Here's another essay of mine that's on the web:
Konch Magazine

But it's archived in an obscure way there, so I'm copying it in here.

From the Schizophrenia of American Racism (the Frying Pan) to the Paranoia of the Middle East (the Fire)

by Jeffrey M. Green

On the photographic paper under the enlarger my white face was black and their black faces were white. If we exposed the print so that the features of their faces were clear and distinct, my face would be so underexposed that I would look like a featureless ghost, and if we exposed it properly for my face, theirs would come out like bottomless shadows. So I explained the technique of dodging to them. After we exposed the print long enough for their faces, I waved my fingers over them to shield them from the light while I continued the exposure long enough to expose my face properly. My students thought this was a riot. Not only had photography reversed black and white for them, but it had made my white face into a problem that had to be solved. They joked with me about it, and for that moment I had gained their trust, in the darkroom, where we were all invisible.

This incident took place in the summer of 1968. I was a twenty-three year old graduate student in Comparative Literature at Harvard, and I had come to Charleston, South Carolina to teach in an Upward Bound program. I had no illusions about the enormous gap of privilege that separated me from my students, but in the safe and nurturing atmosphere of that program, which was run by some self-assured and impressive southern black educators, I was accepted by my students, who probably had never had a white teacher before. We learned a lot from each other. During that summer it often happened that I would be the only white person in a crowd of African-Americans, and I sometimes forgot how conspicuous I was. Once we took our students to the University of South Carolina at Columbia for a meeting of all the Upward Bound programs, and while I was standing with my students, I happened to catch the suspicious gazes of students from another group. Suddenly I sensed the hostility toward white people that black high school students in the south felt but rarely could express openly. You might recall, though, that there was extensive rioting in Charleston a year afterward. Hostility can't be bottled up forever.

Here's the schizophrenia. During the week I lived in a boarding house in a black neighborhood of Charleston. My landlords, the Brevards, were an elderly, proper couple. Mr. Brevard was a retired railroad chef, and occasionally he would cook gourmet meals for me and my roommate, a student from Bombay who was studying at Carnegie Tech. But I spent the weekends with my fellow Jews. A relative of mine had married a doctor from Beaufort, South Carolina, and I visited them several times. Also, before going down to Charleston, I had received the names of several members of the local Jewish community, who were extremely hospitable to me and approved of what I was doing. So I sometimes found myself switching from the Brevards, clean and comfortable but somewhat rundown home to air-conditioned ranch houses in Charleston's affluent suburbs. One of the Jewish families that I came to know in Charleston had a forty-foot racing sloop, and they often took me out for sails. So there I was, with one foot in the poverty program and another foot on a yacht. I went to the African Methodist Episcopal church with the Brevards to see what that was like, and I went to the elegant Reform synagogue in Charleston with my Zoroastrian roommate.

My schizophrenic experience in Charleston was, in essence, no different from what I had known for most of my life. I grew up in Greenwich Village in the 1950s and went to a progressive private school, the Little Red School House, where we were taught not to be prejudiced. In elementary school we studied about Mexico, India, and China, and also what was then called Negro History. How many other fifth graders in the US at that time were taught about Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Haitian rebellion against France? We sang spirituals in music class, and, in fact, our music teacher was a charismatic black woman, Charity Bailey. Looking back on it now, I realize that it was very unusual for a class consisting mainly of middle-class white pupils to have a black school- teacher, but at the time I thought it was entirely natural. Charity (we called our teachers by their first names) was an amazingly gifted teacher and handled her blackness with admirable poise.

I went on from the Little Red School House to its upper school, the Elisabeth Irwin high school (where Angela Davis was a year ahead of me). The political commitment to integration and civil rights was even stronger there. We sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing"along with the "Star Spangled Banner," and we regularly spent Saturday mornings picketing the Woolworths on Fifth Avenue near Fortieth Street, because the lunch counters in southern Woolworths were segregated. But at the same time, Elisabeth Irwin found it hard to recruit African-American students. The tuition was kept as low as possible, and scholarships were made available, but not that many black people could afford to send their children to private schools, and those that could were not interested in a leftist, progressive school like ours. So the integration in my school was more token integration than the real thing, despite our ideals.

Outside of school, my life was just as segregated as any other middle class white American,s. My parents had no African-American friends. I never played with black children or went out with black girls. And I was under tremendous pressure to get into a "good college. Only one of my classmates had the courage of his political convictions and attended City College, where there was some likelihood of studying with a significant number of people of color. Looking back on it, I see how abnormal it was to be in favor of civil rights, against segregation, and so on, and also to protect my white middle class privilege with vigorous tenacity.

