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Why I'm on the Racial Equity
Leadership Committee (RELC)
by Maia Taub, RELC Co-Chair
This month, I am going to talk a little about my why -- why I'm on RELC, why I care so much about Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging (DEIB) -- because I know that humans connect by sharing stories. So here is a story.
It has been twenty-nine years since I discovered two things. I learned, from my dad's Time-Life World War II In Pictures books, that the Holocaust had happened and how dreadful it had been. I also learned that the Germans had done it. Yes, the Nazis, but many people make the argument that if you weren't actively fighting the Nazis, you were complicit.
And what I realized, out of all that, was that I was German. I make no secret of being half-foreign; assimilation in America, as a bicultural person, has been difficult, and my family is White and European. My mother and all of the relatives I knew as a child were born in and grew up in and lived their lives in Germany. Somehow it didn't hit as hard until I was confronted with this ugly truth about my people -- and when I say my people, I mean my family, my home.
As a German, therefore, I resolved, as a little girl, two things: to change whatever I could change so that this never happened again, and to bear witness to whatever I could not change.
This year, Yom HaShoah (literally "day of the Holocaust") falls in early May. I was not introduced to the commemoration until I was in college. Monroe Community College puts on a whole day of programming for Yom HaShoah, and they're not shy about including other genocides. I remember spending part of one Yom HaShoah silently standing in a box about twice the size of a phone booth with eight other people, to experience what it would have been like to hide from the people who were hunting us. I stood witness to the survivors who came to speak, knowing that their time with us was limited even twenty years ago.
I kept, and keep, the day of remembrance after I left MCC. One year, my friend Evan went with me to the Jewish Community Center to see an exhibit. It was a garden of brick and stone. I remember the day was gray and a little damp. Very somber. I traced the names on the bricks, and I sobbed, because my family had not been able to keep them safe. We were trying to survive ourselves. It was a near thing for my grandfather, who was drafted to the Eastern Front and ended up in a Russian mine as a prisoner of war.
For nearly thirty years I have held this. So when I woke up to the injustices on this side of the ocean, the targeting of Black and Indigenous People of Color (BIPOC) Americans, there came a time when I could no longer remain complacent and silent. I had to find a way to be part of the solution or risk being part of the next Shoah.
That is why I pour myself into this work. It is my apology to everyone who died as a result of my family's inaction. It is my promise to stand with those who need it, if the same or worse should come to pass here. It is my resistance. There are people whose trajectories I can change using my privilege.
It takes stories to make up a history, and it takes histories to show us how we can change the future. I welcome you all to share your stories, so we can make new history here and now -- in the name of giving the generations to come a better life.
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