By Eleanor Kazdan, June 4, 2020 — I’m speechless and I honestly don’t know what to say. I have not experienced anything personally but my family has experienced anti-Semitism as a Jewish person. My grandparents had to flee from Russia and Poland in the 1920s because of extreme violence against Jews, and of course, everybody knows about the Holocaust. My family was already in Canada and other countries at that time. But in the 1940s, Jews were not allowed to go to university in Montreal where my mother’s family lived just because they were Jewish, so that’s the discrimination that my family experienced, and I’ve experienced mild incidents when I was a child, but you know, I’m White, so I can’t understand what Black people are going through from a personal point of view. As I’ve said before, I’m horrified and completely outraged that after all the Civil Rights movements and the protests over the years that things have not really changed that much. They have in some ways, but you know, there’s still so much racism that it’s sickening. It’s sickening and horrifying. I don’t understand it but there it is.
It’s a little more under the radar, you know people don’t blatantly say things as much. But when I started working as a speech therapist, I was working at Roxborough Memorial Hospital in the ’90s and I had these older…well some of them were Italian but they were lots of other nationalities too and I was shocked and you know I’m also a Canadian where racism was not as rampant. I just could not believe what these people were saying to me. You know, racial things. Not to me, but about Black people. I was just completely speechless. I had not heard people say things like that before. But they wouldn’t say them publicly, you know? It was just horrific.
I would hope that things would change, so the positive thing is the racist statues getting removed. They are hopefully removing the mural, and the other thing is that these higher-ups and the former defense secretary, Mattis, and the current defense secretary Mark Esper have come out against using the troops. They’ve come out against Trump.