Monthly Archives: April 2017

Why is the reparations movement in the Anglophone Caribbean not putting capitalism on trial in its campaign to force British imperialism to provide financial compensation for its industrial and agricultural capitalists enslavement of Africans? To what extent is capitalism such a sacred spirit or god whose name should not be publicly called in order to avoid attracting its vindictive and punishing rebuke? Are the advocates of reparations truly convinced that British imperialisms payment of financial compensation for the enslavement of Africans would end the economic marginalization of the labouring classes who are toiling under capitalist regimes throughout the region? Why are we willing to place racism or white supremacy in the dock but not its creator capitalism?

On 17 December 2007, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution that made March 25 the annual commemorative International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This day should be used as a rallying point by people of good conscience to press the former major slaving states such as Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden to pay reparations for their participation in the economic exploitation and racist dehumanization of enslaved Africans. The General Assemblys initiative is an acknowledgement of the over fifteen million Africans who landed in the Americas and the over thirty million captives who died during the process of catching and delivering them into the Holocaust of Enslavement.

Capitalism and Slavery in the Caribbean

A key goal of all yearly progressive remembrance activities in the Caribbean and elsewhere should be to educate or remind people of the fact that capitalism was the primary force behind the extraction of the labour power of enslaved Africans. Of equal importance is the need to etch into the consciousness of the public that white supremacy or racism was simply an ideological tool used by the capitalist enslavers and various European states to morally justify the enslavement of Africans. Racism was deployed by these early capitalists and their respective national states to mask the purely economic motivation behind the development of an enslaved labour force.

In the seminal and classic book Capitalism and Slavery that was written by the late historian and statesman Dr. Eric Williams, he states that the brutal, exploitative and exacting labour condition of white indentured workers served as the template for the institution of African enslavement or slavery:

Here then is the origin of [African] slavery. The reason was economic, not racial; it had not to do with the color of the laborer but the cheapness of the laborer. The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his subhuman characteristics so widely pleaded, were only later rationalizations to justify a simple economic fact: that the colonies needed and resorted to [African] labour because it was the cheapest and the best. This was not a theory; it was a practical conclusion deduced from the personal experience of the planter.

Williams asserts that slavery, as basically an economic institution, gave birth to racism. He further states that Unfree labor in the New World was brown, white, black and yellow; Catholic, Protestant and pagan. Racism or white supremacy is now an autonomous system of oppression that intersects with patriarchy and capitalism to create differing degrees of labour exploitation within the ranks of the working-class.

The point that should be centred in the minds of revolutionaries and radicals in the Caribbean is that capitalism, the architect of racism, is still negatively impacting the lives of the working-class descendants of enslaved Africans as well as the societies that were built by their exploited labour. The late revolutionary, organic intellectual and historian Dr. Walter Rodney convincingly argues and documents in his ground-breaking text How Europe Underdeveloped Africa that capitalism was the main contributor to the stagnation of Africas economic development (see Chapter 4 Europe and the Roots of Africas Underdevelopment To 1885).

Rodneys indictment of capitalism and its retardation of the potentiality of the greater portion of humanity (the labouring classes) should be duly noted by the reparations activists or advocates who are playing footsie with capitalism:

the peasants and workers of Europe (and eventually the inhabitants of the whole world) paid a huge price so that the capitalists could make their profits from the human labour that always lies behind the machine. That contradicts other facets of development, especially viewed from the standpoint of those who suffered and still suffer to make capitalist achievements possible. This latter group are the majority of [humanity]. To advance, they must overthrow capitalism; and that is why at the moment capitalism stands in the path of further human development. To put it another way, the social (class) relations of capitalism are now outmoded, just as slave and feudal relations became outmoded in their time.

Dr. Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies, has written an excellent and easily comprehended book, Britains Black Debt: Reparations for Caribbean Slavery and Native Genocide. It is a must read for people who would like to understand the basis of the claim for reparations from Britain for its role in the enslavement of Africans and genocide against Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean.

