Changing race: Judith Ezekiel at TEDxDayton

Judith Ezekiel grew up in Dayton View, spent 35 years in France and currently is the visiting women's studies professor at Wright State University from the Université de Toulouse. Judith has published extensively on the women's movements in the United States and France (Feminism in the Heartland), comparative race and ethnicities, and Franco-American (mis)representations. She is the founding editor of la revue d´en face and The European Journal of Women's Studies, and she co-founded the French, European and International Women's Studies associations as well as the first French women-of-color research group, Race et Genre.

From her childhood in lower Dayton View, as Judith Ezekiel crossed many real and imagined borders, she discovered that race, her race, was fluid and changing. Being a racialized Jew or "off-white" and racially ambiguous gave her a glimpse of what people of color experience and changed her consciousness from supporting the freedom of "Others" to seeing racism as a threat to her own life. Growing up in a predominantly African-American neighborhood, whiteness was not invisible to Judith; indeed she felt very aware of her "white skin privilege." Her sympathy toward the Black Power position ― that the "Black problem" was a white one, and that antiracist whites needed to work in their communities against racism ― kept her from seeing that she was no longer the white she thought she was. In her travels to different neighborhoods and countries, she discovered she was perceived of as racially ambiguous. First, her encounters with anti-Semitism transformed her into a Jew. Then, faced with constant questions about "where she was from," and incidents of discrimination, she realized she was being exoticized and racialized. Opposition to racism was no longer solidarity with "Others," rather it was out of self-defense. This talk looks at that transformation and what Judith "does with" her experiences as a non-white. By understanding that our race is not static and that "whiteness" is relative, she hopes to increase antiracist empathy and consciousness.

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