Repentance
No. 8 | (2020)
Atonement
For Jewish people, Yom Kippur is the holiest day of the year—a day set aside to step back and turn our attention toward repair. We fast, we reflect, we take stock of the harm we’ve caused, individually and collectively. The work is communal. So is the reckoning.
I don’t usually look forward to it. But this year, I find myself needing that pause. I need the space to sit with grief, confusion, and responsibility—and with the idea that repair, if it’s going to mean anything, has to be shared.
This is a heavy moment. Here in my part of the country, people are navigating hazardous air quality, wildfires, and the presence of organized white supremacists, alongside COVID, homeschooling, the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the decision not to indict the officers responsible for killing Breonna Taylor. There’s also the election. And the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett—a judge whose record includes decisions that allow credibly accused sexual abusers to use civil rights law against the very institutions meant to hold them accountable.
Like many of you, I feel overwhelmed. My thoughts scatter easily. My heart feels raw. My spirit is tired. On the eve of repentance, I want to slow down and focus.
The “R” Word
My father tells me we should stop protesting. He worries it isn’t working, that it’s being used against us, that it’s no longer about Black lives but about disorder. He’s 82—white, Jewish, progressive—raised by women who were active in the early twentieth-century labor movement. If this is what he’s thinking, I wonder what other white people are telling themselves, quietly or out loud.
And I wonder what we’re not asking ourselves.
A few questions I keep circling:
What does it mean to abandon peaceful protest because it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient—or because it’s being reframed by those in power? If we give up a right because it’s contested, what are we conceding?
And what if riots are not simply irrational or inappropriate responses to sustained, lethal injustice? What if they are signals—of grief, rage, and despair—rather than the problem itself?
George Floyd was one of roughly 1,100 people killed by police in a single year. A disproportionate number of those killed were Black. The decision not to prosecute in Breonna Taylor’s case lands in the middle of a long and painful historical pattern. What, exactly, is the appropriate response to that reality?
Rather than rush to answers, I find myself turning, again, to history.
Learning
In the summer of 1919 (later known as the Red Summer), the United States was fresh out of World War I, fractured by racial violence, labor unrest, nativism, and a deadly pandemic. That year, violent racial clashes erupted in at least 25 cities and towns across the country.
In 1921, white mobs, aided by local authorities, destroyed Tulsa’s Greenwood district—“Black Wall Street”—killing hundreds and leaving thousands of Black residents homeless. In many of these episodes, police arrested Black people for defending themselves while ignoring or enabling white violence.
These events didn’t end resistance. They intensified it. Black Americans organized, built institutions, and pushed back. The NAACP expanded its reach in the 1920s and 1930s. Protest continued through the mid-twentieth century, often in response to police brutality and daily humiliation.
The uprisings of the 1960s followed a similar pattern. Some were nonviolent; others were not. They emerged from sustained neglect, discrimination, and state violence. Unlike earlier race riots instigated by white mobs, these rebellions were responses to systemic injustice, and they were largely confined to Black neighborhoods, often targeting white-owned businesses accused of exploitation.
The pattern repeats again in 1992 after the acquittal of officers who beat Rodney King, and again in the 2010s and 2020s, following the killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and so many others.
What feels different now is the breadth of participation. Today’s demonstrations are markedly interracial. People are gathering across lines of race, age, and background, united—however imperfectly—by a shared sense that something is profoundly wrong. That matters.
Still, it leaves white people with a question we can’t sidestep: given this history, why are riots so often treated as the central problem, while the long, documented killing of Black people is treated as background noise?
If Yom Kippur teaches anything, it’s that repair begins not with defensiveness, but with honest reckoning. Not with distancing, but with responsibility. That’s the posture I’m trying—imperfectly—to hold.
More soon.
More soon. Until then…So. Much. Love. Cara