Unfortunately, Britains Black Debt has placed the misbegotten child of capitalism racism- on trial, but not the inherently exploitative and soul destroying parent capitalism. If we are going to throw the book at capitalism for chattel slavery, we are morally and politically obligated to do the same for the wage slavery of capitalism under which the Caribbean working-class is currently being exploited.

Caribbean States and Reparations

Today, we are witnessing the unconscionable, but politically understandable behaviour of the neocolonial states in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in divorcing their call for reparations from measures aimed at throwing capitalism into the cesspool of history. These member states of CARICOM are all committed to the implementation of social, economic and political policies that have enshrined capitalism in the region.

They are interested in reparations as a way to deal with their balance of payment, budgetary and development challenges as seen in the call for debt cancellation, technology transfer and a formal apology and not statements of regrets in this regional bodys Ten Point Action Plan for Reparatory Justice.

While these governments are acting like capitalism was not the real culprit behind the economic exploitation of enslaved Africans, progressive civil society groups and individuals who are advocating for reparations should not be silent or conveniently forgetful of this historical fact. We should expect the liberal petite bourgeois or middle-class reparations advocates to not indict capitalism. Their class interests and aspirations are totally immersed and dependent on the continued existence of capitalism. The petite bourgeois elements, unlike the labouring classes, display high levels of class consciousness and the former group tends to allow its class interests to guide its thoughts and actions.

However, radical and revolutionary reparations activists and supporters have no business not putting capitalism on the stand in their activism and general public education initiatives. As political activists who are committed to ending inequity and exploitation that are rooted in the social, economic, political and cultural structures of societys principal institutions, they should know that capitalist economic relations and practices are a major source of oppression.

As such, they ought to educate the public on the reality that the capitalism that exploited the labour of enslaved Africans is the same capitalism that exploited them as wage slaves after the end of slavery. Capitalism is still exploiting Caribbean workers and taking the lions share of the profit that comes from the labour power of the working-class.

CARICOMs ten-point reparations proposal is implicitly using the societies in the global North as the model of social and economic development. The mature capitalist societies in North America and Europe are characterized by widespread income inequality and concentration of wealth as well as the political marginalization of the working-class. How can such societies in good conscience serve as the standard of social, political and economic development for the Caribbean?

Reparatory Justice for Social Transformation and Dual Power

In the Caribbean, the revolutionaries and radicals must advance a reparations agenda that demands Britain/Europes financial compensation for the economic exploitation and racist dehumanization of enslaved Africans. It has been estimated that Britains reparations payment to Africans in the Caribbean would be in the region of 7.5 trillion. The 20 million paid to the enslavers of Africans after the 1838 abolition of slavery in the British Empire would be worth about 200 billion in todays currency.

The proposals below ought to be a part of the Caribbean reparations movements programme and be seen as a part of the general class struggle. The neocolonial Caribbean states do not need the immediate payment of reparations to undertake some of these demands. The social movements in the region must organize around these demands as a part of a dual power strategy or infrastructure of dissent or anarchist transfer cultures:

Promote labour self-management and economic democracy: The governments in the Caribbean must capitalize national and regional Worker Self-management and Entrepreneurship Funds from allotments out of the respective annual national budgets. These funds would be controlled by progressive civil society forces. These financial resources would be used to finance and support worker cooperatives and other labour self-managed companies as well as the work of the support organizations and structures that are necessary to ensure the viability of the workers ownership, control and management of their workplace.

It would be the duty of the revolutionary and radical organizers to ensure that a critical mass of the worker-cooperators embrace labour self-management as a part of the class struggle and the fight for socialism. The workers democratic control of the workplace combined with popular assemblies would be the laboratory or training ground for the self-management of the future stateless, classless and self-organized (communist) society.

Include labour self-management in school curriculum: The governments in the Caribbean should restructure the curriculum and place at its centre knowledge of the oppressive nature of chattel slavery and wage slavery as a system of labour extraction and exploitation. Of equal importance is the strategic need to adequately educate the students in primary, secondary and tertiary educational institutions about workers control, ownership and management of the workplace.

