Info

Not About You

About the Show Not About You is a podcast about identity and social justice. The premise of the show is that a white, straight, cis-gendered man connects with folks with different lived experiences from his own about the ways parts of their identities bump up against injustices. The conversations focus on race, gender, religion, representation, protests, politics, relationships and more. My hope is that this series leads to more conversation and interaction. I want folks who are hesitant or new to standing in these struggles to feel more ready to show up for change and ask questions of themselves. I want historically excluded voices to have new ways to be amplified and supported. Some of the questions we get into: What is a question or reaction you deal with a lot about some part of your identity that you’re tired of responding to? What assumptions do you experience folks making about you? What does joy or humor look like inside your family or community? In what ways do you experience privilege? -Levi Weinhagen
RSS Feed Subscribe in Apple Podcasts
Not About You
2021
December
November


2019
April


2018
December
November
October
September
May
April
March


2017
October
September
June
May
April


2016
December
November


All Episodes
Archives
Now displaying: 2017
Oct 2, 2017

Carin Mrotz presented this Yom Kippur sermon in Minneapolis at the Shir Tikvah Synagogue in 2017

The text as prepared for delivery:

In preparing, I asked my self: What do I want to say to you. What do I need you to know, today, on Yom Kippur. And who am I to tell you? I think about that a lot – who am I in relation to this congregation, this community. I’m the director of an organization that serves this community, and also asks a lot of you. And I’m a member of this congregation. It can be hard to hold some of these those roles at the same time. I’m a board member, and sometimes when I usher at Shabbat, I find myself only talking to people about JCA. Or while I’m sitting in the library reading while my kids are in religious school. It can be hard to know how to just BE in the congregation and not feel that I’m working. Sometimes Jewish becomes such a thing that I do that I forget how it feels to just be. So rather than fight all of that, I’m just going to step into it here, and be all of those things here with you.

And I look out and see JCA members, board members, and staff. I see the doctor who delivered my son, I look into the choir and see the nurse midwife who delivered my daughter. And I see both of my children here, squirming their way through the adult service just to hear mom speak. I see my husband, who isn’t Jewish, who in making a family with me threw his lot in with mine and joined our community wholeheartedly. I’m accountable to so many of you in this room. We’re accountable to each other. That can feel like a tremendous responsibility, but also, today, on our holiest day and one of not just atonement but forgiveness, it feels like a blessing. And I’m going to talk to you about racial justice and resistance, and our community’s flawed inheritance. But I’ll start with Cain and Abel.

To recap, for those who don’t remember or who haven’t yet read, or who just like a good story, Cain and Abel were the sons of Adam and Eve after they were cast out of Eden. They had sisters, too, but they were obviously perfect and never did anything wrong, since I can’t think of any other reason the text isn’t about them.

Cain is the first birth in the Torah. The first person born to another person. To people who were cursed. His brother Abel follows. They are given roles: Cain tills the soil and Abel tends the flock. The soil Cain tills is, of course, cursed. God cursed the soil before he was even born. When he and his brother approach God with offerings, his is disappointing. Of course it is. Abel has the fattest sheep and Cain has fruit grown from cursed soil. And God accepts Abel’s offering and rebuffs Cain’s. God turns his back on Cain, and furious, Cain kills his brother. The first man born in the Torah becomes the first murderer. He makes his brother the first death.

I think it means something that the first man born to a person in the Torah takes the first life. I think his humanity is important. In social justice work, we draw heavily, or lean heavily on the concept of b’tselem elohim, the idea that we’re all made in the image of God. We are all made equally from the divine and are all uniquely valuable. It’s a powerful way to describe what connects us as humans. We use it to build empathy – with victims of police violence, with undocumented immigrants. It’s the way we put words to what we hope we all would just feel – that everyone is valuable, not matter how they got here, no matter what they do. It’s how we articulate what connects us to people we’ve never even met, why we care what happens to them.

There’s nothing about being made in the image of God that means we’re perfect. Cain is messy and flawed and his brother bears that burden and loses his life. And they are both made in the image of God. There is so much responsibility in being human and we’re going to hurt each other. We’re going to make mistakes because we were designed to.

