Bryan Schwartzman: From my home studio, welcome to Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations. Buffie Longmire-Avital: This work was really about saying no. For things to get better for my own child, I need you all to step up and be thinking about the ways in which race is just working through your life. Bryan Schwartzman: I'm your host Bryan Schwartzman, and today I'm speaking with Buffie Longmire-Avital and we'll be discussing her Evolve essay. It has always been a shared story, finding the narratives of diversity, inclusion and racial equity in Judaism. Longmire-Avital is a diversity, inclusion and racial equity scholar educator. She's professor of psychology at Elon University, that's in North Carolina. Through a project sponsored by the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College's Center for Jewish Ethics, she researched the little explored area of how Jewish parents and guardians talked to their kids about race. The project is called Race, Religion and American Judaism. And here to tell us about it is my colleague and friend, Rabbi Mira Wasserman, who directs the Center for Jewish Ethics. We're going to have a little interview before the interview. So Rabbi Mira, welcome back to the podcast. It's great to have you again. Rabbi Mira Wasserman: Great to be with you. Bryan Schwartzman: So I asked you to come on today because we have an interview with Professor Buffie Longmire-Avital about her work connected to the Race, Religion, and American Judaism project. So that was under the Center for Jewish Ethics, I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about what that project was, is, and why you see it as really important. Rabbi Mira Wasserman: Oh, I'm so excited to do that. The project Race, Religion and American Judaism comes out of the strong sense that racism is a really important problem, an ethical problem that Jews are obliged to address. And this particular project tries to address it by generating new research and scholarship on the one hand, and also by developing new educational resources to help bring scholarship and research about racism, race and Jewish identity to broad audiences of kids and adult learners. So we sponsored 10 different research projects on Jews and race, and Buffie's project was one of those 10, a really exciting project, which as you know, had lots of really direct implications for how we can live together, how we can relate to each other within the Jewish community. Bryan Schwartzman: Yes, and we talked a lot about parenting the two of us and [inaudible 00:03:22] both as parents. And this project was funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, if I'm correct, and that seems significant. Rabbi Mira Wasserman: Yeah. We got this wonderful influx of money and resources and we're able to think big. So we were able to actually fund researchers sparking research that might not otherwise have happened with some leading scholars. And you got to know Buffie so you know that she's a psychologist who works in the areas of parenting and racialization. But one really exciting thing about this project was that we were able to tap people who are working in a wide range of different areas. I'm going to make a plug, people can look at jewsandrace.com to see all 10 projects, including Buffy's. And some of the projects come from a religious studies perspective, some have a historical orientation, some are more theoretical and some are more practical. But all of them have real implications for how we take race and racism seriously as Jews. So there's rich learning opportunities both for kids and adults there, and I really hope people will check it out. And I hope getting to know Buffie will be an enticement to get to know the other scholars who all can be found on that website. Bryan Schwartzman: And I guess it depends on who somebody is and where they're coming from, but if somebody goes and clicks on jewsandrace.com, what would you encourage them to look at or how would you encourage somebody to scroll through all that's there? Rabbi Mira Wasserman: Yeah, it's a lot of material. So the ten, actually, we have 11 scholars there and you can watch many lectures from all of them. We group the scholars according to topic, so there's some sort of general ideas. Is Judaism a race, a religion, or something else? That's like a really big question that we start with. So there's a few different perspectives on that and if people are interested in thinking theoretically about what race is, what Jewishness is, I would start with that unit. There's another unit that focuses on diversity within Jewish culture and within the Jewish people. So if people have an interest in Sephardic cultures and the immigrant experience United States, in the Ethiopian Jewish Festival of Sigd, we have materials on all of that, that they can check out. And then the last unit, that's where Buffie's work appears, is really about the very diverse ways that race and racism sh['=ow up in our lives today. So Buffie focuses on how it shows up within Jewish communities, and how families, how parents and teachers can really make a difference. But we also have presentations that look to the relationship of Jews, to indigenous peoples and land reclamation projects. We have another research project about the rise of white nationalism and the deep connection between anti-Semitism and anti-Black racism. Really, depending on what people's interests are and history and politics and family, there's going to be something I think that will be relevant and interesting. Bryan Schwartzman: And is there anything else you'd like to add? Rabbi Mira Wasserman: One thing that really sets it apart, we have really top-notch scholars doing their work. Mostly these are people who are teaching in universities, but instead of writing articles and books based on their research, what we were trying to do is bring their discoveries to people where they have the power to make the most difference. So also on the website are lesson plans and curricula based on these research projects. So if someone teaches in religious school, there are suggestions for how to bring these research projects to groups of kids or to groups of families. If someone is part of a book group or part of a staff in an organization that is interested in taking on the problem of racism, there are resources there to organize group learning with these lesson plans. So there's a lot of ways into the material, either hearing it directly from the scholars or accessing the ideas of the scholars through these very accessible lesson plans. Bryan Schwartzman: And I've looked at the material, I've talked to some of the scholars, it really is fascinating and adds a lot to a vital discussion. So thanks for coming on and help explaining this groundbreaking project and setting the table for the show. Rabbi Mira Wasserman: Yeah. Well, thank you so much for reaching out to Buffie. I think her scholarship is so important and I'm really glad it's going to find a wider audience through the podcast. Bryan Schwartzman: Now a reminder, all of the essays discussed on this show are available to read for free on the Evolve website, which is evolve.reconstructingjudaism.org. The essays aren't required reading for this show, but we recommend checking them out. Okay, let's welcome our guest. Buffie Longmire-Avital, welcome to the podcast, it's great to have you. