Chaptzem Blog!      

Racists among us

On Shabbat I overheard a children’s conversation that I wished I had not. I passed by a Hasidic synagogue, whose name I won’t mention to avoid embarrassing it, when I overheard an honest conversation between two boys. They sat on the steps at the entrance to the building when the younger one, a cute boy with curly sidelocks and an innocent expression, turned to the older boy and asked him a question that threw me off balance: “Tell me, what are Yemenites?” The second boy, without thinking for even a second, answered: “Yemenites are worse than Sephardim, because they are browner”. This conversation transported me back 18 years – a scared girl in the famous Hassidic Beit Yaakov school. I was the only “suntanned” girl in grade 3b, and I was a leper.

I remember hiding in the classroom during recess so that the sun won't darken my skin. My only “outcast” friend was Tzipi. She was born with the “right genes” and did not have “mixed blood” like me, yet even Poles can sometimes be born with dark skin. Her beautiful green eyes and flowing hair did not help her pass the strict acceptance test put forth by the china dolls, our class mates. A girl who in secular society would have been placed on a highway billboard sat hunched next to me, apologizing for her existence- yes, the only two “brown” girls in the class.

Besides the feeling that we would never be as beautiful as the pure white skinned girls who populated our school, we were also considered dumb, because stupidity and darkness go hand in hand, in a distorted logic that I never understood.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3389823,00.html