Cain meets Abel in a field, ready to argue, and he kills him. And God comes to Cain and asks where Abel is. God knows what happened to Abel and doesn’t need to ask. So why does God bother to ask? God wants Cain to tell the truth. Today is Yom Kippur, a day to atone, to reflect, to tell the truth. I need to tell you some truth, too. Like MJ sang last night, I didn’t come to fool you.

First. As a community, we’ve done a deep dive into our white privilege in the name of working for racial justice. We’ve gone to trainings – I’ve conducted them – we’ve read books like How Jews Became White Folks, and articles like last year’s As Jews atone on Yom Kippur, we need to confront our White Privilege in the Washington Post. Many of us want to understand who we are and where to stand in the fight for racial equality in America, so we studied our path in becoming white and sought to understand the privileges that were granted us.

We’ve haven’t been getting this right. That’s the first truth. I did a training a few years ago with a friend and colleague, also Jewish. A black Jew. And I will never forget this - she held up a copy of How Jews Became White Folks, and said, “I could rub this book all over me and I will never become white.”

White Jews need to do the work we’ve been doing to understand how to be allies in fighting white supremacy, but somewhere we mistook the racial identity and privilege conveyed to some of us as individuals as an identifier for our whole community. We’re a multiracial community. Some of us are white. But in generalizing our community as white, we’ve cast ourselves as allies to people who live outside it, and we fall short of supporting - and seeing – Jews of color. Or Jews with origins in the Middle East or South America or Asia. Or Jews whose family history is not one of immigration at all. We’ve simplified our story, taken the Ashkenazi journey to whiteness and made it the story of American Jews. We’ve marginalized members of our own community, made them invisible. I’m sorry we’ve done that. We’re capable as a community of sitting with deeper complexity; we have shortchanged ourselves.

Next truth. Even for white Jews, our whiteness does not protect us from anti-Semitism. Our rates of home ownership and college graduation have not made neo-Nazis okay with us. Our privilege is conditional, and if anything, our whiteness makes it easier for anti-Semitism to be brushed aside as not actually very threatening. Our president – sigh – tells the nation that some of those neo-Nazis in Charlottesville were fine people. Can you believe that? A woman was killed. But I’m not just talking about neo-Nazis, in the days following what happened in Charlottesville, some of us felt the sting of having the anti-Semitism erased from those rallies by our own friends. Men chanted “Jews will not replace us,” and yet when our anti-racist partners demanded justice, in some of those demands, we felt forgotten. We were forgotten.

Truth. It stung. It hurt. A Jewish friend, a longtime racial justice activist told me it felt like a door had closed. She didn’t want to make a big deal out of it because she didn’t want to prioritize her own fear when other communities were experiencing much more urgent attacks, and from systems, from institutions. But the truth is it hurt, some of us felt truly isolated.

Last fall, not long after the election, I was attacked by Nazis on Twitter. A neighbor discovered a giant swastika painted on the garage of an abandoned home in North Minneapolis, where I live. A friend of mine, a black organizer, and I went together to clean it off. I went to Home Depot and bought paint remover and we scrubbed together in the cold until it was as gone as it could be, and then because we couldn’t believe that a few hours earlier, there had literally been a giant swastika right there on a house on the Northside, we took pictures and tweeted them.

Within a few days, racist and anti-Semitic trolls attacked. They said we’d painted it ourselves for attention, or because leftists are intent on proving hate exists. Look, black women and their Jewish girlfriends don’t have to work hard to prove hate exists. So, exposed as a hoax and targeted for having committed the crime of being black and Jewish and women and publicly fighting white supremacy, we got hammered for days. I received pictures of myself photoshopped into Holocaust memes. My face was zoomed in on and analyzed for my Jewish features. My friend was merely the pet, I was her puppeteer. Some were violent, some explicit. There was one guy who kept tweeting my picture and comparing me to a young Howard Stern. Which is probably fair. But most were threatening, and most focused on my identity as a Jew and hers as a black woman and the fact that we had done this together. My friend told me she didn’t know anti-Semitism existed anymore. She’d thought it was an artifact. Something historical. “I thought you guys were normal white people,” she said. “Right?” I answered. “We did, too.”