Further, the students would be equipped with the knowledge, skills and attitude to collectively self-manage worker cooperatives and other worker self-managed companies. We must challenge the public education curriculum that prepares learners, at public expense, to work in capitalist enterprises. The worker self-management ideas and practices should be integrated throughout the curriculum.

Develop comprehensive land reform programme: According to Tony Weis in the paper Restructuring and Redundancy: The Impacts and Illogic of Neoliberal Agricultural Reforms in Jamaica:

Jamaicas landscape still bears the scars of the most ferocious form of agricultural production ever devised, as plantations kept their vice-like grip on the best land after Emancipation in 1838, with all subsequent distribution programmes only ever acting on the margins of these inhumanly constructed yet sacrosanct institutions.

The preceding state of affairs is essentially the situation in the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean.

The governments in the Caribbean must undertake a comprehensive land reform programme that puts flat, arable land in the hands of the labouring classes. Enslaved Africans and indentured South Asians and the Indigenous peoples worked the land and their descendants must now exercise stewardship and control over it.

In order for them to take land out of the capitalist speculative market and to end the idea of the ownership of land by individuals, these governments must create the legislative framework for the establishment of community land trust (CLT). CLT are structures that are used to protect land from the rise or fall in the value of land based on speculation or the whims and fancies of capitalist demand and supply of land and housing. The access to land should be based on the right of collective use or usufructuary rights and not the right of private ownership. Each generation should be the steward of land and not its owners as under capitalism.

Create a cooperative housing programme: The condition of a large proportion of the housing stock in the Caribbean is an assault on human decency, especially for those who live in urban squatter settlements or overcrowded, ill-repaired housing in urban and rural communities. The state must create national funding programmes to support the development and maintenance of cooperative housing by the people through their organizations.

Cooperative housing is a way to engender popular, democratic and collective control and management over the housing by the people who live in these units and to undermine the idea of housing as a tradeable commodity. The members of cooperative housing would have security of tenure but would not be able to pass on the property to their heirs.

Establish working-class friendly labour laws: The system of chattel slavery in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas was a very vile form of labour exploitation. The slave masters did not simply exercise power over the labour power and the fruit of the labour (profit) of the enslaved African workforce. These capitalists also owned the enslaved Africans.

The brutal legacy of exploitation of African workers continued after Emancipation in 1838. In the Anglophone Caribbean of today, progressive organizations ought to develop broad national and regional campaigns to force these neo-colonial governments to create worker-friendly labour laws that make it easier for workers to join or form trade unions. Severe or prohibitive fines must be levied against employers who violate the rights of workers to form or join trade unions. It is hypocritical of governments to demand reparations from British imperialism for slavery, while facilitating the exploitation of workers through laws that are titled against the power of workers in the workforce.

The rate of unionization is very low in the Caribbean and it must become a priority of progressive social movement organizations, socialist organizations, the revolutionary petite bourgeoisie and trade unions to push for legislation that will give workers a greater level of bargaining power in the workplace-based class struggle.

Establish popular, democratic and horizontal assemblies of the oppressed: The revolutionary and radical forces in the Caribbeans reparations movement must work with other progressive forces throughout society to establish a federated system of popular, democratic and horizontal assemblies of the oppressed. These assemblies would function as the direct democratic structures of political self-management that seeks to approximate the communist self-organizing concept of the administration of things and not the governance of people.

The assemblies would be the local, regional and national organs through which the labouring classes discuss, plan and determine their economic and social priorities. The masses would implement their main concerns through their alternative and oppositional institution as well as organize and impose them on existing and domination economic, social, cultural and political institution. In this contestation for power, the peoples organizations would use all available and ethical means to advance their liberation.

Perry Mars documents in his book Ideology and Change: The Transformation of the Caribbean Left that a section of the The Left in the Caribbean has a tradition of using or advocating the deployment of assemblies to connect with the people:

What these parties have in common is their strong advocacy of what are called variously peoples parliament or peoples assembly representing mass democratic participation in grass roots self organizations.

