We Were Slaves…Retaking the Test

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Last year, as our nation’s conscience was challenged with justification by the men and women of Black Lives Matter, as we all wrestled and continue to wrestle with hard and complicated truths and facts and realities that are as old as the idea of America itself, about the availability of a good and solid public education regardless of zip code, about access to something as elemental to our democracy as the vote, about being able to see a doctor when you’re child has a fever or to live near a grocery store where you can buy fresh broccoli and apple, truths about police brutality and racial injustice in our nation’s criminal justice and prison system, about redlining and about discrimination when it comes to who can and cannot get a mortgage or credit, about color blind immigration and environmental justice to name a few…in light of these hard and complicated and necessary national conversations, I decided to do something which I thought would be pretty straightforward…

I thought it would be a good idea to measure my own unconscious bias against black people, if I indeed harbored any.  Why?  Because I thought I walked the walk and talked the talk, throughout my career I’ve built bridges to black ministers and churches and supported equal rights causes, I celebrated MLK day and participated in all sorts of interfaith and interracial events…I’ve read a lot and learned a lot and preached and taught a lot about civil rights…that we were slaves and Passover, I identified as much with Let My People Go as my African American brothers and sisters…so, when it came to taking an unconscious bias test I thought I had little to worry about…

And besides, and perhaps more importantly, implicit, unconscious bias affects not only how we see the world around us but how we make decisions when choosing between and among different people, whom to hire and promote, who will be our doctors, our lawyers, our helping professionals, let alone, the way justice is supposed to be delivered , fairly, blindly, evenly…unconscious bias goes to the heart of how we treat and talk with people, how we connect with people unlike ourselves.

So based on the famous 2nd century Jewish teaching, the Midrash which teaches us Jews that when confronted with wrongdoing in the town to start repairing that wrongdoing at home and with ourselves and to work outward from there, or as Ghandi said to be the change we wish to see in others, or at least since Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, to practice what I preach, I found a credible online measurement instrument, one developed by Harvard with a statistical pool of over five million fellow test takers who had already taken the test.

The Harvard instrument is really a collection of several instruments which allow you to measure your unconscious bias against black people, against people of other religions, against transgender people, disabled people, gay people, Arab and Muslim people, native American people, against career women, against Asian people and against overweight people to name a few… I must admit that I was a bit smug before taking the test, I was more than sure that being a progressive Jew inoculated me against implicit bias.  

So last year, I took the test which took all of ten minutes, back then I thought to myself that I really aced this one as I puffed myself up with pride…and then my results came up…wait a minute, there must have been some mistake…so, I took the test again and found – same results—I found out that I fell into that category of 70% of white people and 50% of black people, who have taken the test who unconsciously,  unknowingly and strongly prefer white people to black people in dozens and dozens of ways.

Back then I was shocked and embarrassed by my results --- I was utterly humiliated to learn that despite wishing it were otherwise, I am a man with an unconscious bias and a strong automatic preference for White people over Black people, to quote from my results.  Despondent I called a friend with some diversity training and bias testing expertise, Rabbi Elissa Sacks-Cohen.  She immediately suggested a TED talk led by diversity trainer Verna Myers.  An old hand with racial bias issues, Myers suggests the following approach for people with unconscious bias who want to make things right, she puts forward an approach far easier said than done.  First, ask myself: Who am I afraid of? Who do I move away from?  I ought to acknowledge that as Myers teaches: we have old stuff about superiority (that is, who should be superior over whom) that is making for despair and disparity and a devastating devaluing of young black men… What is my part and how can I counter even hidden parts within me that I want to change?  So, already it’s a lot of work.

Then, and in my case, I would need to find a way to move toward black men.  Myers suggests that I walk toward my discomfort, that I ought to ask who’s missing from my circle, that I’m not going to get comfortable without being uncomfortable first…who’s missing from my circle…go deeper, closer, further…go against the stereotypes…and third, when I see something, I need to say something by remembering that black people do not have the luxury of shielding their children from racism.

In this journey, I learned that the single most potent way to grow from my unconscious attitude that strongly prefers white people over black people is pretty straightforward.  I need to take on a volunteer project that does good in the world that brings me into the orbit of black people, and that ideally I’d build a connection with a black colleague, a new friend based on something that brings the two of us together frequently and over time.  That if I am serious about decreasing my own hidden bias, Myers is right, I need to move toward black people and not away from them.  This from someone who grew up learning that while out and about driving that when seeing a black man, I ought to lock the car door quickly.  

This was a year ago, and I worked and focused myself to take Myers advice seriously.  So in a little bit I am going to tell you what I did, I’ll tell you how it went and then I’ll tell you how I did on my bias test a full year later…actually this past Tuesday when I retook the test.  But first, I want to talk about why I think we should care.

We Jews are a proud people, teaching our young to retell our story by standing one at a time, in front of our Torah scrolls, and we become Bar and Bat Mitzvah -- by retelling our sacred story, this is why we are proud, because we are each stakeholders in our past and in our future.

We Jews are a proud people, coming together at these sacred days asserting that our most important relationships can be repaired, that our world, damaged and crying for help, can be repaired, and that at the core of our covenant with God, engaging in that repair work is our sacred calling, this why we are proud…not because we have all the answers but because we are willing to wrestle with tough questions.

