The reason for my sadness: I’m a hood nigga who desperately wants to be part of Jewish life, and there is no space for me anywhere. And I don’t know what to do.

My ways of being are alien and unwelcome in Jewish institutions: shuls, nonprofits, community centers, foundations, you name it. I have to pretend to be the kind of white normative middle class Jew I absolutely am not. I have to pretend to be white or as near to white as I can.

I vowed that I would never hide my Blackness or the trauma that comes from antiblack casteism for anyone. Yet when I step into these places, I am still expected to hide my scary, ghetto, traumatized self away. I am not supposed to bring too much of the real YM in the room.

The real YM Carrington is a survivor of poverty and domestic violence. The real YM was raised by an intellectually disabled rape survivor. The real YM was the only non-ID person in their household. The real YM was raised by Baptists with internalized misogynoir. That is YM.

The real YM became a Jew in a deeply antiblack, violent, predatory, Christian supremacist, ableist, toxically casteist environment. That environment shaped me into the Jewish adult that I am today. I carry those wounds with me everywhere, and I can’t just switch them off.

I want Jewish institutions to make space for Black people, Jewish or not. That means making space for Black trauma, Black survival, Black wisdom, Black critique, Black experience of reality. And yes, Black experience of Jews and Judaism. And that space just ain’t there.

So let me talk about my trauma for a bit. I am responsible for how I manage my trauma. I am an adult. I don’t expect anyone else to manage my emotions or coddle my misdeeds, absolutely not. But when I am in trauma in a Jewish space and need urgent help, I want help to be there.

I want Jewish leaders and Jewish comrades to understand that Black people live with intense pain. Pain that varies by each Black person’s lived experience and caste status, but pain that is intense and constantly triggered by the genocidal antiblackness around us.

Everything I’ve been dealing with the past week is because of my shitty confrontational tendencies pissing off a Black Jewish professional friend of mine. They cannot engage my pain or trauma right now, because they are dealing with their own pain. And I really miss them.

My mother’s way of engaging conflict was to confront everything right in the moment. That is how I engage conflict, and how most Black folks from my caste engage conflict. Those confrontational tendencies are unwelcome in Jewish life, institutionally and interpersonally.

Now remember that my mother was intellectually disabled. She struggled with impulse control and executive decision making. I was her child. So guess which Jewish adult in 2020/5781 also struggles with impulse control and decision making? Yeah, yours truly.

No, I am not proud of this fact or okay with this shit, nor do I expect any Jewish person or institution to tolerate all my shitty trauma-laden behaviors. But what I want and NEED from my fellow Jews is patience and understanding, because I am a Black woman who survived hell.

I want y’all to be patient with me, and patient with other Black people living with trauma. I want y’all to see and know me in my complete fullness, scars and wounds and all. I want my Jewish kindred to honor my Black survival and my Black journey. I want y’all to love me for me.

That’s all I wanted from my friend. I wanted that Jewish man to see me, to see the Black girl pain that my Yiddishkeit is rooted in. To see what misogynoir and casteism and Christian supremacy has done to me, and how it damaged my mother and me. I wanted him to see it all.

I wanted that yid to understand what sista pain, sista trauma, and sista rage really is. Because although he is Black just like me, I know he doesn’t get it. I could see it. I know when someone gets that lower caste sista shit. You always know. Hood sistas always know.

There are no Black Jews in the USA. There are Jewish people who are Black, legally and ancestrally. There are Black people who are Jewish by ancestry or conversion. But there are no Black Jews, yet.

I’m a Black woman fighting with a Jewish man. That is it.

I am a Black woman who is Jewish. My friend is a Jewish man who is Black. That is the division. That doesn’t mean I’m not fully Jewish or that my friend isn’t fully Black. What it does mean is that Black women and Jewish men haven’t yet learned how to engage with each other.

That’s the exact division between the white yid and Christian sista masses too. We have similar trauma at the hands of the same Eurocolonizers, but we developed completely different responses to that trauma. American Jews avoid conflict, Black Americans engage it. That is it.

Y’all know this is true. You know it’s true every time Ariel Sobel gets published, every time Dov Hikind or Heshy Tischler pulls some stunt, every time Ice Cube or Mort Klein or Professor Griff says some raggedy shit. Yidden and sistas handle trauma and conflict differently.

My friend and I come from very different worlds. Northern queer friendly college town versus Southern Klan-Nazi Country. Loving interracial Jewish home versus violent Black Christian home. Queer affirmation versus Christian queerphobia and sex shame. We are not the same, kindred.

Why am I writing all this shit out? Because again, my impulse, my tendency, is to deal with conflict as it is happening. I cannot put it off until later, because then it festers and metastasizes and becomes intolerable. So I’m sharing my Black girl pain with all of you.