For writers who think of themselves as Jewish, the stakes of this debate have seemed at times almost as high as they are for the culturally unmarked white writers who tend to feature most prominently in cultural appropriation controversies. When cultural appropriation came to the forefront of literary conversations half a decade ago or more, Jews were, by most indices, a highly privileged group in the US. Most American Ashkenazi Jews had long ago been assimilated into whiteness, and were not yet newly imperiled as targets of white supremacist violence. As a result, the standard take seemed to be that anyone could write about Jews, but that Jews could not necessarily—and certainly not haphazardly—write about people from more marginalized groups. By the same token, though, fiction focused on contemporary American Jews and their Jewish dilemmas seemed, to many younger writers, parochial, small-minded, and unlikely to interest readers. Few MFA students aspired to become another Cynthia Ozick. Under these circumstances, meaningful, exigent, and marketable Jewish subject matter for novels often felt elusive.

April Baskin—a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant and racial justice director of the Jews of Color Roundtable—told me that the focus on numbers carries a particular sting, as often the first questions Jews of color face when entering new Jewish spaces are “Are you Jewish?” and “How many of you are there?” In addition to the article [“How Many Jews of Color Are There?”] conjuring a familiar feeling of objectification and the need to justify one’s existence, Baskin says it undermines the practical inroads Jews of color have been making in the organized Jewish world. “When I read this article, it was equivalent to someone lighting a match in the middle of a field of high grass,” she said. “Our funding and fundamental belonging was put in jeopardy.”

Jews of color encounter this systemic “sense of normative whiteness” on a regular basis in the everyday experience of having our Jewish identity questioned. From casual comments about not “looking Jewish,” to being racially profiled by synagogue security, to being stopped for carrying a Torah in the street by a mob, most Jews of color have at least one story like this, sometimes many. These experiences stem from the ubiquitous assumption that only white people belong in Jewish spaces—that is, that American Jewish spaces are in fact part of the greater American “white space.”

Be a radical copyeditor. When someone says “all lives matter,” engage with them (particularly if you are a white person, like me), and help them understand why saying this makes things worse, not better.

Especially given that we continue to face the worst global pandemic in a century, with no vaccine in sight, the fact that the Boston Police Department expects to receive four times the funding of the Boston Public Health Commission is simply unconscionable.

It is important to interrogate the reasons that institutional Jewish organizations turn toward law enforcement and the critical failure of imagination that such a turn reflects. But it is most important right now for white Jews to join the fight: Given their evident proximity to the police state, white Jews are in a position to use their voices and resources to not only withdraw support for it, but also to actively disrupt the preservation of the racist status quo. Young, non-Black Jews are thus facing a vital imperative to confront their white Jewish families and peers about their active implication in—that is, maintenance and reproduction of—white supremacy, raising questions about the most effective strategies for organizing and mobilizing Jews who remain shrouded in white ignorance.

Bicycle politics, the causes championed by cycling advocates and activists, are often dismissed by critics as esoteric or élitist. But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities.

Baldwin was hardly naïve about the human capacity for evil, especially in white folk. “If you’re a Negro, you’re in the center of that peculiar affliction,” he said, “because anybody can touch you—when the sun goes down. You know, you’re the target of everybody’s fantasies.” But what shocked him was that white America had killed someone who espoused love, an apostle of nonviolence. King’s death revealed the depths of white America’s debasement and the scope of black America’s peril. “Perhaps even more than the death itself, the manner of his death has forced me into a judgment concerning human life and human beings which I have always been reluctant to make,” he wrote. “Incontestably, alas, most people are not, in action, worth very much; and yet, every human being is an unprecedented miracle. One tries to treat them as the miracles they are, while trying to protect oneself against the disasters they’ve become.”

The Black Foxes is a collective of black cyclists and outdoors-people who have created a platform to share and control their own narratives. Check out their introduction video here and then visit theblackfoxes.com for their manifesto.