content warnings
references to civil unrest and war, inherited trauma
[2127 words]
There is a bridge in Selma, Alabama called The Edmund Pettus Bridge. It is a large metal structure not unlike many of the other mid-century monuments to practicality. Its wide white beams intertwine their geometric fingers at the top and its sturdy steel legs are shin-deep in the Alabama River. It was the site of the Bloody Sunday atrocities when Martin Luther King and his freedom fighters attempted to peacefully march from Selma to Montgomery. The pictures from that time are extraordinary. I get choked up with pride and disbelief when I see them. Pride for the accomplishments and disbelief because the bridge still, after years of fighting for its name to be changed, is called The Edmund Pettus Bridge, after Edmund Pettus, a Civil War hero, an Alabama state senator, and the Grand Dragon of the KKK.
Our history is brutal and unjust. So why do we insist on memorializing these injustices?
“Our history”. Those words have never quite made home in my immigrant mouth and mind. American history and its socio-cultural constructs have never felt native. Being an immigrant has always felt like walking into the theater an hour into the movie. I’ve been trying to put the pieces of America’s violent plot together since 1996 when my family migrated here from Ukraine. But the truth is I know this story arc all too well; maybe not the specific scenes or characters, but certainly the themes. These are unfortunately universal and I am unfortunately intimately familiar with them.
When someone asks why we left, I usually blame the country’s failing economy and give the standard immigrant answer of “in pursuit of a better life”. The real reason is that we were Jews in a country that hated Jews.
I grew up in Khmelnytskyi, a moderately large city on the Western side of Ukraine. I miss watching red squirrels with their bright bushy tails scamper up the enormous statue of fallen soldiers. I even miss Lenin’s giant guillotined head, abandoned for years in the town square after the rest of his granite body was successfully hauled off during Perestroyka.
The government took down many of these mementos from previous oppressors. All over the city, empty pedestals stood awkward and naked. Their emptiness, a monument in itself.
Among the statues that still stand, even through Russia’s invasion, and I suspect will never be removed are the ones commemorating the city’s namesake, the hero on his fearsome horse, Bohdan Khmelnitsky. That motherfucker.
Khmelnitsky was a 17th-century Cossack who led an uprising against Poland and eventually negotiated the Treaty of Pereyaslav which pledged Ukrainian allegiance to the Russian state.
His other claim to fame is being responsible for some of the most brutal pogroms Eastern European Jews have experienced in recent history. There are no definite numbers but it is estimated that he and his men murdered anywhere between fifteen and one hundred thousand Jews residing in Ukraine and Poland. He didn’t just kill, he brutalized men, women, and children; his soldiers buried people alive and cut them into pieces. My country memorialized this in stone and name.
I have dark brown hair, pale skin, and brown eyes. In Ukraine, I stood out, not like a sore thumb but like a middle finger to the mostly blond, mostly light-color-eyed population. I didn’t have to announce my heritage, my appearance identified me as a Jew. I remember one of my ashy-haired, green-eyed classmates calling me “Jid” a derogatory term for “Jew” similar to “kike” when I refused to give up my turn on the swings. When I told my blonde, blue-eyed teacher, she scolded me for being a tattletale.
In America’s sociology of knowledge1 I am a white person easily and privilegedly. And I am grateful for the privileges that passing as “American” (as Mitch McConnell would categorize me as) grants. But it also deeply unsettles me. I feel like a phony. Though that’s not the right sentiment because you never want to be a phony and a part of me wants to be recognized for the minority that I am or rather the minority that I was. Yes, antisemitism is still all the rage, and yes, it has gotten significantly worse since the brutality with which the Israeli government has responded to the October 7th [2023] attacks. Genocide does not help with popularity, at least not in this case. Though my own, as an unofficial expert on the Middle Eastern conflict, did. Suddenly, acquaintances and even friends wanted to know my thoughts on the matter. What makes me a more reliable source than anyone else watching the horror unfold on their screens? My Jewish blood? That’s not blood’s work or expertise. I have never lived or even been to Israel. I studied about its creation in history class. But Zionism, as any movement motivated by fear and the notion of “mine”, has never appealed to me as the answer to Jewish safety. And yet, I still get dms from long-long college buddies every time a shocking statistic about starving children in Gaza comes out. I, too, don’t think it’s right and I, too, have no say in the matter. This has been another inherited assumption based on my ethnic background.
