A Jewish Defense of White Saviors

My people have dedicated a garden to saviors – the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations. Some eighty+ % of whom were White. We owe them an eternal debt of blood, because if there is one thing we Jews have, it is a long memory. If you feel a desire to be choosey about the racial/ethnic identity of the person standing next you in the fight for safety, equity, or freedom, you need to ask yourself why. Let me take a moment to say I do not equate ashkenazic Jewishness with Whiteness, and the conceit that European anti-Jewish violence was White on White crime is so ahistorical it would be laughable, if it weren’t deeply offensive.

Therefore, writing about the issue of White saviors, I am writing from the perspective of someone who identifies as non-White. This is not the same as identifying as a person of color. As an ashkenazic Jew I am White passing (not every Ashkenazic Jew is), and experience a high percentage of the many privileges accorded to Whiteness in the United States. And I must therefore own an equal amount of the responsibility to dismantle oppression that comes from having the power to do so. But I know when the White supremacists come, they will come for me and my family first. My people came within a gasp of extinction in living memory, and the question of Jewish identity, and how we are racialized as either White or non-White by the non-Jews upon whom our safety depends, implicates what I view as an existential threat. And lest you dismiss this as paranoia, it is worth mentioning that my people have been genetically selected for paranoia. There is a mass grave for Jews who were insufficiently paranoid, secure in the belief that whatever Whiteness their ‘White passing’ skin color had bought them was enough. This mass grave is called Europe.

I do not mean to imply that being a ‘savior’ denotes moral superiority over those experiencing oppression or fighting on their own behalf (all though it is certainly morally superior to using power and privilege to further oppress others or enhance your own status). I do not mean to imply the act of the savior should further harden the hierarchy between savior and saved that preserves power imbalance instead of dismantling it. I do not mean to imply that community power can and should be granted as a boon from the outside. Rather I mean that the desire to do good and correct injustice is a human motivation – one of our better ones – that is not curtailed by race, class, or ethnicity. You do not have to be born into the genetic inheritance to fight racism, you have to be a human being and fight racism. Who should lead that fight, and how, is a complicated question, but I reject the notion that any human being is racially ineligible to participate at any – or every – level in the struggle for the future.

Let me tell you about a White savior. His name was Raoul Wallenberg, and it is because of his courage, and his rejection of racial essentialism, that my husband and our three beautiful children exist. Raoul Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat, who began writing passports for Hungarian Jews to enable them to flee the Nazi regime. A crime for which he paid with his life. Let me tell you about another White savior; John Brown. John Brown was an American abolitionist, who initiated a small war to end the enslavement of Black people in America, because he knew it was right. He died for his convictions, and by all accounts, he walked to his noose with his head held high. Their Whiteness did not qualify their heroism. Their humanity qualified their heroism. They are not more heroic than the activists who fought for their own communities, but neither are they less. The idea that any action on behalf of another community is essentially pejorative and/or oppressive is a current intellectual vogue in the social justice world, and I write this to reject it. In a racial essentialist framework, we must fear that our racial identities define the scope of our activism in ways beyond our control. If we reject this framework, we are free to imagine and fight for any future we can dream of. This is not to say that we should ignore the powerful interpersonal ways in which race operates between activists on the same side of the isle, but this is to say we should not assume we know what all those ways are and what the solution is simply by glancing at someone’s skin, or what racial identity box they have checked. I realize that my Whiteness, such as it is, will prevent most folks who disagree about this from taking me seriously. So I speak here just to anyone will listen. If someone is willing to step up for justice, let’s not ask them to sit back down on the basis of race.