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. Bryan Schwartzman: Yeah, we had a chance to talk offline a couple months ago for a print article and now it's for all the world to hear, or at least the couple thousand people who've been downloading us. The numbers have been good recently, so if you're out there listening, keep downloading. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. I feel like ever since we talked the first time, I've had so many dinner conversations where race and racism has come up with a nine year old and a 12 year old, and I think I've flubbed every one and I'm like, okay, I'm going to get all the answers on whatever date... Buffie Longmire-Avital: I wish I could give all the answers. Bryan Schwartzman: There's a lot of pressure on you. But before I go to seeking personal parenting help, which I actually do want to ask you about, I'm going to start where we started around when we talked offline. And just to ground us, I know that in your professional life you've studied socialization in African Americans, African American families, and that's really been a primary topic of your research. So if you can remind us what compelled you to really look at how race is discussed in Jewish families and Jewish families of all racial backgrounds? Buffie Longmire-Avital: Yeah, absolutely. This is entirely a personally motivated line of research. So I identify as a bi-racial I am married to an Israeli American man who definitely identifies as white, although I think his identity as white has developed over time and perhaps more so now that we've been in the South than when we were living in Brooklyn. And we have two biracial kids. And so I knew very early on that we were always going to have to have these conversations and that our conversations were probably not going to be easy because our boys were going to be straddling multiple worlds and they would have experiences that both my husband and I had or one of us had and experiences that neither of us had. And so I've always looked for and been conscious of the ways in which we've been engaging conversations around race, wanting to always follow their lead. So thinking about where they were for the moment, knowing what I needed to prep them for, and then being able to respond when those conversations came up and those conversations come up when you least expect it, a conversation just happened in shul. This Shabbat, my oldest leaned over, I could tell he was a little frustrated and down and he recounted that he was playing at school, they had finished their end of year testing and I guess they decided they wanted to play football. And because middle school is the seventh pit of hell, they decided that they were going to break up the teams based on race. Bryan Schwartzman: Of course. Buffie Longmire-Avital: So because of course you would do that, so the White kids would be versus the Black kids. And he said, "Well, there was an equal number of Black kids if they would just count me, but they refused to count me. They said that I wasn't Black enough." And he's like, "I knew that the White kids weren't going to take me on their team." So he said, "Instead of being able to play, which I really, really wanted to do after a long day," he said, "I just kind of walked around." And he's like, "I really..." He divulged that he just wasn't feeling good about himself. And so here I am in Shabbat services, people are reading Torah and I'm trying to have a quiet conversation with my son who's got his head on his shoulder because he just felt in that moment that it all came out and he needed to just talk to me about it. And we talked about the fact that he is who he identifies to be, that it's not based on how other people are identifying you. They don't have that right, that is the right that you have as a human being to embrace your identities, that he has claimed to both identities and this additional space. And that he needs to dig and embrace the things that he loves about how he is Black and how he expresses that, and that it is not meant for him to become a version of himself that is acceptable to others, partly because they don't even have the correct version of themselves. They are still in process and sometimes it's the people who are trying to figure out themselves the most that can cause the greatest harm. So how does this relate to this work? Our conversations around race are an almost everyday occurrence because we can't escape it based on who we are as a family, who my children are. And if I'm having these conversations, I want to know how other people are having those conversations, especially people who are raising children that are in a position to and intentionally cause harm to my own child. I guess at the end of the day, this is coming from a great love and drive to protect my children as much as possible. Bryan Schwartzman: So many different reactions to that. The first is a little bit of surprise that happens in a 2023 middle school, which maybe is part of the problem and disconnect to begin with, because it sounds like based on your own experience, you weren't surprised that something like that would happen at all. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Not at all. No, this is a daily. Bryan Schwartzman: But just also, number one, I'm sure you're very glad that your son shared something that was bothering him. And the other hand, it didn't come in the moment when you were prepared to receive and it didn't come at the optimal moment. And I feel like so often the impetus is, let's talk about this later, but you had the conversation in the moment, Torah service or no Torah service because... Buffie Longmire-Avital: Absolutely. Part of this work is about the idea that parents really need to be, we all, not just parents, everyone needs to be thinking about these topics and developing a comfort level with these topics so that when your children come to you and have a question, you are not saying, "Okay, hold on, pause. We'll talk about this at another time when I'm better prepared." Because the likelihood is that they're not going to receive it in the same way if you dismiss them or push them off to another moment. Bryan Schwartzman: All right. I promise I'm going to get to your research and communal implications, but this definitely strikes a chord. I think reading your essay and after the first time we talked, one thing I've been thinking about is this idea of parenthood as this job description that just constantly expands and gets longer and longer explaining racial dynamics to a child, preparing them to help make the world more anti-racist, it just seems really hard, but I guess that's what I was talking about. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Yeah. No, it definitely seems hard and it is. So here's two things. One, there are some of us that have no choice, we have to have these conversations. Two, if we're thinking about it in a Jewish framework, we're already having conversations about anti-Semitism. What Jewish parent, if you think about the fact that your role is to protect, to keep them alive, is not going to have a conversation about anti-Semitism, what it is, how to spot it, how to respond, how to make sure you're okay. Thinking about the emotional toll of what it's like to go through an anti-Semitic experience, you know are prepared to have that conversation. You're prepared to react because it's so infused into your identity that you lead and walk around with. And so is race for me, so I knew that these conversations were going to happen. I knew that sometimes my children were going to experience things and tell me things and they wouldn't put the dots together, but I would put the dots together and then I would have to choose how I would respond. So sometimes I have a very upfront frank conversation, "Guys, do you know that's what this means?" Or sometimes I just send a little note to a teacher or have to send a note to a parent saying, "FYI, this happened," or I make a decision that you know what? That is not the place for us. And they may not fully understand why in that moment, but I catalog it and I have to go back to it. And you're probably doing the same thing when it comes to being vigilant about anti-Semitism, but when you carry an identity of White, you get to engage in this social loafing where you're not hypervigilant around these conversations. At least I haven't seen a vast majority of people be that way. And this work was really about saying no. For things to get better for my own child and maybe to alleviate some of the burden that I have to shoulder, I need you all to step up and be thinking about the ways in which race is just working through your life. How is it that your race is shaping the experiences, the access even to Judaism that you have? And not that you need to prepare this full on speech or manifesto on the state of race and Judaism for your children, but that you are aware so that when a child does come to you and says something, the kind of initial shock is not long lasting because you recognize, oh yes, this exists. Oh yes, we navigate this world not only as Jews, but racially as well, and so here's the way that I'll start to have these conversations. And those conversations are going to shift based on what the child is bringing up. But nonetheless, you are more equipped or at least acknowledge that the conversations need to be had, that they don't need to just end in awkward silence or perhaps we'll go look it up some other time or find somebody else that we can talk with. Bryan Schwartzman: Or just eat your dinner. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Right, exactly. Or we don't talk about it, like that song, We Don't Talk About Bruno. I think that there's a whole generation of us that said, "We don't talk about race." That's what we decided to take away from the civil rights movement and particularly Martin Luther King who was not advocating for that at all. He was saying he was hoping for a society where race would not be this permanent indicator of your positionality, privilege and access, not just go ahead and ignore it so we don't have to contend with our racialized history. So I'm hopeful that this work, that the ongoing work that I do in a lot of spaces is pushing people to be uncomfortable in a moment so that they recognize that you cannot just pack it up into a nice little box and set it on the shelf for when you are ready to tackle it. I don't have the option of doing it. I need you to tackle it then and there in a way that is comfortable for you. Bryan Schwartzman: And social loafing, how would we define or understand that term? Buffie Longmire-Avital: Social loafing, if you think about it in terms of a tug of war, and if you think about the strategy in tug of war, you put kind of your strongest people at the end and in the front. And if you were to take a picture or a video, what you would see is a lot of strain happening at the end and at the front. But you've got a whole bunch of people in the middle that are tugging, but not necessarily tugging completely because they recognize that the amount of effort they exert is really not distinguishable from those who are pulling at the front and those who are pulling or being the anchors at the back. So social loafing is kind of this concept that when you are in group settings and you can't really distinguish individual contribution, people tend to pull back in terms of the level of effort they exert. And so what I've started to see and what I want to call out in this work is the idea that we are starting to have conversations about race, racism and Judaism, have always been and are certainly happening more frequently now, but what seems to be the pattern is that it is reliant on Jews of color to facilitate, to be the catalyst to sustain those conversations. Or we say the loafing comes in a way of, "Well, I have never had to think about this. I don't know what to do. I don't want to be wrong, so I'm just going to leave it to the experts over there, that person with the lived experience, I'll ask them or I'll take my kids to something that they are putting on. But that's kind of the extent of the work that I'm doing." And so to me that is social loafing. And what I argue is that when you see this type of social loafing, this White social loafing, so we're not going to talk about race, we're not going to instigate, we're not going to be as hypervigilant and involved in unpacking our own understanding. We're simply going to wait maybe in a nod of trying to be respectful to Jews of color in their lived experience to tell us. It's not actually a movement of empowerment. I think what it is, is a movement of objectification. So now my experience, my need to educate and talk about race becomes