Djelloul Marbrook: Our Discourse About Racism is too Narrow

I’ve felt from a very early age that we can’t engage in honest discourse about racism in our society unless we take the full measure of racism as it has been suffered by the Irish, the indigenous Americans, the Jews, the Arabs, the Sicilians, et al.

In each instance, racism has had its unique subtleties, and I can’t help but feel that we have tended to sweep those subtleties under the carpet by focusing on the tragic history and legacy of slavery. I can’t help but feel that it is a way of marginalizing the entire subject of racism by too narrowly focusing it.

For example, when I went to college there were Ivy League quotas for Jews, and no doubt others, but there was a kind of agreement not to rock the boat, not to bring up the subject.

When it comes to racism. there are entirely too many elephants in the room. The more subtle the racism, the more disguised, the more racism thrives. It’s not unlike the Watergate phenomenon in which we find that the most notorious perps came from regions where there were inferior newspapers, so they were used to getting away with wrongdoing, and they brought their confidence in wrongdoing to Washington.

Another subtlety we marginalize is that we all profile, but we discuss the issue as if the law enforcement establishment owned it. We sit across the table or the room and say to ourseves, They’re Jews, or they”re Arabs, or they’re Hispanics, or whatever. And our behavior, however genteel it may be, is governed and shaped by those perceptions.

When I started out in the newspaper industry my first editor, an Irish American, said you can’t have that name. He meant my Christian name, as he put it. Djelloul, my first name, is actually the French version of an Arab name, and it happens to also be my baptismal name. So it was good enough for the church and good enough for the Navy but not good enough for the newspaper. Nobody will ever be able to pronounce it, he explained. The exact explanation so many Irish families heard from WASP authorities. I sat there stewing, because I remembered remarking to a commanding officer in the Navy who had struggled with my name when giving me a citation that I knew it was difficult. He was indignant. If you’re willing to fight and die for this country, your country is by damn going to say your name right. I wish I had had the guts to recount that incident to that editor, but I needed a job and shut my mouth.

And that’s the problem. There are many nuanced versions of American racism that have shut our mouths.

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copyright 2015 Djelloul Marbrook