Cain doesn’t tell God the truth. God asks where is Abel and Cain answers, famously, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Why lie to someone who already knows the truth? I try to put myself in Cain’s shoes and I think about how scary it is to tell the truth when you’re all alone.

That’s the function of anti-Semitism – to isolate Jews, to position us as an invisible buffer between the oppressed and oppressor. Conditionally safe. We get privilege but never full acceptance. We are exalted as powerful by those who wish to destroy us because it separates us from the people we think of as our most likely allies in fighting them. If everyone believes that the rich white Jews are funding the anti-racist resistance, white supremacists will blame us while black activists will feel used, controlled, resentful. We end up alone, vulnerable. A scapegoat.

I pause here, because the idea of our community being used as a scapegoat is interesting to think about today. The traditional Yom Kippur text is from Leviticus, the expulsion into the wilderness of the scapegoat—the “goat for Azazel,” carrying upon him all the inequities of the Israelites. A literal vessel to carry our sins away from us. Today, though, we’re reading Cain and Abel, a story that does the opposite – pushes us to stand and face our flaws, pushes us to ask ourselves questions we already know the answers to in order to tell the truth. To really atone is to hold our flaws close, not send them away. And if we’ve been made the vessel for others to cast off their sins, a scapegoat, it’s not a role we have to accept.

God asked Cain what happened to Abel. God gave Cain a chance to tell the truth. And he couldn’t. Or he just didn’t. And yes, he was alone, but remember, Cain was alone because in his anger at having been handed cursed ground, and in his pain at being rejected by God, he pushed his brother away. He turned inward and destroyed the person that might have supported him. In his pain, he made himself alone. And they were both made in the image of God, and Cain’s destiny was bound together with Abel’s – after he killed Abel, God sent Cain to wander, separated him from the land that was his birthright, never to return.

Here’s another truth, or maybe a question. When we’ve found ourselves alone, are there times when it’s because we’ve isolated ourselves? When we have assumed likely allyship based on a historical relationship that we haven’t kept up? When have we been hurt that other communities have scheduled something a date that’s significant to us without understanding why it might be significant to them? When we have criticized tactics without understanding the demands? or wordsmithed statements? or disavowed groups that we never had a relationship with in the first place? When have we relied on an image of Heschel marching with King because we didn’t have a more recent example of solidarity? We’ve been relying on Heschel praying with his feet for more than 50 years. His feet are exhausted.

Another truth: B’tselem elohim, the recognition of God in a stranger is not a shortcut to actually knowing them. I can recognize your humanity and fight for you, but we are stronger if we fight together, on equal terms, not because we want to help each other but because our destinies are firmly entwined. We are strongest in relationship. Those take time, and they’re messy. That’s by design – remember, we’re messy on purpose. We need to stay in relationships when it’s hard. When we feel invisible, when we accidentally make someone else invisible.

When we’ve found ourselves alone, when has that been an opportunity to make a connection?

When I was being attacked by Twitter Nazis, I was scared for my safety. I use my real name on the internet, I am a professional Jew in public, my address is listed. I knew rationally that the anonymity and distance that enabled these trolls to come after me online would also probably protect me from having to encounter them physically in my world. But I was deeply shaken, my anxiety was out of control, I was drained. And I got through it, because of my friends. They took my phone away and blocked the trolls so I wouldn’t have to see all of the tweets. They fed me meals. A dozen of my girlfriends in other states coordinated a donation to JCA in honor of fighting Nazis. From all around, I felt held, and supported.

We say that our inheritance as Jews is a broken world. Like Cain inherited cursed soil, we received a world in need of repair. We entered it broken, like Cain, but we can choose to care for it, to tend it. We can choose to bring each other closer, not isolate ourselves.

I believe our other inheritance is resilience. Some people think resilience is the ability to bounce back, but I like the way the American Psychological Association defines it – as adaptation in the face of adversity, trauma, tragedy, threats, or stress. I learned that not from a psychologist but from Rabbi Deborah Waxman, the President of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. I had the privilege, in a dark moment, to receive some of her teaching on resilience, and I wanted to share just a tiny bit with you.

