Читать книгу White Christian Privilege - Khyati Y. Joshi - Страница 20

In New Jersey, students pursuing a teaching career must complete an internship in the schools. Each student intern is paired with a mentor teacher who has been identified as a role model. One fall semester, around the time of the Jewish “High Holy Days” of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, two interns who had taken my Multicultural Education class described a conversation between their mentor teachers. The topic was several students’ absence for the Jewish holidays. One teacher remarked, and the other agreed: “I don’t know why they keep the kids home on these days; they’re not really that Jewish.”

This statement illustrates the judgments and attitudes of people who have spent a lifetime internalizing their dominant status as Christians in America, to the point that they feel at ease to pass judgment on their Jewish students based on their Christian interpretation of what makes a person “that Jewish.” My interns were troubled by the exchange because they could see how their mentor teachers were deciding how others should behave religiously. It is not appropriate—particularly for religious outsiders, as these teachers were vis-à-vis their Jewish students—to critique how others express their faith or celebrate religious holidays. As my students correctly recognized, their teachers’ remarks exemplified several facets of Christian privilege.

Let us unpack the situation a bit more. First of all, are the Jewish students really free to observe the Jewish holidays? Many school districts across the country have policies that treat religious holidays as “excused absences.” While appearing progressive, these policies still create a structural bias against students who are not Christian. The notion of an excused absence for Christmas or Easter is moot, as the school year is designed around the Christian calendar. Christian students never have to be absent (excused or otherwise) to observe their major holidays, while religious minority students and their families face the conundrum of observing their religion or going to school.

Second, the teachers are casting judgment on what it means to be “that Jewish,” or Jewish enough to observe the holidays. In doing so, they are applying Christian standards of what religiosity looks like. Too many people’s understanding of other religions is limited to what I call “Wikipedia knowledge”—a general understanding, at best, that boils down to rudimentary knowledge that “Jews do X” or “Buddhists believe Y.” This monolithic approach ignores how religions are actually lived. Christians may be selective about belief and practice, choosing to believe only certain passages of Scripture, or to abide by some religious prohibitions and not others. Yet this idea—that a person can agree with or observe only certain tenets of their faith, such as going to temple on the High Holy Days even if they do not keep kosher or wear a yarmulke—is not always extended to how we think about members of other religions. To really understand another person’s religious identity, and the way they experience lived religion, we have to ask a slightly different question. Instead of asking, “How Jewish is she?” we need to ask, “How is she Jewish?”

Policies cannot police attitudes. For example, when students are absent from school for observing a religious holiday, they still have to complete assignments. This can result in more work for teachers. The words and tone of these mentor teachers displayed resentment over giving up their own time to help students whom they felt should have just come to school on their holidays because they are “not that Jewish.” The feeling of entitlement to say that their students are not Jewish enough illustrates an attitudinal dimension of Christian privilege³⁸: the perceived authority to judge and opine on others’ religiosity, and to generate opinions based on one’s own understanding of someone else’s faith. White Christians’ way of life is reinforced and reflected in everyday culture, which provides an additional sense of entitlement to judge, categorize, or condemn members of minority faiths. The fact that those public school teachers could make those judgments, and share them aloud, shows the power of Christian normativity. Such attitudes may be reflected in their interactions with the students and their families. Whether in schools, or workplaces, or the public square, the judgments and reactions my interns identified are carried out thousands of times in thousands of places in America every day.