Digging Up the Rotten Roots
I woke up and went outside to harvest. I spent the morning digging up roots, rinsing them clean, putting them into containers to store. Then I checked the news.
Hasidic Jews in New York attacked with a machete inside their Rabbi’s home on Chanukah. The ninth anti-Semitic attack in New York during this week. Visibly Jewish people bearing the violent brunt of the story told about all Jews: that we are the ultimate source of people’s suffering. And that by harming us, killing us, that suffering will be alleviated.
The roots of our society are rotting. It is time to dig them up.
The roots of racism and anti-Semitism have run deep through our society’s history and have grown violence for generations. The exploitation of Black and Brown people, since before our country’s founding. The story that says that Black people are subhuman, that Black labor is white people’s to commodify, that Black communities can be destroyed in an infinite number of ways if white people can benefit. Stories that pave the way for gentrification and expulsion. And the stories that say it’s the fault of the Jews, stories imported by white nationalists for generations that claim that Jews control the banks, control the government, and ultimately control people’s lives. We have breathed these stories in since before we were born. They have always been written and spread by white supremacists and white nationalists, but at some point they came to be understood as common knowledge and we have failed to belong to each other ever since.
All of these stories serve to divide and conquer. All of these stories are meant to keep power in the hands of those who hold it.
As Carin Mrotz writes, “Just as capitalism absolutely depends on racism in order to justify exploiting black and brown bodies for labor, it absolutely depends on anti-Semitism in order to scapegoat the Jews and obscure the wheels of its own violence. Poor people are told it’s the Jews who are to blame for their poverty and oppression. Oppressed people are driven apart and pitted against each other. That’s the whole point. It’s so, so painful—and as we see, violent—when it works the way it’s supposed to.”
Most Hasidic people in New York experiencing this violence are poor. They live at the same economic level as the communities around them. But this isn’t the story that gets told. Because if we enable our suffering to connect us to one another, then we constitute a threat.
We must constitute a threat.
This doesn’t mean returning things to the way they were under the Obama administration. This means digging up the rotten roots.
Dove Kent, “Tearing Up Anti-Semitism by the Roots,” The Lilith Blog.