kind of an instrument, a textbook for you to use as opposed to you exerting your own individual drive and effort to learn and to be better. Bryan Schwartzman: Okay. So through the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and its Race, Religion and American Judaism project, you explored some of these issues. So can you tell us a little bit about what was the research you did and what you found? Buffie Longmire-Avital: Yeah, absolutely. So I was able to do a study asking for parents of children who were Jewish who either identified as Jewish themselves to complete a series of questions, really just getting at exploring what are the conversations that are happening? Are conversations even happening about race and racism in Judaism? How prepared do people think that they are? What are the values that maybe are driving some of these conversations and examples of if they've experienced or witnessed microaggressions before? And so I had about 121 participants, which was phenomenal in terms of an online response. And for the most part, parents are having this conversation. Over I think 80% of the respondents said, "Yes, we've had a conversation about race and racism." Where it tends to get a little bit fuzzy is whether or not that conversation has really talked about race and racism within a Jewish setting. So a lot of parents were having conversations that were sparked by the racial reckoning that we saw in the summer of 2020. This research was done in 2022, and so parents immediately started reflecting on how they went to protests, they saw the videos and they just got to a point where like everyone else in the US, they just couldn't ignore it anymore and intentionally started seeking out opportunities and spaces to have these conversations to learn more. So it was very interesting seeing how a lot of these conversations were anchored or the catalyst, the momentum was in that major moment of our US history. We know that happened. What is also concerning though is the fact that had that moment not happened, would we have seen these conversations and that is one of the reasons why this work is so important. So yes, you're having this conversation, but you're having this conversation because it was kind of socially sanctioned to do so. Would you have been having this conversation if we did not have the kind of explosion of conversation and thought and concern around race? And why didn't you have these conversations prior to that time? Especially the fact that we live in the era of videos showcasing excessive police brutality and other forms of racist incidents, way more than I remember growing up. Again, I grew up in the '80s, '90s, so not everybody was walking around with a handheld device that could capture these things, but it did make me curious as to why in 2020 and not all those times before. And so that was one of the takeaways, parents were having the conversations with these conversations primarily for the White parents were tied to the 2020 events. And so it does make you wonder what would've happened had those 2020 events not occurred. The other pattern that I saw was that parents who had this conversation typically felt more prepared to do so. So if they felt prepared, they had been learning about it themselves, they were doing work that put them in spaces where this was something that they thought about, they were more likely to engage. And then of course, parents who had an extended kind of social network of people that included persons who identified as Jews of color. So if your kind of personal orbit, your micro system, the people that you're engaging with the most frequently or the next level up, maybe not as frequently, but to some degree, was diverse, then you were more likely to engage in these conversations, as well with your children and you felt more prepared to do so. However, you engaged in conversations talking about race and racism, you did not necessarily, the parents did not necessarily engage in conversations around what specifically are microaggressions, so what to look for so that your children are aware of what they might witness and how to actually respond. So you're talking about race and racism as this abstract thing, this thing that is kind of happening to society, but you're not contextualizing it within Jewish spaces. And it was really the parents who either identified as Jews of color or were raising children that were Jews of color because there was a distinction. I think I had a little over 15% of the sample identified as Jews of color, but almost 30% said that they were raising children who identified as Jews of color, so that was an interesting discrepancy. But if they were raising children who were Jews of color, if they identified as Jews of color, they had conversations about what are microaggressions, what could they look like and how do you respond to them? The further away you were from having that emic perspective, the less likely you were to have conversations that were really around the practical notions of how to not just be simply a bystander or how to not be in a space and simply miss that something is occurring. And then I would say the other main takeaway is when I looked at the types of values that parents were recording in terms of what was influencing their parental approaches in general, and then perhaps specifically this work, it really did align with notions of Tzedaka and B'tzelem Elohim. So this notion of justice, seeing God in everyone, which was really beautiful, but there was something about it in terms of missing a humility piece as well. It was small, but it was there, that there was a desire to be advocates to speak out in terms of injustice, but I didn't always see the balancing of giving space for people to tell their own story. And I know I said we don't want to objectify, but objectification comes when you assume that that person has a sole responsibility of making the change, of educating the populace. But humility comes from being able to understand and sit with the fact that you may need to stay quiet in order to learn and that someone's else's story, which is very much part of the Jewish story, needs to be centered in a way that it hasn't been centered before. And that can't happen if you're too quick to speak over and not actually with. For example, I had one parent write talking about how they told their children that if they see anything that was wrong happening to somebody who identified as a person of color, particularly in a Jewish space, that they needed to not just sit back and be a bystander, that they needed to actively engage, they needed to be an ally, be an advocate. And then they added, because most Jews of color are converts. And I was like, "What?" So