In 1969, while I was partway through my graduate program, I had the opportunity of teaching English in a southern Negro college. I was offered a job at Tuskegee and also at a college in Houston, Texas, but I chickened out. I opted to remain in the safe environment of Harvard and

finish my doctorate (which has proven to be a virtually worthless credential, since I did not become an academic). I can,t complain. If I,d gone off to teach at Tuskegee, I would never have met the woman I married, and our marriage has been very rewarding. But my life would certainly have had a very different shape.

For one, I probably would not have moved to Israel in 1973.

To some degree, the decision to move here was an effort to escape American racism, to escape the burden of being white in a society that oppresses people who aren,t white. I heeded the cry of Huey Newton (I think it was he who said it): "If you,re not part of the solution, then you,re part of the problem. I was unable or unwilling to make my whole life over to become part of the solution, so I decided to evade the problem by moving away from it. How naive I was! Instead of being privileged by my skin color, in Israel I am privileged both by being Jewish (with respect to Palestinian Arabs) and by being of Ashkenazic (European) origin (with respect to Jews from North Africa and the Middle East). Also, as if to compound the irony, during the past ten years or so I have become increasingly interested in jazz, and that interest has led me to read extensively about issues of race and African-American culture. So not only have I not escaped American race issues, I have found myself in a violent stew of ethnic conflict in which I am no less compromised by the unearned, accidental privilege of my Ashkenazic Jewish birth than I was as a white-skinned citizen of the United States.

For someone who grew up in the racial society of America, it is difficult not to see the social problems of Israel in the same light. That is my point of reference, but it is not necessarily a useful one. The crimes committed against Africans during the slave trade and under colonialism, and to African Americans under slavery and since then, are not at all the same as the suffering undergone by the Palestinians as a result of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Which is not to deny that very deep scars have been left on Palestinian souls. Conversely, being here in the Middle East has changed my view of the issue of race in the United States. Despite my white skin and European features, I don,t look all that different from many Arabs and Oriental Jews. Although they tend to be darker than I am, some of them are just as light, even blond. The main difference between me and them is cultural. Seeing this, now, has shown me what I had been blind to as a liberal, white American in the fifties and sixties. I tended to discount the cultural difference between me and African-Americans. I failed to realize that African-American culture was really a culture, and I didn,t understand why there had to be Black Studies departments at universities. I wanted desperately to regard American Negroes as white people who happened to have dark skins. That,s how I viewed civil rights. Since "they are the same as "we are, "they deserve the same rights. I hadn,t fully grasped the notion that "they deserved full civil rights even if "they weren,t the same as "we were. Moreover, now that I think of it, it was odd that I, as a Jew, thought of myself as part of the white American collective, while at the same time I insisted that Jews should both enjoy full American citizenship and also preserve certain distinctive religious and cultural traits. We Jews are often accused of being clannish, and I felt

we had every right to be that way if we wanted to.

As an American who grew up committed to civil rights, I am sensitive to the prejudice and discrimination practiced in Israel against Oriental Jews and Palestinians, and as a person who has lived in the cultural stew of the Middle East for nearly thirty years, I have become sensitive to the cultural aspects of discrimination against African-Americans in the United States. As an American troubled by the unearned privilege of having white skin, I suffered from a kind of schizophrenia. As an Israeli, surrounded by real enemies, many of whom have every intention of killing me and my family, I run the risk of suffering from paranoia. I can,t assume that Palestinians will stop hating Israeli Jews if we start treating them fairly. I still have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of being a privileged person who doesn,t believe in that kind of privilege, but I also have to protect myself. And it,s never clear how real the threat can be. I have joined groups of Israeli peace activists on visits to Palestinian villages in the West Bank, and I have felt safe and welcome. But I also was within sight of one of the suicide bus bombings that took place in Jerusalem in 1996. If my car had been stopped a couple of hundred feet closer to the traffic light, I could have been injured. If I had sent my son to the Central Bus Station by bus that morning instead of driving him, he might have been killed in that explosion.

I have used the words "schizophrenia and "paranoia loosely here. I,m not a clinical psychologist, and I don,t really claim that these situations have made me mentally ill. But sometimes I feel as if what stands between me and the mental illnesses that go by those names is insensitivity. Not only is my skin white, it is thick. If all of us were fully sensitive to the contradictions between the values we profess and the values we actually live by, we might all go mad. Or else we might change the world.