Searching for Kindness: Reactions to the Events Surrounding Ferguson and Eric Garner

I was raised in an equal opportunity home where I was encouraged not to discriminate based on the color of someone’s skin, and I grew up in a community where derogatory comments were frequent and racist remarks almost as common as prayers. I have some friends who grew up in Brooklyn and they have it really bad; they were raised alongside children of another color with the insulated impression that every black person is a mirror of the kid on the news who broke into a convenience store. They were raised on the premise that every person with skin of another color is a potential rapist, murderer, or thief.

You know, when I’m walking alone at night and I see a man slow down his pace to match mine in my peripheral vision, I’m not getting tripped up on the color of his skin. I’m usually wishing I had remembered to buy pepper spray and I’m sliding my key in between my fingers to use as a weapon if need be. In a moment of fear, I like to think that I don’t discriminate. And maybe the same can be said for Officer Darren Wilson, the cop who wasn’t charged for the murder of Michael Brown. Or maybe not.

I want to write a story about intolerance and the way it threads itself into our lives. Maybe you’ll argue a leftist agenda in the case of the protests currently going on all across the nation and you’ll fight that mentality with everything you have. Maybe you’ve only heard only a jumbled explanation of the current events, second and third hand accounts of a news story. Maybe, like me, you’ll say that you don’t discriminate and you were also raised in a home where Rachel Maddow’s liberal sarcasm blared from the television and no one ever once intentionally muttered a derogatory remark. For all of us, intolerance is still prevalent in our lives because it’s still prevalent in our society, as Jews and as Americans.

Say that your grandparents are in town and Friday night at the Shabbos table, your grandmother starts going on about a man in front of her in the security line at the airport. His pants were slipping off of his hips, she says, and she uses a few choice words to describe his ethnicity that are no longer socially acceptable. The rest of the family might start to visibly shift in their chairs, your brother is perhaps outwardly gaping by now, and everyone does their best to move forward and ignore the racist remarks. No one wants to pick on an eighty-year-old woman who grew up in a different generation.

In that moment, intolerance isn’t just a global issue. It isn’t just the source of sometimes peaceful, and other times violent, protests all across the country. It’s not just a rising issue about police brutality and the necessary discussions and actions that need to follow. It’s sitting right in front of you at your Shabbos table, and it’s being encouraged by your silence.

In her TED Talk, given just a few weeks before the Ferguson decision that chose not to bring charges against officer Darren Wilson for the death of Michael Brown, Verna Myers talks about unconscious bias. She talks about how there are different concentrations of racism, and how it’s our responsibility to shift our perspective as a culture and as a society.

“What are we going to do about the Ferguson that’s in us?” asks Myers. “We wonder why these biases don’t die and why they move from generation to generation,” she says. “Because we’re not saying anything. We’ve got to be willing to say, ‘Grandma, we don’t call people that anymore.’” And we have to keep saying it.

I think back to the morning of the terrorist attack in Har Nof when I called my mother crying. I blamed my final papers, lack of sleep, stress from work, and general anxiety. It took me a few minutes to acknowledge that the terrorist attack nine thousand miles away had made my head spin on the train that morning. For a few moments there, all of that panic overwhelmed me; the blatant hate and violence hit me and I didn’t know what to do with all of the injustice I was feeling. She calmed me down and told me, “Do your part here. Be a little kinder to people there.”

That morning, standing in the freezing cold just outside the train, my mother reminded me to be more tolerant and kind. She reminded me that intolerance is everywhere and that it’s not all ‘them’ and ‘us’. She sparked some acknowledgement of the small ways that prejudice is still a part of each of our lives and made me look to myself for the change and kindness I was seeking.

I’ve been reminding myself lately that I’m not an exception to the hate in our society, but that if I make a different choice, I can be. I’ve been reminding myself of the potential kindness that exists in each of us and the ability we have to outweigh the hate. I’ve been trying to remind myself to be a little more tolerant.