you are saying that you want to speak on behalf, but you are also doing so based on a very incorrect stereotypic assumption. You have now decided that you know the origin story of almost every Jew of color, I think they said one parent is likely a convert. And so I said, "Okay, here's a lacking of humility there." And then I guess I'll add this other piece because I think that this is really important, which is what's the starting point for parents to do this? And for me, one of the best quotes I got was a parent who talked about the fact that they leaned into their own story, but not just a story of saying, we experienced atrocities throughout life, and therefore we can just take the Jewish story and just completely map it on to other stories. That's not what they were saying because that is a point of tension when talking about the racialized experience in the US, and then the automatic comparison to the Holocaust and other experiences throughout the history of the Jewish people. But this parent really talked about the idea of sitting with their relatives, like their grandfathers relationship with race and the fact that as much as they were a survivor, they also exhibited certain racial biases and tendencies, and that they needed to sit with that first and understand that complexity of the story before they started to engage with any other story. That they needed to make sure that their child understood that origin story of their family and how these conversations have evolved over time, before they launched into a conversation of if you see this, then do this and you should be an ally or an advocate or all of these other protective phrases and personas that I saw come out. I thought that's the humility, that in telling our own story, our own positionality, we are also telling a more nuanced Jewish story as well, while making space for stories that have historically sat at the margin to come to the center. Bryan Schwartzman: If you're enjoying this episode, please take a minute to give us a five star rating or leave a review in Apple Podcasts. These ratings really help other people find out about the show. Our most recent five star review, and I hope I'm getting this name right, came from Zarifa Bedford who said or who wrote, "I just discovered this podcast through Reconstructing Judaism's website. I have been delighted with the content, highly recommend." Thank you so much, Zarifa, wherever you are. We'd like to get 100 five star ratings, we're currently at 40, so please help us if you have a moment. We really appreciate it. Back to our conversation with Buffie Longmire-Avital. Any other advice, guidance specifically for White Jewish parents knowing that these conversations can happen at any time? I don't know about you, I don't think my wife and I never... Life is way too hectic for us to sit down and say, "Okay, tonight at dinner we're going to have a conversation with the kids about X or Y." It just happens organically and usually when you're least prepared for it, and maybe have a blender going and can barely hear. Like, "What? What is racism, Dad?" I know there are no simple rules for such a complex subject. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Absolutely. But I think that you need to, I'm all about this notion of seeding the ground, planting seeds. How are we seeding the ground? I have recognized in parenting that my goal is just to simply seed the ground, and hope that something takes root and grows eventually. It's a hard position as an individual to be in. Parenting is hard because you don't know if you seeded the ground correctly until much later, but that's essentially what parenting to me at least is about. And so what I would ask parents is how are you seeding the ground in terms of these conversations or topics about race and racism, and recognizing the beauty of racial diversity within the Jewish people? Which spoiler alert, it's been there the whole time. This is not something that is new, partly because Jews predate the social construction of race itself, so we got grandfathered into how we determine race, but Jews have been around before race as a social construction. So that's just a side note to put out there and for us to recognize why I think it's perhaps incredibly hard for some of us to talk about it within this specific space. But for me, knowing that, for example, I had biracial boys, I remember getting a book called Mixed, and it was a book actually put together by Barack Obama's sister, and it's just a look book essentially of biracial kids because I realize that my sons are probably going to navigate spaces where they don't see anyone that truly looks like them. My oldest, he is absolutely enamored and in love with Patrick Mahomes, and I said, "We are from the East Coast, where is this love from Kansas City coming from?" He said, "He looks like me." And I realized, yes, of course. They love Miles Morales because Miles Morales is a biracial kid who looks like them and he's a Spider-Man. So my children have always thirsted for kind of reinforcements of who they are. They're looking for that, and that's what parents provide. So I think about the ways that I intentionally curated books that they could read that weren't maybe at a young age directly saying this is about this, but just had representation. That I made a point of thinking about the films and the television shows and the different events and activities that we got involved in. That I never hid the fact that I talked about what it was like to be a woman of color, and then I had these conversations with my husband. So the question that I would ask parents is, how are you seeding the ground around topics around race? How are you seeding the ground that the default should not just be White when it comes to looking at the narrative of the Jewish people? We have this tradition in our house, which has been put on hold because of the pandemic, but I think we might be able to bring it back this year. We call it Laka Palooza. And so what we do is, and it's primarily me, we invite all our friends over and it's essentially a Laka tasting party and I do my best to find recipes from all over the world. We've had Lakas that have been inspired by Japanese cuisine, Cajun cuisine, Mexican cuisine. And one of the things that I'm trying to do in this Hanukkah tradition is open my kids' eyes, open our friends' eyes to the fact that there are many ways to make a Latkes, meaning that there are many ways to experience, embrace and be Jewish. And so that's just a simple thing that I've done that's really fun. But I ask parents, what are the intentional ways that you are breaking out of just this default space that your one identity as it relates to race is the default identity for Jewish expression and experience? There's so many books now. There are so many different activities and avenues. That's just one place that you can start. The other thing that I would say, and I know I'm long-winded, but you gave me a mic, so I'm going to go, is that I don't think that you can really do this well unless you do the work yourself. And I don't assume that anyone has really done that deep of the work themselves, because again, we're of the generation where we put it into a box and we just put it on the shelf and we just said, "We're not going to see color." It's something you don't talk about. So you need to open that box up. You need to sit and you need to really think about and reflect on how race has worked its way through your life. Bryan Schwartzman: You mentioned Barack Obama, that was the post-racial election, right? We were done, we were done with it. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Some of us thought, some of us who had been on this rodeo for quite a while, was like, "All right, let's see what the pendulum brings." And boy did that pendulum bring something. But yes, I think people thought, oh, we don't have to talk about it. But yet the irony is he was the presidential candidate and president that talked about it the most. Bryan Schwartzman: I was actually at his major speech on race he gave in Philadelphia, in the Constitution Center. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Oh yeah, gosh. Bryan Schwartzman: I think it was on my birthday, March 18th, 2008. By saying I was there, I was in the media overflow room, so I was in the building watching him on a screen, but that's probably worth revisiting. I remember it being pretty powerful and not the kind of thing you heard every day in 2008. Buffie Longmire-Avital: No, absolutely. I think he opened a door for those conversations to happen more. I think we are in a point in time where that door is getting pressure to be closed, and that is, we're going towards very scary times. But religion and spiritual grounding, having a community that truly sees you is so critically important, especially for our young people. I was just listening to how the rates of depression are just skyrocketing, particularly for our children and adolescents and young adults. And so I know from my own research over time that having spiritual connections, having a faith community, having a cultural community can make a huge difference. So if we're really talking about the idea around social justice, and bringing forth a humanity and world that we feel like we have been tapped to do in our teachings, that means that we really want to make sure we are creating spaces where anyone who needs to feel that anchor can feel that anchor. And I want to make sure that is certainly true for my children, and so many of the children that share similar stories or slightly different stories than my kids. I want them to know that this is a space that truly is theirs, and it has always been theirs, and they don't have to give their Jewish CV to be allowed entrance because they happen to look a little bit different. Bryan Schwartzman: And as a researcher, you noted that this is a pretty new topic, what's least understood or what are you most curious about going forward? Buffie Longmire-Avital: Yeah. Oh, that's a great question. I'm still, I think, processing what I have, but I think that there was a lot of conversation about when and how you start these conversations. A lot of the parents remark things like, "Are they too young? I don't want to take away their innocence." And then other parents would remark, "I have no choice because I don't want the world to take away their innocence before I set them up appropriately so that they're able to navigate this." So I would love to take a much more developmental approach to this and really thinking through what are parents of young children doing or saying, what does that look like when they get into elementary, and then into adolescent and moving into high school, even to emerging adulthood. I don't want any parent to think that, oops, we missed it. There was a small window when we could have done something and we didn't do it, so oh, well. That is not the case. It is never too late. But the approach that you take is going to be developmentally linked to where your child is. So you may have a much more societal kind of infrastructure conversation or histories of race and racism in the US and how that relates to Jewish people with a child who is in high school going into college or in college. Whereas with a young child, you're going to have conversations around embracing difference and the beauty of that, and getting them comfortable to not just look for similar things or similar experiences. So I would love to do more work on that. And I think that there's still a need to dive more into the parents themselves and the experiences that they've had. In some ways, this was an easier one because parents can just report out what they're doing to their kids, but it takes a little bit more courage and comfort I think to really sit and wrestle with the ways you've either actively engaged or actively avoided engaging in topics around race and maybe your own stereotypes, implicit biases and ignorance. And so I think there needs to be that companion piece as well. Bryan Schwartzman: Based on developmental progress, or that's not the right word, but do we understand, have a sense, for better for worse, when kids really pick up the race as a socialized concept? In my vast experience as a parent of two, which this is me saying I'm no expert, I saw kids 2, 3, 4 playing together. There's no way they would divide themselves into White and Black or they're just kids playing, but at some point they pick up at the very least, oh, there is an us in there we have to be aware of. So I guess, do we just have any sense of when that is or there's no magic moment, it's just... Buffie Longmire-Avital: So it does happen differently for different children, and a lot of it has to do with what children are exposed to. In general, young children live in the superficial. So if you ask them to describe themselves, and this is your kindergartners, maybe even I would say not quite fourth, but definitely your second grade down, when you're asking them to identify themselves, they are just giving you factual things. So they'll give you the color of their skin, the color of their hair, the color of their eyes. They'll tell you if they feel big or tall or small. They'll tell you what they like, what their favorite things are. And so their description of their identity and themselves is very much rooted in what you can see. It's very concrete. Then you