Resilience is not coming back from something terrible, it’s adapting in the current moment to terrible circumstances. I went to a training once, on how to fight racism as people of faith, and the facilitator said, “We talk about safe spaces, but my job is not to keep things from hurting you in this space, it’s to help you be resilient enough to deal with painful things and keep doing the work.” That’s what our community has always done. That’s our job right now – to support each other through challenging times, knowing that sometimes we will be messy. And we will work in relationship, because none of the paths through this moment can be managed alone.

The last truth, another question. When we’ve thought ourselves alone, when have we really not been? When have we been guided by our ancestors, our shared story of survival. When have we looked around to find ourselves sitting in a full congregation, in community, on our holiest day, together?

Sep 26, 2017

This episode features three conversations about how white folks can engage with themselves and the world in response to racism and anti-semitism. This is a response to the events in Charlottesville on August 12, 2017, as well as so many other things happening in the United States. These conversations were recorded in September of 2017.

The guests featured on this episode are:

Emily Krumberger

Brendan Kelly

Laney McKee

This episode concludes with a performance of "How to explain white supremacy to a white supremacist" by Guante. 

Jun 15, 2017

“No one is obligated to be an educator about their identity.”

Artist Rebecca Kling talks about issues surrounding gender, bathroom use and anti trans activism. She talks about being a transgender activist and educator. Rebecca unpacks the idea of reciprocity and whether someone is or isn't obligated to teach about their identity. She shares personal stories of traveling as a performer and advocate and how that's influenced her understanding of how progress is made. Rebecca also talks about ways to understand trans issues and the many ways to be an ally.

Rebecca Kling is a Washington, D.C. based transgender artist and educator who explores gender and identity through solo performance pieces and educational workshops. Her multidisciplinary performances incorporate conversational storytelling, personal narrative, humor, and more. Kling takes the position that sharing accessible queer narrative with a wide audience is a form of activism, and that understanding combats bigotry.

Jun 8, 2017

“It is difficult to dismantle a system that is invisible to you.”

Bharti Wahi talks about frequently dealing with the question, "what are you?" and where that question comes from. She talks about growing up in rural Minnesota with immigrant parents from Canada and Southeast Asia. Bharti talks about systemic oppression and the challenges in the way of changing systems. She talks about the myth that brown people don't live in the middle of the country and about being angry but staying hopeful and focused. 

As the Executive Director of Children’s Defense Fund–Minnesota office Bharti Wahi brings 20 years of professional experience as an advocate in the nonprofit world and more than a decade of experience in education. Prior to joining Children’s Defense Fund, Ms. Wahi spent three years with Greater Twin Cities United Way where she oversaw several grant portfolios related to early childhood education, two-generation interventions and literacy. Previously, she led the Children and Family Program for the Minnesota Literacy Council for five years, building the home visiting program and overseeing two early learning centers.

As an active community member Ms. Wahi serves on the Board of Directors of the Hale-Field Schools Foundation and Women Organizing Women. In addition she sits on the McKnight Foundation’s PreK-Third Grade Design Team and is currently serving on the Minnesota Department of Education’s ESSA Accountability Advisory Committee and the Department of Human Services Parent Aware Advisory Council.

Ms. Wahi holds a Bachelor of Arts from the Saint Catherine University and a Master of Arts in public policy and nonprofit management from the University of Chicago.

 

May 30, 2017

"People are trying to figure out how to categorize you and I think that's just a human thing."

'Pogi' talks about being an actor of color and how that makes him wonder about parts he does or doesn't get. He talks about people assume he speaks Spanish because of how he looks even though he's a Filipino-American. He talks about identifying outside of the typical "racial binary" and about being a part of a family that has ongoing immigration into the US. 

Eric 'Pogi' Sumangil is a two-time recipient of the Playwrights' Center's Many Voices Fellowship. His full-length plays include The Duties and Responsibilities of Being a Sidekick and Kicking The Gong Around. His play, The Debutante's Ball, was produced in 2015 by History Theatre in partnership with Mu Performing Arts. 

He is a proud member of Actor’s Equity Association, and a co-founder of The Unit Collective, a collective of emerging playwrights of color. He is a recipient of a 2002 Excellence in the Arts award from the Fil-Minnesotan Association, and once got his name on a plaque for eating a 3-pound steak.

