Keeping up with the Joneses: The naming of racial identities in the autobiographical writings of LeRoi Jones/ Amiri Baraka, Hettie Jones, and Lisa Jones

College Literature, Winter 2002 by Thompson, Deborah

was struck by their perfect physical match. Goyim, I thought. That shamed me. I went to a meeting of the Jewish group Hillel, but all I saw there were people unlike me. Summer arrived. I read Whitman in Riverside Park at night and watched the mighty Hudson's march to the sea. I dated a Pakistani, an African who lived at International House, and a Jewish-- Lutheran lawyer from Washington Heights. Jones 1990, 17)

At a time when Hettie is only beginning to develop a language for race, she has a very explicit vocabulary word for white non-Jews: Goyim. As an aside I want to note that earlier in this century, "Jewishness" was potentially one way to inhabit whiteness while also being other to whiteness. It could have offered a model for other forms of minority whiteness. Instead, Jewishness whitened; it disappeared as a racial sub-category for people of European or Middle-Eastern descent who identified as others to whiteness, of darker cast(e)s. Following Noel Ignatiev's thesis in How the Irish Became White (1996), I would suggest that the 1950s was a time when American Jews, Italians, and other marginally "white ethnics" followed Irish Americans in becoming incontrovertibly white. (Many people who have read or heard this paper in progress feel that I am too harsh on mainstream American Jewish identity. Because of my own complicated family history of names, audiences fail to identify me with my Jewish upbringing, or to see me as a member of an interracial family. From my own perspective, I am writing very much within a tradition of Jewish self-criticism [not to be mistaken for Jewish self-- hatred]. This is a Jewish self-criticism that I believe Hettie shares. My anger at the whitening and mainstreaming of American Jewish identity arises from my being raised with the myth of Jews' special status in the Civil Rights movement. I was brought up by my parents and my temple to understand that Jews, because they [we] had been relentlessly persecuted, have a special mission to end all persecution, which we saw around us most immediately in the form of racism. In my Bible school we studied Martin Luther King, Jr., alongside Golda Meir, and Langston Hughes alongside Emma Lazarus.) On the other hand, Paul Berman, in his collection Blacks and Jews, considers this perceived alliance between Blacks and Jews as stemming from the liberal humanism central to American Jewishness (particularly "reformed" Judaism). The following passage is particularly relevant to my discussion of Hettie Jones:

The emancipatory liberalism of the American Jews took an infinity of forms in the twentieth century, and only some of these movements flew a Jewish flag. Many Jews were more likely to proclaim a doctrine of purer universalism and to relegate Jewishness to the sphere of private life ... From the perspective of people with the universalist idea, humanism and liberalism, not what they conceived of as Jewishness, brought them to the cause of African America. There is an old and slightly peculiar Jewish custom of rebelling against Jewishness by identifying with the most marginal of all possible groups, so as to rebel and still not assimilate into the mainstream; and this, too, played its part in attracting Jews to the black cause. (Berman 1994, 11-12)