by Dr Yvette Alt Miller
Growing up as a black Orthodox Jew in Chicago, Lev Perlow witnessed racism first-hand.
Lev Baruch Perlow is a 1st Sergeant in the Israeli army and with his slightly Ethiopian-tinged Hebrew and English, he might seem like a “typical” Ethiopian-Israeli working to defend the Jewish state. Yet Lev’s background — and his Ashkenazi-sounding name — indicate that his background is anything, but ordinary.
He was adopted at the age of 10 in 2005 into an American Jewish family and spent much of his childhood in an affluent suburb of Chicago, attending a mix of public schools and Jewish schools, immersed in his family’s tight-knit Orthodox Jewish community. Lev, as well as his siblings who were also adopted from Ethiopia, had Orthodox conversions to Judaism. In a recent Aish.com exclusive interview, Lev discussed growing up in a largely white American area, the racism he experienced, and what he wants people to know right now about racism and how to combat it.
“I remember pretty well living in an orphanage in Ethiopia as a young child,” he recalls. He’d watched movies about New York and thought of America as a magical place. When it was time to actually leave Ethiopia and move to the United States to join a new family, he was apprehensive.
“When I got to America I was speechless,” Lev says. “It was a dream come true.” Back in Ethiopia “my house was the size of a room”. Suddenly, he had a beautiful house and every comfort he could imagine. More importantly, he now had two loving parents and a warm Jewish environment to welcome him. His second Shabbat in America, Lev went to synagogue with his parents. “From the very moment I got to shul, the second week after I got adopted, I felt very welcome.” The fact that he was from Ethiopia didn’t elicit negative stares or remarks. “Everybody saw me as another person — not something to stare at.”
That warmth and acceptance gave Lev a strong feeling of security and a sense of being home, but he soon realised that in many ways to have black skin in America is to face a constant drumbeat of racism, prejudice and hostility, invisible to many people who are not black.
The first time Lev felt slighted because of his skin colour was in a shopping mall where he’d arranged to meet a friend. Lev arrived early and waited. He was dressed well, Lev remembers, like most of the other shoppers in the mall. That didn’t seem to matter to a woman who walked towards him. “She looked at me and stopped,” he recalls. Somehow a young boy in a bustling public space, simply because he was black, seemed like a threat. She took her purse off her shoulder and switched it to the other side so that it wouldn’t be close to Lev as she walked past him.
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It wasn’t the last time he’d be negatively judged because of the colour of his skin. But Lev stresses that his experience has been very different from most African Americans. “African Americans have a whole history in America — in Ethiopia, there’s no similar history of slavery or racism. You don’t really feel it until you come to America.” Yet once he was in America, Lev was struck at how many people seemed hung up on the colour of his skin.
One of his first months in an American school, a social worker entered his class. Lev was the only black child in the class — one of only a small handful in the school — and she asked him to come out of the room with her to talk. Black History Month was coming up, she explained, and she wanted to know Lev’s thoughts about it. “I kind of felt offended,” he remembers thinking. “Why do you have to specifically make a month to represent blacks? What about the other 11 months of the year?” And why was she taking him, a 10-year-old, out of class and asking him and only him to think about it?
“The moment we start putting all these precautions around black people,” trying to tiptoe around in order not to hurt their feelings, Lev cautions, we risk creating a gulf between people, and emphasising differences in colour instead of bringing people together. Asked what white people can do to overcome racism, Lev is emphatic: “Think of them as normal.” This is something he’s noticed many well-meaning whites fail at, as they try to bend over backwards to be extra nice or to show how unprejudiced they are. “At the end of the day we’re people. We’re not more special than another person — we’re the same as you. We have the same rights, the same everything — just a different skin colour.”
Instead, he’s noticed that some people’s determination not to offend can make them even more likely to emphasise differences and to be inadvertently racist. He remembers one time in class his teacher was reading excerpts from a book about slavery. “It was from a white point of view,” Lev recalls. “The teacher was reading the book and said the ‘N’ word. I see her saying the word from the book and looking at me.” The teacher paused, possibly embarrassed, and in that moment the entire classroom of children all turned their heads too and stared at Lev. Suddenly, the racism in the book seemed horribly present in the classroom. “The moment that you put these side looks and pauses after saying the N word, you give it power… Little by little, you separate people from each other.” What started off as Lev’s teacher’s embarrassment over saying the N word in his presence grew to feel like an acknowledgement that this vile slur somehow applied to him.
The N word continued to bedevil Lev as he got older. Some children seemed to be determined to make racist remarks about Lev. The liberal use of the N word in some rap songs gave them the perfect cover to say this odious insult with seeming impunity, under cover of merely singing some popular songs. —Aish.com