May 22, 2017

PH Copeland shares her experience as a Pan-African woman from North Minneapolis building power through community organizing. She shares about the way larger women are treated and talked to, the way people attempt to complement and connect that can lead to unintended harm. And she talks about the large and small ways people can dismantle oppressive systems.

 

May 14, 2017

"I have decided I don't care enough to be normal."

On this episode, Jess Banks talks about tracing her inability to ignore injustice back to childhood and how that set her apart from her family. She shares openly her struggles with chronic pain and what it's like to being a parent with autism raising a child with autism. Jess also talks about why she shows up to her activism work, what she gets from being a part of movements and what it means to her to be a part of a community. 

Jess Banks is a wife, mom, professor, historian, gamer, crafter, activist, autistic, UU. Jess is office manager at Atlas Games.

May 2, 2017

“If it has to get aggressive in a way of defending myself or others, I’m absolutely okay with that.”

Why does representation matter on film, in art and in life? Documentary filmmaker, film programmer and arts advocate Kareem Tabsch answers this question and so many others. Kareem talks about being a first generation American to Lebanese and Latino parents, growing up in Miami and getting his first exposure to film and movies via PBS.

Kareem Tabsch is the co-founder and co-director of Miami's largest art house cinema, an Award winning documentary filmmaker and an Arts Advocate who strongly believes in the power of the arts, particularly film, to enrich lives and revitalize communities.

 

Apr 24, 2017

"I took the word 'cripple' and I've been swinging it around sort of like a bull in a china shop."

Timothy Iverson talks about his early life with Cerebral Palsy that required many surgeries and now means he walks with crutches. He talks about the process of going to a special school and then being "mainstreamed" in a way that was meant to be positive but didn't necessarily have positive results. He also talks about the way people treat folks with physical disabilities, how he's come to own hurtful labels and why his tenacity isn't a choice so much as a requirement.

Plus, Timmy talks about being a gay man and dealing with the idea that people with physical disabilities don't have sex. He shares openly about the realities of the similarities he sees in how gay people are treated and how people with physical disabilities are treated. 

Timothy Iverson is an IT expert, a frequent participant in the Renaissance Festival, a huge part of CONvergence, a graphic designer and a huge nerd. He's also very funny. You can connect with Timmy on Twitter @iversonimage

Apr 15, 2017

“Often times an assumption of most people is that I am white.”

Taj Ruler talks about being bi-racial but mostly being perceived as white. She talks about the differences between time in her mother's house where Sri Lankan culture was prominent and in her father's house SpaghettiOs where more common and explains the feeling of not quite fitting in either space. Taj talks about her own, ongoing quest to understand her identity. And she explains the challenges of being a person of color who doesn't fit into the black/white dichotomy that often dominates conversations of race.

Taj Ruler is an actor, improviser, voice over artist, comedy writer and teacher in the Twin Cities. She has performed at Pillsbury House Theatre, Mixed Blood Theatre, The Playwrights’ Center, HUGE and the Brave New Workshop. Taj studied improvisation at the Groundlings in Los Angeles and Second City in Chicago. 

Apr 7, 2017

“I think that spending time with only people exactly like you is sad and boring.”

On this episode, Carin Mrotz talks about growing up with social justice through the lens of teacher parents who engaged with the union. She talks about what American’s think of when we think of the American Jewish community and how that isn’t necessarily representative of the diversity of Jewish experiences and voices. Can unpacks how whiteness hurts literally everyone, talks about the relationship between Judaism and resistance, goes deep on Christian hegemony and tries to explain why Anti-Semitism never goes away and how it’s used to separate people.

Carin Mrotz is the Executive Director of Jewish Community Action. She has worked on campaigns for immigrant and workers’ rights and played a central role in organizing the Jewish community in support for marriage equality in Minnesota in 2012. Carin has worked as a trainer, curriculum designer, fundraiser, college instructor and organizer. She’s one of co-hosts of the political podcast Wrong About Everything. She grew up in South Florida but has lived in Minnesota for the past two decades.

Find Carin on twitter @mrotzie

Check out the Wrong About Everything podcast

 

For further reading:

Toward the Next Jewish Rebellion by Yotam Marom – Read I it on Medium HERE

A Brief History of Everything” by Ken Wilber 

How Jews Became White Folks and What That Says About Race in America” by Karen Brodkin

1