very much. But now I see how being raised in Jim Crow Arkansas affected her early years where she clearly knew her background, and how it closed her off from the world, with no individuals in similar circumstance, once she left the home town. She always had to be perfect. Now I know it started early–she had to be pure white–which meant “nothing like a black.”