Black Crowd Cheers as StarsnBars comes down.

My brother in law chose South Carolina as his home  and castigates me for criticizing his chosen home.  This photograph explains why I will continue to do so.

Bill and my sister are Jews, as am I.  Unlike them I refuse to be called “white” because that is not my heritage and because of my own experiences as a non white growing up in a very bigoted part of Boston. I worry, however, that Jews who identify as white are too willing to a accept  the benefits of white privilege without recognizing the shame.

The self congratulations amongst white South Carolinians disturbs me greatly. They took this damned thing down 150 years after they fought a racist war, a century after the last of 143 Back people were lynched in the state, about as long after the height of the KKK, six  decades after the Palmetto State  raised the damned thing to defend their right to segregate Black children, three months after a police officer shot an innocent Black man in the back, and two weeks after the massacre of nine good Americans in a historic church.

South Carolina’s Jews are not exempt from this shame.  Southern Jews were good citizens, good white citizens in a racist society. The racist principles  that were later written into the KKK charter were first written by members of Charleston’s reform congregation.  The South Carolina Jews sided with Jim Crow laws and played no role in the civil rights movement.  Being white was easy until the KKK and its  ilk pointed out that our color was more than skin deep.