On being Jewish and still benefiting from White privilege

I’ve seen lots of great responses to the privileged Princeton kid article in the past several days, which have addressed many of the misunderstandings and misconceptions about “privilege” he espouses. But I’d like to specifically call out his attempt at using his Jewish heritage as a “get out of racism free” card, which I’ve seen fairly frequently from my fellow Jews and – to my mind at least – runs counter to the Jewish imperative to “not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” So, here are a few ways that kid’s grandparents benefited from White privilege EVEN WHILE they were also being persecuted for their Judaism:

• They were allowed to immigrate to the US at a time when folks from other countries and of other races were outright banned, due to the Immigration Act of 1924 (which entirely banned “undesirable” immigrants from Asia and the Pacific, and placed strict quotas on immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe - restrictions that were not lifted until 1965). Had his grandparents been fleeing persecution in an Asian or Pacific nation, they would not have been allowed to enter the US. At the same time, they would have had an easier time fleeing Germany than they likely did fleeing Poland, since as a Northern European country Germany had a much higher quota than Poland did. That's just one way that these issues are more nuanced than his article would imply.
• His grandparents were able to start a business when they arrived here. They may have scraped together enough money on their own to do so, but it seems likely they would have needed a loan. If so, they would have had an easier time obtaining one than a family that wasn’t White, thanks to the (well-documented and still ongoing) racial discrimination in how both the federal government and private banks loan money.
• His grandparents’ business was allowed to flourish at a time when many Black-owned businesses were met with terrorism and destruction. This is NOT to say that his grandparents did not work hard to make their business successful or that they somehow did not “deserve” their success, it IS to say that they benefited from not having someone burn it down because they were Black. The most well-known example of this reality was the destructionof “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and lynching of many of its residents and business owners.
• His grandparents, and in turn his parents, were able to obtain a mortgage to purchase a home when redlining prevented many Black families from doing so. Home ownership allows wealth to accumulate and be passed on through generations – even today, Black and Latino families making the same income as White families have less overall wealth, due in large part to their lack of access to housing equity. To be clear, this is not just a “historical” problem – this is an ongoing reality. Here is a recent study about racial lending discrimination, which demonstrates that it cannot be explained by other factors such as creditworthiness. This doesn’t mean his parents and grandparents didn’t work hard to accumulate their wealth, or should be made to feel guilty for passing it down the generations – it does mean that they were able to do so in part because they had advantages that other equally hard-working folks did not.
• The land his grandparents built their business and their home on was stolen from the Native people who originally lived there. From his article I think his grandparents came to New York, meaning they most likely owned land that was formerly inhabited by the Lenape. Are his grandparents the ones who systematically murdered and displaced the Lenape to steal their land? No. But did they benefit from that genocide and land grab? Yes. I have a feeling he would respond to this fact with eye-rolling about how that has nothing to do with his family, but I also have a feeling that his response would be very different if asked about the accumulated wealth of the descendants of the German families who profited from the land and resources stolen from their Jewish neighbors during the Third Reich. Just because more time has passed doesn’t change the fact that his family has benefitted from the oppression and extermination of Native peoples who were targeted specifically because of their (non-White) race, even though it was not his family's fault that it happened.

None of these facts mean that his grandparents didn’t work incredibly hard to overcome horrific persecution, or that it is wrong for them to have passed on the fruits of that labor to their descendants, or that he's not entitled to reap those benefits while building his own life. However, the reality is that his grandparents’ success wasn’t solely a result of their resilience and work ethic – they were afforded opportunities, from immigration to home ownership, that others were not because of their race. His grandparents didn’t create that reality, and they don’t need to apologize for it. Neither does he. However, if he wants to further his grandparents’ legacy of resistance to injustice, and live up to the Jewish ideal of liberation from oppression, he needs to start by acknowledging the racial injustices that have existed throughout our country’s history and still exist today.