Rutgers University history professor Clement Price, center, studies an exhibit on race and skin color at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. Photos by Robert Wiener
April 03, 2008
It was a conversation on race planned months before, and not one prompted by any one political event or news story.
But when a prominent black scholar addressed members of a Livingston synagogue and his own graduate students at the Liberty Science Center in Jersey City on March 31, neither he nor they could ignore the wider discussion on race swirling about them.
“Why has race all of a sudden become such an issue? Is it Barack Obama, or has he become a vehicle for a discussion that we Americans have been having since the dawn of the republic, but mainly a closeted discussion?” asked Clement Price, professor of history at Rutgers University’s Newark campus.
“This seems to be a discussion now in the public sphere. Race is a metaphor for identity. Race is a metaphor for opportunities found and opportunities lost. Our tour this afternoon could not be held at a more fortuitous time.”
Joining Price on the excursion of students and congregants from Temple B’nai Abraham was Allyson Gall, director of the New Jersey region of the American Jewish Committee. Together, they led a tour of a current exhibit at the museum, “Race: Are We So Different?”
The event was planned by AJC several months ago in an effort to have a multicultural delegation visit and analyze the exhibit.
The one-hour tour took in the exhibit, which was conceived by the American Anthropological Association and includes video, photography, printed word, and interactive technology. The topics it treats are as varied as skin color, medical care, real estate, and census-taking. Although the visitors’ conversation would eventually come back to Obama — the Illinois senator who is the first person of color to come within reach of a major party’s presidential nomination — participants also discussed the topics covered in the displays.
As he studied a video on racism in real estate, Jeffrey Roth pondered its message.
The exhibit is “all about home-buying practices and the neighborhoods people live in and how there are appraisals of houses equal in every way other than that one house is owned by an African-American,” said Roth, a software developer from Short Hills. “Time after time, an appraiser will give that house a lower value. It is disturbing.”
In one corner of the room, spectators sat engrossed watching a videotaped discussion among a multiracial group of youths. The teens described self-segregating arrangements many high school students adopt in their lunchrooms.
Noah Kulwin, a freshman at Montclair High School, said his reality is more complex.
“The town I live in screams diversity,” said Kulwin, who accompanied his father, Rabbi Clifford Kulwin of B’nai Abraham. “There is clearly some sort of segregated atmosphere in school, but I have African-American friends. As segregated as are parts of it, there is also a very integrated culture. But the segregation is not nearly as apparent as it is in other places.”
At a discussion after viewing the exhibit, his father noted that he had found an omission.
“By focusing on this solely in America, it creates the impression that this is just an American problem,” said Rabbi Kulwin.
Gall reflected on the program before it began. “I have benefited my whole life from being white because there is a benefit from being white in America,” she said. “But I’ve never, if someone asked me who I am or what I’m proud of, I would never say it is my whiteness at all.”
Instead, she said, it is being “Jewish, Irish, and a mother that I am most proud of, and I am proud to be an American.”
Cottage industry
Jeffrey Roth, left, and Rabbi Clifford Kulwin and his son Noah join in a discussion on the race exhibit following the March 31 visit.
Noting the national impact of Obama’s recent speech on race, made in part to explain his long-term relationship with a pastor who has made inflammatory statements about blacks and whites, Price remarked, “Race has created a cottage industry for our conversations.”
One temple member, Susan Scher, said she was sympathetic to Obama’s explanation of the reason he could not “renounce” his pastor of 20 years, Jeremiah Wright.
“When you have an understanding of different groups, you realize it is very difficult to shut people out of your life,” she said. “That’s what I took from the speech when Obama didn’t want to condemn Rev. Wright. I kind of understand [Wright] and the good things he tried to do. You hope the people in our country can actually listen to people and try to understand one another, rather than have all these emotions inflamed and have all these little snippets of things on YouTube. You kind of hope we can go beyond that.’”
Rabbi Kulwin complained that the story about Obama and his pastor had become a distraction.
“This has become the focus of so much media attention,” he said. “We are not being treated to in-depth analyses and reportage about economic policies or foreign affairs or education programs. Those are infinitely more important, but those are not what the media focuses attention on.”
As for his son, Noah said the media itself was making decisions based on preconceptions about race and other prejudices.
Allyson Gall, executive director of the American Jewish Committee’s Metro New Jersey Area, said, “If someone asked me who I am or what I’m proud of I would never say it is my whiteness.”
“They see Jeremiah Wright as the spokesperson for every black church-going Barack Obama supporter, and then they see Hillary Clinton as the voice box of every feminist,” said Noah. “It is an ongoing cycle.”
But in a setting that encouraged museum-goers to consider the nuances of race, Price offered one of his own.
“I don’t see Obama as black,” Price said. “I see him as a guy of mixed heritage.”
Standing not far from a display on “Human Variation,” Tiffany Schurman, one of Price’s students, noted an irony.
“It’s funny to be too black for some people and not black enough for other people,” said Schurman. “It is definitely a double-edged sword.”
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