Though again, I am grateful that this is the extent of my interaction with this conflict. This, too, is a privilege. And this: I have never experienced antisemitism in any other form than a Jew joke and even those have been a rarity. I know this is anecdotal but if you’re not an orthodox Jew, which many of us in this country are not, it is easy enough to go through life passing, which is to say not ever experiencing prejudice that feels life-threatening. I posit that a lot of this is based on the simple factor of whiteness.
As children of the Holocaust, my parents learned young and well to keep their mouths shut and their heads down, aka pass. I can’t remember if this was said explicitly or implied with their hunched shoulders and tightly sealed lips, but I had the sense that I was not to tell anyone I was Jewish if I could help it. Most knew anyway. This was a clunky and failed version of passing, but they tried anyway because as the Nazis taught us, and before that even the Torah itself in the Purim story where Queen Esther passed as a Babylonian in order to marry the king and save her people, passing is survival.
My parents came here for a better life for me and my brother. And it is true, we have a better life. America has given me whiteness or at least the illusion of it; the ability to pass as the privileged is a privilege indeed. It has given me opportunities that being a Jew in Ukraine would not. Everyone loves a successful immigration story. There are plenty of glossy hardcovers about this. But we all know what they say about judging a book by its cover. Underneath my cover is a history of oppression that cares very little for my geographical and cultural relocation and the privileges it affords.
In his seminal text, Race and Racism, Pierre L. van den Berghe argues that “…it is not the presence of objective physical differences between groups that creates race, but the social recognition of such differences as socially significant or relevant.” Though Judaism is a religion, it identified me as “non-Ukrainian”, as “other”, which can be compared to being non-white in America. Being Ukrainian then is equivalent to American whiteness. When my Jewish family fled to America, I (not my parents, with their thick Eastern European accents that gave them away) became part of the in-crowd, a part of the privileged majority. I am now part of a race, and that race is the historical oppressor.
I have no actual historical, physical, lived link with American whiteness, but my skin automatically puts me in that category.
In the field of linguistics, it is understood that fluency depends on a cultural definition of a word. One of my favorite Noam Chomsky “Chomskyisms” (he came from the same Ukrainian village as my family!) is that the dictionary definition of a word is only a hint, a shadow, a rough sketch and in order to truly understand a word one must be a member of the social group to whom the word belongs. Whiteness is a concept that is very intrinsically American. But as a foreigner who falls under the umbrella of whiteness, I am forced not only to understand its definition but also to participate in it and take on all its idiosyncratic histories and consequences.
No thanks. I’d like to opt out, please. But I can’t because my skin plays a much more significant role in my classification than my ideology. Passing, after all, is different from masking, although both have a connotation that the person who is doing either the passing or the masking is choosing to do so to gain benefits of the privileged group. What if it is not a choice? What if it is an assumption placed on the person based on the color of their skin? What if that assumption erases history? Erases culture? Erases toil and tradition and generations of surviving atrocities beyond words, beyond language, beyond color.
And even so, I am still incredibly grateful for the privileges that “whiteness” affords me, which are numerous and probably go beyond my understanding and realization of them. Especially since the war in Ukraine started, I have been thanking my lucky stars for being able to live in relative peace here due in so many parts to the privilege of passing.
The privilege also extends to the fact that I am able to reveal my identity at will. To come out if you will. I often feel this way when after the first few weeks of the semester I reveal to my students, in my mostly Hispanic serving institution, where many are immigrants or first generation, that I am an immigrant as well. It feels like a joyous homecoming, as my students soften to me, begin to use inclusive pronouns like “us” and “we” when they speak about their experiences of being a minority in this country.