We Jews are a proud people, and remembering where we come from, that at our core as a people is a sacred story, yes, a story of liberation from slavery, we are taught that in each generation, we are to see ourselves as if we ourselves had been slaves in Ancient Egypt, and that we do not take that freedom for granted, and that we have a direct and certain responsibility, not only to assure our own vitality as a people, but that taking on what makes us least comfortable, the plight of the stranger, the awful plight of the stranger, because it is Sacred work, because whether we are seated at our Seder tables in April or gathered to hear the voice of the Shofar here in September, we assert that history is our teacher, that the lessons of our ancient experience are lessons for today, this is why we are proud.  Because we have something to be proud of.

I started reading about the experience of enslaved people here in America which led me to read anew texts which come to us from the ancient world about the direct experience of our enslaved Hebrew ancestors in Egypt and remarkably, or unremarkably it reads like the story of enslaved blacks here in on our shores just four generations ago…

Economic records from Ancient Egypt and America reveal unbearable quotas imposed upon the enslaved, in Egypt for clay bricks, in America for bales of cotton and how rarely quotas were met, and how frequently the rod and whip on the hardest working inflicted agony and scars, just as the whip here in America, were freely used on the hardest working, how owners of the enslaved in Egypt and America saw their human property...dirtier than pigs, he washes himself only once a season, he is wretched through and through…we will beat him as he is stretched out and bound on the ground, we will throw him into the canal until he sinks down, head under water…we will bind his wife before him and put his children in fetters…

Indeed, in learning about our Hebrew ancestors enslaved in Egypt 3500 years ago and those enslaved right here in America or until the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation a mere 156 years ago, I could hardly differentiate between the two.  But one thing is clear, the act of enslaving others and creating and protecting an economy that depends on it is still a cancer on the soul of our nation.

But what a seductive cancer it was.  Slavery here in these United states created our first millionaires, free labor generated an industry designed to do what industry does: maximize profits, get the most out of workers, and with slavery legal, make sure that violence by overseers flows in one direction only. 

Just as enslaved Hebrews made Egypt rich, so too, enslaved Blacks made America rich, in fact, the value of America’s slaves far exceeded the value of the entire railroad industry. The American Dream of a home mortgage is rooted in the American nightmare of mortgaging of enslaved people, no less than Thomas Jefferson himself mortgaged 150 enslaved people to build the American icon impressed on every nickel called Monticello.  And being industrialists steeped in a legitimate if obscene trade, slave Owners enjoyed trade magazines where owners swapped advice and details of slave diets, slave clothing as well as the tone a master should use to maximize performance

In short, American Slavery created culture of acquiring wealth without work, of growth at all costs that abused the powerless for its own ends. 

American slavery didn’t just deny blacks every sort of freedom imaginable, but built white fortunes, at slavery’s peak there were more banks in New Orleans than in New York, and from our vantage point looking back we can see that the wealth gap between whites and blacks is a defining and persistent characteristic of our nation…

In health, in education, in social services, from the from the plantations to the halls of congress, as in ancient Egypt, the suffering of enslaved people becomes baked in while monuments to power grow. 

Indeed as our ancestors in Ancient Egypt fell from overseers with whips, here in America, and for much of our history, the bottom gear of economic growth was also legalized torture itself.

Who can believe that a 1729 law authorizes punishments of enslaved people to include cutting off the right hand, severing the head from the body, dividing it up the rest in four quarters and putting it on display in public places to discourage future violations.

And today in America, and I love my country, America’s blacks are 22 times more likely to receive the death penalty.  America’s Black kids in school are disproportionately suspended and expelled from school for the very same behaviors as whites by huge margins…And America’s Black family average wealth is one tenth, that’s right, one-tenth the average wealth of America’s white families.

Of course, long after the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, we all still very much live in the awful wake of slavery and the attitudes about black people that flow directly from it…my childhood includes more memories than I care to share of those I loved and adored using the most awful words about black people, espousing deeply held racist attitudes about black people and, generally wanting to keep a healthy distance from black people, in my childhood neighborhood and in the workplace and beyond.

So last year, I ramped up my game, I involved myself in groups and organizations whose causes were empowering for black Americans and built a series of meaningful relationships with the good people in those groups.  Specifically, I developed two new and intentional relationships with two African American ministers, relationships which flourished over the past year.  Additionally, I participated in a continuing education class and just started another with lots of people not like me.

So, now it’s a year later, I took the test again and scored just as poorly, I still have a strong unconscious preference of white people over black people.  So I called my African American minister buddies who reminded me of their poor test results last year, that it takes a good long time to reframe old and entrenched attitudes, that I’m talking about it, that I’m doing something about it, and that I shouldn’t be impatient…and, most importantly, I shouldn’t use my results as and excuse to stop working to wrestle with my own bias…not from guilt and shame, but because it’s sacred work…because God wants me to start bettering the world by bettering myself.

So I would like to share with you this morning, that this year I am setting a new goal, to continue to find common cause and common concerns which put me to work in rooms with black people, something  that will continue to bring us together frequently.  That is my Rosh HaShanah resolution.

I think that part of serving my Jewish tribe means wrestling with my own hidden biases.  And I believe my God, who creates all of us in a divine masculine and feminine image,  wants me to rise beyond my own stuff.

I believe that our job as Jews is to name the worst of what people do to one another and to remedy those ills as best we can.  And I believe that sometimes the worst of who we are and what we do occurs quietly and subtly and that taking that on requires that I start with myself by stretching toward the sacred.