get into this fuzzy age of third, fourth, fifth grade where their identities are starting to take root and shift, and they're recognizing personality characteristics, things along those lines. But they're also starting to pick up on these other socialized differences, and they're recognizing that their identity is not just based on who they are, but it's also based on how others are perceiving them as well. And so they're already starting to absorb the content and the social dynamics of the world. And I think that's really important to consider because most parents would probably say, "No, they're not at the age to start having those conversations," but the fact is they're already starting to develop concepts. They may not have the language for them, but they're already starting to develop those concepts. So I would say that's the critical age. I think every age is a critical age and can do some really interesting things, but that's definitely the critical age to start having these conversations. Their memory is getting better. They're connecting the dots in different ways, and so their foundations are really being set. And I think this is the missed opportunity. I want to give you one example that I usually give when I'm doing topic, when I'm doing talks about the ways in which our mind works in terms of picking up stereotypes. So when my youngest son, I want to say he was about three or four, definitely in that earlier period of time. He was about three or four and we experienced being robbed. Not our house was robbed, but our shed was robbed. Somebody came in and decided to help them themselves to all our lawn mowing equipment. And because we are northern kids in North Carolina, we did not know that we were robbed for probably about four or five months, because my husband hates mowing the lawn, and so I think he just shoved things in there, walked away and said, "Oh, maybe I'll pick it back up in the spring." So by the time he came back in the spring, he stepped into an empty shed. So we were in the process of talking about what do we do? We don't have cameras out there. We have no idea when this equipment was taken. It could have been anywhere from November till April. Do we file a police report? Do we say anything? We don't know, we were just at a loss. And my son was in the bath overhearing this conversation, and so he said, "Mommy, I know who took it." And I said, "You do?" And I was like, this could be very interesting, "Do tell." He does have the only room that looks out to the backyard, so maybe he did see something. Well, he said they had on black pants and they were wearing a shirt that was striped with white and black stripes, and they had a black hat thing on their head that was really tight, and they had a brown bag that they were carrying, and then they had a black bandana around their eyes. So some of us probably think about the Hamburglar in that description, but if you have children and you have watched Lego City, then you are thinking about the ways that Legos basically crafts all the robbers. And about two days before, my son binged watched Lego City Cops and Robbers. And so when he heard we were robbed, he immediately went to that mental representation that he had formed earlier from watching the show and was completely ready to give a full description to a police officer should they walk into the door to essentially look for a Lego person. Because in his mind, that's what robbers look like. That is at a very, very young age and it just took a day of watching a few episodes for him at three to have this mental representation that was attached to a particular identity or person, and he felt confident to give that description to some type of authority who would walk through the door. That seems very innocent and sweet, and it's comical. It is an example of how quickly we form mental kind of heuristics and stereotypes, as well as implicit biases. But then I immediately think to the fact that I grew up during Boston's Charles Stuart case, which was when a White man was shot, and his wife was shot and killed right next to him in a supposed carjacking. And the description he gave was a very vague description of essentially a Black man. That's literally it. And so for weeks, Boston Police just pulled Black men over to question them as to whether or not they had involvement. And it was Black men of all ages, sizes, skin tones, features, everything. And then it came out, if you know this story that there was no assailant whatsoever, he actually shot his shot and killed his wife, and then shot him himself, I think it was an attempt to get insurance. I don't know. And when he realized that they were finding out, they were closing in on him, he actually I think jumped from one of the bridges in Boston. It was a horrific story. But the fact that people were willing to embrace this vague description is this example of how we form from a very young age, learn certain stereotypes and develop certain assumptions. And if unchecked, they can be incredibly dangerous. And so the fact that my young son was showing that at three, four, and we still see the vestiges of something like that with adults is why I say, you've got to start these conversations early. Bryan Schwartzman: I'm similar age, I grew up in New York, so the Central Park jogger case comes to mind. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Yes. Bryan Schwartzman: Every day on the... I have thought about this. If you grew up at that time, 1990, there were 2000 homicides, give or take, in New York City. So the evening news, which my parents watched every night, we didn't talk, we sat, and the news was on, you would just see picture of Black man after black man and African, and the mind has to form associations with that if you're seeing it every night. I've never done a study of myself, but it has to have an effect that has to be consciously countered, right? Buffie Longmire-Avital: Yeah. The term they use in social psychology is cognitive misers. We are constantly looking for shortcuts and constantly looking for ways to just take in all this information and truncate it into usable chunks that we can pull from at different times. And I think what we fail to recognize is how much we're doing that automatically, unconsciously all the time. And so consciously, you may say to yourself, "Oh, I would never fall into a stereotype. I would never be one of these people that makes this gross assumption about who a person is." But the fact is, we've all been exposed to these stereotypes over time, they've just run rampant and unchecked. So we have to take the onus of really sitting down with ourselves and going through and getting at those implicit biases. And that can be through intentional exposure to certain conversations or really reflective work, not shying away from certain conversations, but if it happened to us, why would we think it wouldn't happen to our children? So part of the uncovering the unconscious or the subconscious is through talking and through addressing it, you've got to bring it forth so that this exercise is not just about... This push for conversations that I'm encouraging is not just about for the children, but it's about you as well as the parent. Bryan Schwartzman: In your essay, you share two really powerful illustrative stories, one that took place at your son's summer camp and another at your synagogue. I'm wondering if you wanted to share one of them with the listeners. