As a child, I spent most of my waking hours with two Black women who cared for seven Jewish children as if they were their own. I rode buses with them, navigated both secular city life and Jewish communal structures with them. Yet children and adults around me often insulted and degraded people who looked like them.
I couldn’t understand it. I loved these women. They truly loved me. But some others around me? They felt threatened. They were uncomfortable. They had internalized assumptions that were entirely counter to my experiences. Some were overtly racist, while others hinted at it. But I saw it. And it hurt.
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