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The Lilith Blog
June 9, 2020 by admin
Where Was the “Peace” 400 Years Ago?
My father is the most peaceful man I know.
A few years ago, he came home from the watch store, and told us that the owner had said to him, “What would people think if they walked in and saw a nigger working here?” after my father had casually said something about becoming his apprentice and learning how to fix watches. In that very moment, I wish my dad hadn’t been the peaceful man that he is.
“… a nigger working here…”
I think about this story frequently. I was so angry at my father for not screaming in the owner’s face, or arguing with him until he had lost his voice. My father had let me down. I wanted him to fight, but I never told him this.
A few weeks ago in an argument, I brought this story up again, and in an instant I finally revealed to my father how I truly felt; how I felt about him walking out the door before an argument could even begin. About how his actions made me lose faith in his ability to defend the color of my skin. As he listened to my concerns, with his legs crossed and his eyes calm but focused, he soaked up the emotion that poured out of his 18-year-old daughter. That day, my father told me that if he had gotten into an argument, he would have been risking his daughters having a future without a father or his sons having to lock the door at night, because they would now be the oldest men in the house. He wanted to fight, but he had to choose.
I thought my father hadn’t fought that day because he gave in. I thought he had let them win, when in reality, he had decided that his life, vows, and the promises that he had made to his wife and children trumped everything. His family was more important than defending the color of his skin, in that rundown watch shop. My father decided to swallow his anger in the face of a man who only saw his Black skin, a man who perceived my father’s brown eyes as more threatening than the small pocket knife dangling from his own jeans.
My father chose us. He chose to come home instead of lying on a rug in a pool of blood, alone, and unable to defend the skin that would be soaked in the very red that is printed on the flag of a country that promised to protect him.
There will be more racist shop owners, there will be more blood, there will be more sons and daughters waiting on the stoop for their fathers who are never coming home.
Who’s gonna raise the kids of the parents who were murdered screaming “George Floyd?” Who’s gonna carry the body of a young Black man who has not even graduated high school yet?
My father is the most peaceful man I know, and I love him for that. But I won’t wait for my brothers to be the next young Black men that “fit the description.” I want to see my 13-year-old brother graduate from middle school.
I want to be peaceful, but where was the peace when my people hung from trees, naked and stripped of their lives?
Where was the peace when Emmett Till was mutilated and murdered at the age of 14?
Where was the peace when unarmed Breonna Taylor was shot eight times in the comfort of her own home? Where was the peace when two men in a pickup truck chased Ahmaud Arbery, an innocent man, and fired a shotgun into his stomach?
We need more peaceful people like my father, but I won’t wait for his blood to be spilled.
So let me ask you again,
Where was the peace 400 years ago?
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Makeda Zabot-Hall is on the editorial board of jGirls Magazine, where this piece was originally published. You can read more of Makeda’s work here.
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June 4, 2020 by admin
Let’s Get To Work
White folks: how many of you have spent the week feeling paralyzed by the question: “What do I do?” I’m not going to answer that for you. Because we each have to answer that one for ourselves.
Yet whether any of us like it, we are responsible for one another. Your choices are my responsibility. Your silence is my responsibility. And mine is yours. That’s kind of how this white thing works (except spoiler alert: this white thing is definitely not working).
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June 4, 2020 by admin
Black Lives Matter: Read, Learn, and Act
In the wake of this most recent horrific moment of racist violence and white supremacy, the Lilith staff would like to share the articles we’ve been reading and rereading–the organizations we’ve been following, and resources we’ve been turning to.
We also want to hear from you: what have you been reading, asking, wrestling with, learning from, supporting? Because we’re in this with you- committing to listen, deepen our anti-racism learning & act in solidarity with Black communities, Jews of Color, Indigenous people, & communities of color for racial equity and a just world.
Read
- We are Dying Because of the Fears of White People by Dena Robinson for Lilith Magazine.
- It looks like Amy Cooper, the white woman in the viral Central Park video, is a liberal. That’s important. By Nylah Burton for The Independent.
- As the George Floyd protests continue, let’s be clear where the violence is coming from. By Rebecca Solnit for the Guardian.
Watch
- Ask Yourself by Lauren Whitney.
Donate
There are so many organizations doing incredible racial justice work. We wanted to highlight the following organizations that are run for and by women of color.
- Sister Song is a Southern-based organization with a purpose to build an effective network of individuals and organizations to improve institutional policies and systems that impact the reproductive lives of marginalized communities.
- The Loveland Foundation is an organization that provides financial assistance to Black women and girls seeking mental health support.
- #FreeBlackMamas is an annual campaign by National Bail Out seeking to raise awareness about the human and financial costs of money bail and emphasize its impact on Black mothers and caregivers.
Learn
- The Anti-Racism Resources List is a comprehensive list of resources to learn and engage in anti-racism work.