Further, The Left sees assemblies as political instruments that compensate for the fact that the liberal capitalist democracies in the region are not responsive or represent the needs of the people. Assemblies should not be used as consultative or information-sharing bodies by nationalist and socialist revolutionaries or radicals.

These political assemblies are supposed to be proactive and positive structures that familiarise the people with the idea and practice of shaping all decisions that impact their lives. Mars notes that in the Caribbean:

The problem with the peoples assembly is that the implementation does not necessarily eliminate the tendencies towards political centralization and elitism as far as leadership of the movement is concerned.

From the period of chattel slavery to the current period of neo-colonial flag independence, the Caribbean labouring classes have yet to exercise substantive power over the political institutions that govern their lives. A system of popular assemblies with the capacity to challenge the authoritarian liberal capitalist democracies for power would be one of the best expressions of reparatory justice in the Caribbean.

Conclusion

The struggle for reparations in the Caribbean should become a site of the class struggle and organizing the people for socialism or communism. Capitalism must be put on trial for aiding and abetting the enslavement of Africans and genocide against the Indigenous peoples.

The proposals that are outlined above for adoption by the Caribbean reparations will not become a reality in the absence of national campaigns that organize the people into their self-organized class-based and other popular organizations. We are seeking to build a counterhegemonic force or alternative power bloc to contest the existing forces of domination and to advance the long-term struggle of putting them out of business.

The neo-colonial governments have jumped in front of the reparations bandwagon and are trying to set the agenda. It is incumbent on the popular forces to organize the people in order to wrest the agenda setting initiative from the state and impose their programme of action on the state through the organizing of the labouring classes and other oppressed groups within its ranks.

It is critically necessary for the organizers who are organizing the people from below to do everything possible to utilize all available opportunity to build the capacity of the oppressed to challenge and undermine the existing white supremacist, patriarchal and capitalist political order. It is for this reason that a dual power strategy must build the embryonic economic, social and political structures of the future socialist society, while engaging and contesting the existing institutions of power.

It is in this light that the development of worker self-management over their workplaces and the establishment of a system of popular assemblies as the seat of working-class political power becomes necessary. The reparations movement can play an important catalytic role in helping to ideologically prepare the people for the completion of the Second Emancipation in the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas.

Ajamu Nangwaya, Ph.D., is an organizer, writer, and lecturer at the University of the West Indies. Read other articles by Ajamu.

This article was posted on Sunday, April 9th, 2017 at 10:30am and is filed under Activism, Africa, Anti-slavery, Capitalism, Caribbean, Culture, Economy/Economics, Labor, Resistance, Slavery, Socialism, Unions, United Kingdom, Wage Slavery.

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Caribbean Reparations Movement Must Put Capitalism on Trial ... - Dissident Voice

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Credit: International Labour Organization

Slavery in modern India the brick-kilns of Rajasthan

Slavery is a word that would seem to have no place in our modern world a world which is built on a language of rights and freedoms. Last week, Life of Labour linked to a series by the Guardian on instances of slavery across the modern world each one a brutal reminder of a feudal world we were supposed to have left behind. In one video, a Russian NGO called Alternativa rescues men and women who work as slaves in brick-kilns and sheep farms. This is not the slavery we expect slaves with t-shirts and passports sounds oxymoronic. But as withhuman rights abuses in the Middle East, Russian slavery is built on hidden debts, withheld wages, confiscated documents and, when that isnt enough, physical violence.

Brick-kilns are the sites of slavery and human rights abuse in India as well. Based on NSSO data, Anti-Slavery International calculatedthat there might be 100,000 kilns in India employing 23 million (or 2.3 crore) workers. In a letter dated 6th April 2017 to Rajasthans labour secretary, the Peoples Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) described the condition of brick-kiln workers and there were many similarities with the Russian situation.

