@DBashIdeas, my brother, this is why teaching our kids to be nice and empathetic and engage with black Americans openly, friendly, and respectfully, while good, is just not enough. Why there must be structural systems change if we are to get anywhere near justice in this country. https://twitter.com/Jodiscohen/status/1283177129174355968

Because there is no conceivable set of circumstances on God's green earth that one of our kids would be processed through the system to end up in a position to be sentenced to juvenile detention for not doing work in Zoom school.

Seriously. You must read the underlying article.

And more: much of our community doesn't know that such a set of circumstances exists for other Americans. They live, in @chrislhayes' invaluable term, in the Nation, and they don't know the Colony exists.

So they can end up like many Orthodox Jews: able to be perfectly nice and personable with black kids on the playground (yes, of course there are plenty of Orthodox Jews like that), but thinking that higher rates of poverty or crime or lower rates of education achievement

are solely the results of black Americans' personal or communal failings, with no understanding at all of how systems and structures shape their lives so, so differently from ours.

I'm a big fan of personally nice and empathetic and getting along and (obviously) no slurs and denigrating comments.

But nice without structures misses the boat. And nice *instead* of structures is a dodge.

"Nice" might be a reach for some in our community. It is certainly a place to start. It has value. But I know plenty of Jews who play basketball with black kids in the playground and think "they" are poor because "they" don't work like we do, value education like we do, etc.

I keep going back to Woody Guthrie's song about Pretty Boy Floyd, about class, not race, but it applies:

"As through this world I've rambled, I've seen lots of funny men
Some will rob you with a sixgun, and some with a fountain pen."

The fountain-pen looters have been robbing the black community for 400 years.

The fountain pen looters largely got away with it and continue to get away with it.

If the fountain pen looters get caught, they end up in the business section, not the nightly news lead story.

The fountain-pen looters don't make good TV.

The sixgun looters do.

The fountain-pen looters do much more damage over much longer periods of time.

We never seem to have time/energy/attention for outrage about the fountain pen looters.

(whispers: the antisemites aren't right, and the antisemites are antisemites, white or black, but we're big boys and girls here, so we can hold complexity: some of the fountain-pen looters are members of our community. That's ugly and painful, but unfortunately true.)

We should raise our children to be mentches, to see tzelem Elokim in every person, certainly to shun slurs and hate.

But then we need to teach them to see systems and structures. To see the way things are, and why they are that way, and whether it's right that they are that way.

And if it's not right, what do we think we can/should/have to do about it?

(Sorry, thread got broken. Fixed it.)