- 26 Ways to be in the Struggle Beyond the Streets is a list designed to celebrate all the ways that our communities can engage in liberation.
- Your Kids Aren’t Too Young to Talk About Race: Resource Roundup is a list of resources that are targeted at parents who want to teach their children to be anti-racist.
- The 1619 Project is an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.
Act
- #JusticeforFloyd: Demand the officers who killed George Floyd are charged with murder is a petition demanding the along with Derek Chauvin, the other three officers be arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter.
- NAACP: We Are Done Dying is a petition with 4 main demands. These are to arrest the remaining 3 officers involved in George Floyd’s murder, demand appointment of an independent special processor to lead the government’s full and impartial investigation of the murder of George Floyd, demand reinstitution by the Department of Justice of consent decrees on police departments and municipal governments across this country that have demonstrated patterns of racism towards and mistreatment of people of color, and demand for sweeping police reform, including federal legislation mandating a zero-tolerance approach in penalizing and/or prosecuting police officers who kill unarmed, non-violent, and non-resisting individuals in an arrest.
- Black Lives Matter: #DefundThe Police is a petition that calls for the end to the systemic racism that allows this culture of corruption to go unchecked and our lives to be taken. They call for a national defunding of police and investment in Black communities.
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May 31, 2020 by Yona Zeldis McDonough
Three Characters, Three Storylines, and Three Time Periods
The Book Of V (Henry Holt, $27.99) is nothing if not ambitious—three main characters, three storylines and three wildly divergent time periods—and yet novelist Anna Solomon manages to weave all three together with an effortlessness that belies the profound nature of her fictional probing. She talks to Fiction Editor Yona Zeldis McDonough about why Esther and Vashti continue to be subjects of endless speculation and fascination, and what their stories can teach us today.
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May 30, 2020 by admin
A Debut Novel About Family
When La La Fine is eight, her mother disappears, and her father, Zev, starts taking her with him to work. Unfortunately, Zev’s work is part-time locksmith, part-time burglar. Fifteen years later, when Zev gets arrested, La La quits veterinary school to raise money for his legal defense the only way she knows how—robbing houses. What constitutes a good mother? A good father? A good daughter? A normal life? These are questions posed by R.L. Maizes in her compelling debut novel Other People’s Pets (Celadon Book, $26.99).
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May 29, 2020 by admin
We are Dying Because of the Fears of White People
“I’m not Black, I’m Jamaican.” Following in the tradition of many immigrants and first-generation Black immigrants, that was the tune I sang for most of my adolescent life. I ran from my Blackness. My mother came to the United States seeking a better life. Until she stepped onto U.S. soil, my mother had never known a country where you could be shot and killed just for existing.
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May 29, 2020 by admin
I Told Our Son He Can’t Come Home
He asked to borrow the car.
Just two weeks earlier, he’d been sheltering with us in our Hudson River town, where he’d stayed for the first two months of lockdown. Despite our pleas, he returned to Manhattan. On a whim before leaving, he took the antibody test and learned that, like 30% of people infected with the coronavirus, he’d had it asymptomatically. Considering himself safe, he asked if he could stay overnight before taking the Honda. I reminded him that no antibody test is highly reliable and that nobody knows yet whether a true positive test means a person is immune. I had to say no.
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May 28, 2020 by admin
When Will the Counting End?
The Jewish holiday of Shavuot starts tonight. My husband, Aryeh, and I have been counting many things over the past several months: 1) the days of quarantine. 2) the omer. 3) the days that Darwin Ramos will remain with us in our home. Like everything else this year, Shavuot will be different. Not only because of the quarantine, but also because we will be spending this holiday in quarantine with Darwin.
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May 28, 2020 by Alexis Tomarken
“Hello, Can You Hear Me?”: Therapy on Zoom
“Hello, can you hear me?”
Teletherapy with each of my patients in my psychology practice begins with this hourly ritualistic greeting. But I have come to hear this seemingly innocuous question as a Mayday signal for the stranded desertion many of us are feeling right now. It’s a plea to be heard in the eerie silence of our homes, streets, playgrounds and schools, akin to “Hello, is there anyone out there?”
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May 26, 2020 by admin
Making a Feast of Mezze
by Susan Barocas
As a writer, cook, filmmaker and travel enthusiast, I have loved traveling to many places and, of course, eating my way through cuisines. I’ve done this enough to know my favorite way to eat. Many of my favorite dishes have been part of mezze, an abundance of cold and hot plates full of flavor and a wide variety of ingredients.
The mezze of the Mediterranean and Mid East, called salatim in Israel and tapas in Spain, are traditionally a prelude to stimulate the appetite for the main meal to follow. But for me, mezze is a wonderfully social, leisurely way to eat the meal itself. Whether dishes are brought out one by one–cold first and then hot, as is traditional–or served all at once, mezze encourages tasting, talking and slowing down.
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