The letter said, The vulnerable conditions of the these workers stem from the fact that:

(a) The state government has failed to enforce provisions oflabour legislations; (b) Most of these workers are interstate or intrastate migrants recruited from remote villages of UP, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and part of Rajasthan by illegal contractors onan advance wage during the off-season; (c) The workers are illiterate or have modicum of education, almost landless, poor with high indebtedness/deficit budgets and belong to backward communities like SC, ST or OBC. Representation of forward castes like Rajputs, Brahmins, Banias is not there; and (d) The establishments are located in the remote areas therefore the workers remain invisible and get exploited, deprived of social safety net benefits and legal labour rights.

In a reporton the issue, Equal Times described how a man from Uttar Pradesh borrowed money for a wedding and found himself travelling thousands of kilometres to repay his debt. His wife, three young children under the age of 10 and his ageing father all worked at the kiln, yet Brijesh was the only one officially employed and paid. The payment was a sustenance amount as he worked off his debt.

Just like Russia, the kilns tend to be situated in remote areas. So,geography becomes the first hurdle in trying to escape. These kilns are effectively gulags or debtors prisons but with the formal veneer of wage labour. In this instance, mechanisation cannot come fast enough. In an interviewwith IndiaSpend, Ken Bales, a professor of contemporary slavery at the University of Nottingham, said The interesting thing is that there are lot of things people do for business not just in India, but across the world with slaves that if they didnt have slaves for it, they wouldnt do itThere is a belt from Punjab to Uttar Pradesh, below Nepal, where they make bricks because of the kind of soil found there. You can buy Chinese brick-forming machines for not many rupees, and they dont need to pay for the machines because they have slaves children and mothers. As soon as you break it (slavery), either they have to shut down or they have to buy those machines.

But despite knowing about these kilns and the existence of strong central legislation against bonded labour, state governments like Rajasthan are notoriously impotent at dealing with the issue. PUCL hascriticised the state for notifying a minimum wage of Rs 227 for 1000 bricks. This wage was absurdly low compared to neighbouring states like Punjab (where it is Rs. 587), Haryana (Rs. 472) and Uttar Pradesh (Rs. 365). Within Rajasthan, areas like Ganganagar, Ajmer and Bhilwara pay more than double of this notified rate. But in places like Jaipur, the minimum wage is whats paid. And the prices of bricks are much higher in Jaipur than in Ganganagar or Ajmer, so there is no market reason for the wages to be so low.

Pioneering the use of behavioural science at work

In the United States of America, theyve moved way past slavery and now simply trickpeople into choosing to work hard by themselves. Employing hundreds of social scientists and data scientists, Uber has experimented with video game techniques, graphics and non-cash rewards of little value that can prod drivers into working longer and harder and sometimes at hours and locations that are less lucrative for themBy mastering their workers mental circuitry, Uber and the like may be taking the economy back toward a pre-New Deal era when businesses had enormous power over workers and few checks on their ability to exploit it. Read the fantastic investigation by NYT here.

Caste and Safai Karamcharis

A recent studypublished in EPW of 360 safai karamcharis employed by the Bombay Municipal Corporation argues that policies aimed at uplifting conservancy work may actually be institutionalising caste-based occupations, This study reveals that almost 90% of safai karamcharis in the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM) belong to the Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Other Backward Classes. Castes like the Mahar, Matang, Meghwal, Harijan, Valmiki and Chambhar dominate, whereas others like Kathewadi, Kunbi, Vadar and Devendrakulathan are found in smaller numbersIn our study, we found that more than three-fourths (77.2%) of safai karamcharis are second-or third-generation workers. Nine out of 10 have adopted this occupation after their fathers retirement or death and only 5% took their mothers place.