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Sure. I'll share the one that I experienced at my son's summer camp because it was so innocuous. And I think that we overlook a lot of times where just assumptions and stereotypes kind of pop up, and if we're not prepared for them, we don't know how to respond and it's a missed opportunity. And so I'll say that my sons were going to summer camp. They were staff kids, my husband and I were working at the camp. This is a camp that my husband grew up working at, his mother still works at and almost everybody in his family, I feel like has either worked at this camp or attended this camp. So my kids are definitely legacy children. They run around that camp like it is their camp, and they continue to do so, and I absolutely love that. I'm not that much of a camp person, but I have grown to love it as a result of my love for my husband and my children. But one of the very first summers that they were both there, my mother-in-law had an exchange with one of her Bar Mitzvah students. He was, I guess, in one of the programs that my husband was running and she was just trying to get a sense without asking directly, hey, how's my son doing in this staff role? I think he was leading the bike activity, but the Bar Mitzvah student couldn't really place who her son was, and when you're like, now that I have a 13 year old, I get it. A 12, 13 year old, if it's not really about their orbit, they're not truly paying attention, so he was trying to think, and he said, "Oh, wait, you mean," and I think it was cute, I think he said, the old guy. So there's that too. I didn't know we had reached the point of old, but he said, "Oh, you mean the old guy with the two adopted kids?" And so I think it took her for a loop because she recognized that he was definitely talking about her son, but her son doesn't have two adopted children and those were our kids. And so she said, "No, they're not adopted. They're his biological kids." And the child just went on and was like, "Oh, okay." And so she came back and she told me, and I could tell it kind of stayed with her a little bit. Now, it didn't stay with me that much, not in terms of surprise, because I have long experienced walking around with strollers with my kids and people assuming that I was the nanny. So I am used to unfortunately, the experience of my children not being biologically identified as my kids. This was particularly common for my oldest son who favors my husband in terms of complexion and has blue, gray eyes. And people were very invasive to look in and look at him, look at me and say, "You must be the nanny." So I'm used to that experience, and these were in Jewish neighborhood and Jewish spaces that I was getting this questioning. But I think it was a very first time for my mother-in-law because when she looks at the boys, she just sees manifestations of her son. She showed me pictures where they look exactly alike, so she sees that clear genetic kind of lineage. But what was so powerful was the fact that this child innocently just assigned essentially race, because it was clear that he was saying, my husband was White and these children were other, they were not White because I think had they been White, they would've just been his children. He was saying that there's a difference racially there, and thus the path must be towards adoption. Now, I want to be very clear. The idea that the child thought that the children were adopted is not an issue. There's nothing wrong with adoption. And I want to make sure that I'm not in any way conflating that as why I was taking offense, and I don't even know if I took offense more so than I thought it was just very curious how this 12 year old, going on 13 year old could easily assign race to my husband and my children based on whatever kind of experiences or assumptions that he brought with him. And that is why I know it's important to have these conversations because again, these assumptions, these decisions, these biases are happening whether we want to talk about them or not. The conversation could have been, well, you just say that this is a person's children, you don't assume whether they are adopted or not, that's not your place, so there's that level of response that needed to happen. But I also think it's a really powerful example of how race is kind of ascribed to individuals, whether we want it to be or not. And that privilege of doing that is one that we need to be thinking about in terms of what does that mean in terms of a people who's legacy and lineage is so incredibly important too. Bryan Schwartzman: Wow. I think that's a powerful place to end on. Buffie Longmire-Avital, this was, at least for me, a really important conversation. I'm really appreciative of your time and thought, and glad our institution was connected to you and benefiting from your experience and knowledge. Buffie Longmire-Avital: Thank you for having me. This was wonderful. Bryan Schwartzman: So what you think of today's episode? We want to hear from you. Evolve is about curating meaningful conversations, and that includes you. Send me your questions, comments, feedback, whatever you've got. You can reach me at my real email address, bschwartzman@reconstructingjudaism.org. And if Laka Palooza sounded interesting to you, I'd be remiss if I didn't share that my colleague, Avaja Shatler has a wonderful recipe she inherited from her grandmother for Iraqi latkes. We'll put the cooking video in the show notes or you can find it at reconstructingjudaism.org and search holidays and Hanukkah. I can't believe I just did a Hanukkah plug in June, but there it is, and we hope you go check it out. We'll be back soon with an all new episode. Evolve: Groundbreaking Jewish Conversations is executive produced by Rabbi Jacob Staub and edited by Sam Wachs. Our theme song, Ilu Finu, is by Rabbi Miriam Margles. This show is a production of Reconstructing Judaism. I'm your host, Bryan Schwartzman, and we'll see you next time.