Heritage Florida Jewish News - Central Florida's Independent Jewish Voice

I would like to respond to AP’s Deepti Hajela’s article “White People Seem Uninterested in Racial Talk” in the Daytona Beach News Journal’s Sunday, March 28, edition.

I have no problem discussing racial questions in a country that has been literally torn apart racially through years of unrest.

Names that contributed to this ongoing unrest mostly involved police interaction with Blacks, mostly males but the death of one female is listed among them for her accidental death at the hand of a police officer.

For the record, I have been a Liberal, a Democrat, an Independent and a Republican.  I would have voted for JFK in 1960 but I had not yet turned 21 years of age.

I consider myself an arch-Conservative American Jew slightly to the right of Attila the Hun and very proud that I voted twice for Donald J. Trump and, yes, I believe the 2020 election was stolen from him by the Democratic Party.  I believe one day the truth about that will be exposed.

What can I say that white people are reluctant to discuss?

If we still had the Negro Leagues and Jim Crow still ruled in the South while I was growing up in Brooklyn in the early 1940s then I would say there was a race problem.

I wasn’t born when Jesse Owens won the track meet during the Berlin Olympic Games in 1936 and was snubbed by Adolph Hitler at the same time that Jews in Germany were being persecuted and hounded and then murdered.

I did know about lynching’s of Blacks in the South and that was why Jews founded the NAACP in 1909, at a time when everything wasn’t so great for them but they felt that helping the Blacks was more important than helping themselves.

The same went for a Jew named Greenwald who built schools for the Blacks in the South so they could be educated and lifted out of poverty and illiteracy.

Slavery was an abomination. Let’s face it, it was an accepted practice for thousands of years and we so greatly admire the Greeks and the Romans, who we credit with our legal and justice system — and they had slaves.  There were more slaves in Rome than Romans and the slaves weren’t black but white.

Twenty-two thousand Jewish slaves built the Roman Coliseum from the third Jewish rebellion against Rome, which saw the destruction of Judea and the expulsion of the Jews in 70 AD. So whites were slaves as well, and the Latin word for slaves is “Slavs,” since so many slaves came from the Salvic nations.

Since that time we’ve had many race riots and of course the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on April 4,1968, which led to the devastation of many majority-Black cities such as Newark, N.J.

That was 1968, but President Lyndon Johnson enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1965 which was supposed to aid Blacks with every entitlement that a wealthy white nation could provide. Welfare, food stamps, Title 8 Housing vouchers, free health care and the end to segregation and equal education and higher education.

If only it worked out that way we would not be living in a country with 2-million prisoners, 38 percent of them Black from a population of 13 percent, millions more on welfare and Medicaid, inner cities where violent crime is rampant, schools are violent and the students, if they attend school, are mostly illiterate, and a 73 percent illegitimacy rate among our Black population all paid for by the mostly white population.

This probably sounds very harsh, but the truth is often harsh and many white people are not eager to criticize their Black neighbors, out of fear of violence.

I wish every Black could be like Jess Owens or Dr. Ben Carson or Jason Riley and so many more successful Blacks, but the truth is they are in the minority.

Those that came here as Black slaves or white poverty-stricken immigrants from Ireland, Italy, Hungary or as persecuted Jews from Eastern Europe didn’t come here because their life overseas was so great.

The slaves had no choice and they were bought, sold, taken advantage of but they were never murdered; they were chattel and they were valuable, until they were freed in 1865 or by Lincoln’s Proclamation of Emancipation.

Mark Twain once wrote about the Irish immigrants who came to America in the wake of the Irish Potato Famine. He said, “The Negroes (slaves) are sleeping on mattresses while the Irish are sleeping in the streets.”

Slums weren’t ever thought to be the end goal and millions of immigrants started there including my own grandparents from Kiev and Warsaw and crawled their way out to have their children become successful and give back to America the gratitude well earned for taking them in.

The Black family was far better off before welfare destroyed the “Negro” family according to the White Paper of Daniel Patrick Moniyhan, then an aide to President Johnson and later renowned senator from New York State.

His paper “The Negro Family” is worth reading.

System Racism? White supremacy? Hatred of Blacks?

Where does this come from? It is as if we never had a two-term Black POTUS. It’s as if the millions of Blacks have not been represented by Black mayors; Black governors; Black Harvard, Stanford or Yale professors; Black Chief of Staff or generals and admirals of our military in every branch of service; Black senators and representatives both on the local level and in Washington, D.C.; the list goes on if white supremacy was factual, but it’s not.

It’s an excuse for failure. And speaking as a white man who doesn’t have a white supremacy problem, would I rather be a 6’8” superstar Black basketball player earning a hundred-million dollars a year or be the white Jew who discovered the cure for all cancers or time travel?

You know what I would choose and so should they.

So much for having a discussion about race and I would be happy to speak about it any time.

William Levy lives in Ormond Beach, Fla.