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The Life of Labour: Slavery in Modern India, How Uber Uses Psychological Tricks - The Wire

While most of New Orleans sits down to a dinner of red beans and rice, our seders will be beginning for us porch doors flung open to let in Elijah (and the seasons first mosquitoes), bottles of wine clustered like brass quintets on tables as the corner church bells strike six. Its Passover Louisiana style, with sweet potatoes alongside the brisket and hot sauce next to the butter, Hebrew prayers laced with Southern accents. From Uptown to the Bywater, Jews, some of whom have been part of this city for two hundred years, celebrate our Exodus from Egypt, when we broke free of an institution whose legacy is a bit more recent where we call home.

Yet, as we celebrate our freedom from slavery, its hard to forget that we have also been witnesses to slavery. In 2014 in The New York Times, Passover in the Confederacy, Sue Eisenfeld wrote of Jews who felt so at home in Dixie that they were proud to fight for it in the Civil War: To them, after all theyd suffered and fled throughout the ages, the South was their new motherland, the land of milk and honey (and cotton), and it was worth fighting for.

The online encyclopedia Virtual Jewish World states that more than 200 Louisiana Jews are known by name to have served in the Confederate forces, but the true number is probably three times that.

The Southern state with the highest Jewish population was Louisiana, where large numbers of Jews were concentrated in and around New Orleans. Many Jewish men worked in the shipping, sugar and cotton trades, or in related fields, like banking and maritime law, that financed or supported those commodities. The majority of Louisiana Jews were not slave owners, but their livelihoods, like those of their non-Jewish neighbors, were based on the slave economy. Without slaves picking the cotton and sugar, they would not have had jobs financing the sugar and cotton industries or shipping cotton north (one popular job for Southern Jewish businessmen), or owning the successful department stores on Canal Street that dressed New Orleanians for two centuries.

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Judah P. Benjamin

Judah P. Benjamin, the Confederate Secretary of War and the first Jewish U.S. senator, was an outspoken defender of slavery and the South. Benjamin was not a particularly religious man, but there were religious Jews who were able to reconcile their pro-slavery attitudes with their Judaism, such as Rabbi James Gutheim of the now-defunct Dispersed Of Judah synagogue in New Orleans, who, after the Union takeover of the city during the Civil War, refused to pledge his loyalty to the Union. According to the Encyclopedia of Southern Jewish Communities, he declared the Confederacys fight right and [just]. Rather than bow down, he moved to Montgomery, Alabama, and took over the rabbis job for that congregation, where he could be more outspoken. After the war, in 1868, he moved to New York, where Temple Emanuel-El hired him.

The first Jew to move to Louisiana was Isaac Monsanto, a Sephardic Jew who was later expelled when the Spanish began enforcing the Code Noir that the French had neglected. He worked in the shipping trade, and only one shipment over the course of his entire career involved slaves, according to Saul Friedman in his 1998 book Jews And The American Slave Trade. However, several of his descendants, who moved back to Louisiana when Jews were allowed back into the territory, did own slaves.

Friedman notes that the Monsantos were not great slaveowners: Benjamin owned 17; Angelica, 8; Eleanora, 4, and Manuel, 12. He argues that even calling these men and women Jewish slave owners is perhaps not accurate, as two of the women married Christians (a Catholic in one case, an Episcopalian in the other), and one converted. The Monsanto descendants, like Isaac, were not religious and did not even participate in cultural Jewish life. Because of this, Friedman argues, can you call them Jews?

Up north, Jews were split in their support of slavery. Tulane University professor Michael Cohen taught me of a dialogue between two East Coast rabbis that proves how divisive the issue was nationwide. In 1861, Rabbi Morris Raphall of the congregation Bnai Jeshurun, in New York, published The Biblical View of Slavery in the New York Herald, justifying slavery. His argument rests on the fact that the patriarchs, men considered the closest to God, owned slaves, and that the institution is simply a part of life: I am therefore justified when tracing slavery as far back as it can be traced; I arrive at the conclusion that, next to the domestic relations of husband and wife, parents and children, the oldest relation of society with which we are acquainted is that of master and slave. That is not the strongest of arguments, that because something has been around for thousands of years its fine, but Raphall drew a vehement group of supporters. He lashes out at those who dispute his ideas: When you remember that Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job were slave owners, does it not strike you that you are guilty of something very little short of blasphemy? If Gods favorite men owned slaves, why cant ordinary American Southerners?