So what does this mean for monuments? It’s complicated, like the ideas that they represent. Some are easy cases to make. Others are tougher because they’re less harmful or prominent and some that commemorate even awful people or events may open more conversations if they remain. In 2022, when the Edmund Pettus Bridge’s renaming was up for debate, many survivors and community members did not want it to be renamed completely “because of what the bridge has come to represent”(Associated Press).
When we rename or take down monuments we take down pieces of history that are perhaps brutal and unjust but have also shaped its survivors as much as the oppressors. They also commemorate the thing that we survived and continue surviving well past the actual event. Taking down or renaming our violent past, can bring some closer to denying it. If the evidence isn’t physically there, it’s easier to say it never happened. The Holocaust deniers are growing in numbers the less survivors are left alive. In denying our violent past, we deny the possibility of future violence and leave ourselves open and unprotected. Many protest the fact that Auschwitz concentration camp is open to the public for tours and though I would never go there myself because it would be too painful, I believe this is necessary. We must remember, we must understand the physicality of the event. Statues and monuments by their nature make tangible abstractions like historical facts or ideas.
At the highest peak of my optimism, I hope that this is the reason that cities stay named after mass murderers even after the country elects a president from the discriminated minority group. That hatred is not the driving force here. That it is not brutality in all of our hearts, but a heart-driven desire to hold on to the past because that is when, in the immortal words of Lucille Clifton, “something has tried to kill (us)/ and has failed”.
Maybe this is why every few months I find myself returning to the statue of Khmelnitsky on Google Earth. It is still there, right where it was. His mace pointed toward the sky, like a giant middle finger to me and Jews everywhere. Even so, the same smile creeps onto my face every time at the sight of his glorious handlebar mustache. And every time, like giving thanks around a Thanksgiving table, I raise my own middle finger to him: To you, motherfucker! To you, whom my people survived and will continue surviving.
Toma Zbrizher is a Ukrainian American poet and writer. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, including Grist, Mom Egg Review and others. She is the recipient of the 2024 Individual Artist Grant for the NJ ARTs Council On The Arts and the 2021 NJ Poetry Prize winner. She lives and loves in NJ with her son and two talkative cats, Murka and Midnight.
Footnotes
- The Sociology of Knowledge, a subfield of sociology that focuses on knowing or knowledge as a socio-cultural construct and production. In their 1966 book, The Social Construction of Reality, sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckman suggest that “The sociology of knowledge therefore, must concern itself with the social construction of reality. (1966) ↩︎
Works Cited
Brown, P. (1991). Passing: Differences in Our Public and Private Self. Journal of Multicultural Social Work, 1(2), 33–50. https://doi.org/10.1300/J285v01n02_03
Guess, T.J. (2006) The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequences. Critical Sociology, 32, 649-673. https://doi.org/10.1163/156916306779155199
Hitch, P. (1983). Social identity and the half-Asian child. In G. M. Breakwell (Ed.), Threatened identities (pp. 107-127) New York: John Wiley and Sons
Kanuha, Valli Kalei (1999) “The Social Process of “Passing” to Manage Stigma: Acts of Internalized Oppression or Acts of Resistance?,” The Journal of Sociology & Social Welfare: Vol. 26: Iss. 4, Article 3.
Ozbilgin, Mustafa F., Cihat Erbil, Sibel Baykut, and Rifat Kamasak. 2023. “Passing as Resistance Through a Goffmanian Approach: Normalized, Defensive, Strategic, and Instrumental Passing When LGBTQ+ Individuals Encounter Institutions.” Gender, Work & Organization 30(3), 862–880. https://doi.org/10.1111/gwao.12928.
“The Concept of Language- Noam Chomsky Interview” Upon Reflection. UW Video, Youtube.com March 12, 2014. https://youtu.be/hdUbIlwHRkY?si=gSKvO4Q15N5cl3Xq
Alabama plan advances to alter name of Edmund Pettus Bridge – https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/alabama-plan-advances-alter-name-edmund-pettus-bridge-rcna23211
