I wonder who will be the lucky man to catch this prize?
Is it egregious cultural appropriation when blacks play classical music composed by whites, perform in plays written by whites, play games invented by whites?
Single frum men, specifically, can be clueless morons. They come into adulthood thinking they can drop on me what they perceive to be great pick up lines such as: “Hey, I dated a black girl once. She wasn’t Jewish and you know we did lots of freaky stuff.” (Mind you, this was said to me during a Shabbat seudah. Needless to say, I was fuming and couldn’t wait to leave! I do not know what angered me more—the transference of the racist stereotype that all black women are sexually loose and like to be spoken to as such, or the audacity to wear a kippah and say such things to me with pride at a Shabbat meal of all places!)
But wait, there’s more. Back in college, a guy at a party I liked “complimented” me by saying, “Wow you have a really nice goy butt!” My crush instantly dissipated and I excused myself from the party. Yet whenever the occasional non-Black Jewish girl with a big butt chilled with me and my friends, she never received such a name for her ample derrière. She just had a “big booty.” That was all. Yet she would also refer to my endowments as a “goy butt” just the same.
I vividly remember sitting on park bench years back some with frum friends, including this stereotypical “white boy with a hoodie” who had his jeans hung low. While I was speaking to my friend, he interrupted me. ” Yo, you are the first Black girl I heard talk right,” he said. “Why do you talk like that?” As his friends nodded in agreement, I felt fiercely upset. And I felt cornered, too: To them, being black means talking “not right.” Couldn’t play into the “Angry Black Woman” stereotype, now could I?
Then there was the time when one of my non-black frum college friends braided her hair into cornrows. Everyone in our social circle said she looked “fierce” and “cool.” But when I braided my hair to preserve its health that same summer, my frum friends told me it looked “too black.” And I got a lot of attention from guys and spoken to like a slut. Apparently the more “black” I looked the easier I must have appeared. Apparently I didn’t have to be won over like any other Jewish girl.
Experiencing double standards of beauty and language when it comes to race, and watching members of my frum community appropriate black culture so as throw away their religious identity, brings deeper questions to the forefront: Why do these double standards exist within my Jewish community? Why do frum white Jews adopt black culture when they want to rebel against their religious upbringings? And what does that say about my existence?
Those that engage in this practice are telling me that involving themselves in what they perceive to be the representation of “Black Culture” is a complete departure from being a religious Jew, or Jewish at all for that matter. In essence they are saying that being “Black” is being “Not Jewish.”
This disturbing concept further reinforces the false ideology that being Black and Jewish is inconceivable and contradictory. If you want to rebel, rebel—don’t make your rebellion a “thing” by listening to rap music and acting “black” because it co-opts other black identities—namely Jewish people who also happen to be black. It goes without saying that not all black people are the same, talk the same, etc. However, I have come across many people who have yet to grasp this reality.