Rabbi David Einhorn of Baltimore gave a sermon opposing Raphalls stance, arguing that Jewish law does not condone slavery: The Ten Commandments, the first of which is, I am the Lord, thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage, can by means want to place slavery of any human being under divine sanction. Einhorn received such backlash from his sermon that he was driven out of his congregation and Baltimore as well; he fled to Philadelphia. It was not just Southern Jews that justified slavery; Jews were like other American whites, a bloc that had both slavery supporters and those who did not support it, both in the North and in the South.

Of course, there were Southern Jews opposed to slavery, and Jews who chose not to own slaves. New Orleans department store owner Leon Godchaux is credited with transforming the sugar industry in Louisiana, but he waited until abolition, when the industry was a mess and plantations sat in ruins, cane growing tall and unpicked, to buy up bankrupt plantations and use wage labor to turn around the industry and become the largest sugar producer in the South. He remained a prominent member of New Orleans and Southern society, but not a slave-owning one. And there were many like him, whether or not they spoke out against slavery or quietly refused to support it.

When I moved to the South nine years ago, I was charmed by some Jewish-Southern adaptations the annual Jazz Fest Shabbat at Touro Synagogue during the first week of Jazz Fest, the fried chicken Friday Night special at Kosher Cajun Deli, Shabbat services shortened during parade season so that congregants wouldnt miss Morpheus and Krewe dEtat the Friday night before Mardi Gras. But I was less charmed by Jews embracing the darker legacy of the South, like a guy I met in college, a Jew from New Orleans who used the N-word in conversation, and when I called him out, he rolled his eyes and told me that I didnt understand because I wasnt from New Orleans. And the Jewish frat boy who hung the Stars And Bars alongside his Israeli flag in his dorm room window that faced out into an undergraduate residential quad. I am not equating these two boys actions with the support of slavery, but they prove that Jews can be as racist as any Southern goy.

Eisenfeld writes of families with husbands, fathers and sons away, fighting for the Confederacy, sitting down to a Seder to reflect on how we were once slaves in Egypt. While these Southern Jews were fighting to preserve the institution of slavery in their own land, they remembered how they themselves were once slaves. This paradox shows how much privilege Jews had in the South, even in the antebellum era. Sure, most Jews did not own slaves. But the huge difference here is that Jews in the South were never in danger of being made slaves again. Why werent those Confederate Jews looking back on our collective history, especially on Passover, and deciding that they could not morally be a part of this institution?

On my first Passover in New Orleans, I sat around a crowded table of undergrads at Tulane Hillel. We shvitzed in our seersucker and linen, knocking back plastic cup after plastic cup of wine and reading from paper Haggadot. The Hillel House sits right off campus, a campus built on what was once a long-lot sugar plantation that stretched from the Mississippi River to Lake Pontchartrain. The legacy of slavery literally surrounded us as we held our Seder. This proximity to a much more recent slavery was palpable. I cant imagine what those Confederate Jews were thinking as they broke matzo and worked their way around the Seder plate at their mansions in the Garden District and in Creole cottages downtown, how they could justify what they were fighting for when singing about freeing themselves from bondage.

It makes me think about what paradox I may be living in now, how we Jews need to always remain on the right side of history. Weve been through a lot as a people, and we must learn from all that suffering and use our knowledge to help others when we see them suffer. American Jews are Diaspora Jews. We need to remember that we were once in bondage, that we were once a targeted people, immigrants, and to help those in those positions now. As I sit down to my Southern Seder, thats what will be on my mind, making sure that I am not that that Confederate Jew, singing Dayenu and noshing on gefilte fish as slaves prep macaroons and matzo meal cake on the other side of the wall.

Sophia-Marie Unterman is a teacher and freelance journalist based in New Orleans.

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As We Celebrate Our Exodus, Let's Not Forget Our Role In Slavery - Forward