Oral History Interview with Judith Kaufmann

Title

Oral History Interview with Judith Kaufmann

Interviewee

Judith Kaufmann

Interviewer

Eli Bastiaansen

Description

Judith Kaufmann of Falls Church, Virginia was interviewed by Eli Baastiansten, a Sewanee student, on November 25th, 2023 on Zoom. While their conversation was primarily on the Black Lives Matter Movement, other topics included: her interracial marriage and spreading awareness about racial inequality. We hope that this conversation will assist scholars with a further understanding of race in the United States during the early twenty-first century. Please click on the link to see the full interview.

Transcript

00:00:01 Eli Bastiaansen: Hello, this is Eli Bastiaansen from Sewanee, the University of the South. It is 2:34 PM and the current day of the week is Saturday the 25th of November, 2023. And I'm with Ms. Judith Kaufmann,

00:00:22 Judith Kaufmann: And this is Judith Kaufmann who is in Falls Church, Virginia, as we are talking,

00:00:30 Eli Bastiaansen: Thank you so much Ms. Judith Kaufmann for being here. I'm very grateful for your participation in this interview. Just to start, could you talk about where you are currently or where you're originally from?

00:00:43 Judith Kaufmann: I was born in Chicago, Illinois on the south side and moved to Cincinnati, Ohio when I was 14 and finished high school there.

00:00:59 Eli Bastiaansen: And then can you sort of talk about where you currently live?

00:01:04 Judith Kaufmann: I live in Falls Church, Virginia, which is a close-in suburb of Washington DC. I live in a continuing care retirement community with a bunch of very active, very politically minded, other old folks.

00:01:31 Eli Bastiaansen: And how is where you live now different from where you grew up? Either the community or just culturally?

00:01:41 Judith Kaufmann: That's an interesting question. Of course, Chicago and Cincinnati were somewhat different. I grew up on the south side of Chicago. I grew up at a time when my part of that area was very white, surrounded by black suburbs. I'm going into that because I know what we're going to be talking about and we can talk about my experiences with sudden desegregation in the schools if you'd like. Cincinnati also in a predominantly white area, and as is this community despite efforts to try and make it more diverse. But Washington of course has itself is a highly diverse place in the Washington area is

00:03:00 Eli Bastiaansen: Yes. Could you also speak about your previous occupation and sort of your journey to this role?

00:03:11 Judith Kaufmann: I was for, I forget how many years now, a foreign service officer, in other words, a diplomat for the US Department of State. So spent several tours overseas. I joined, I was interested in it because my parents were both born in Germany. My father did a lot of travel for business and growing up in Hyde Park near the University of Chicago, got a taste of things international, so I was always interested. I'm not sure I had thought about living a good percentage of my life overseas, but it proved to be a good fit for me.

00:04:15 Eli Bastiaansen: How did living overseas change or influence the way you saw other people or even discussed your own experiences just being from the US and how did that differ from your time overseas?

00:04:36 Judith Kaufmann: I'm not sure I was, the State Department when I came in did not consciously talk about cross-cultural communications or cross-cultural understanding. Our role was in large part to explain the US but also to explain what was happening in the country to which we were signed back home. The longer I was in, the more I realized that as diplomats, we probably get a skewed view since we're dealing with political elites for the most part, although I've been really lucky, all of my posts, I was able to make friends in the local community and therefore learn more about it. But it's still an incomplete knowledge and I still can't completely define or understand how I was able to do that, make those kinds of connections where I spent most of my free time with nationals of the country I was in, where others of my colleagues were not able to do that. So I'm still a little unsure about what characteristics I brought that others might not have. Does that answer the question at all?

00:06:20 Eli Bastiaansen: Yes, thank you. Would you be able to sort of further discuss the type of work that you did?

00:06:29 Judith Kaufmann: I was very much a generalist, which is why it probably suited me. I could sort of flit around from subject to subject in place to place. I was a political officer, which means my career should have been reporting mainly on political events. I'm not sure how good I was at that, at least on the analysis piece, but I spent a lot of time in Washington and there I worked in two main areas. One was training at our Foreign Service Institute where I had two tours and the other was in transnational issues. So I had one tour, three years working on democracy and human rights issues. I worked on health issues, so I didn't have the typical work on a country desk become an expert on a region kind of career.

00:07:49 Eli Bastiaansen: Thank you. And where in the world did you work and travel?

00:07:56 Judith Kaufmann: I have to divide this into two parts because I married a foreign service officer and it was not easy to find posts together since we were both political officers and he was senior to me, but before we were married, my two overseas posts were Brazil and Spain. And then after we were married I went with him, but as a what they called dependent spouse or trailing spouse to Benin and Senegal, both in West Africa and to Geneva, Switzerland to the UN missions there.

00:08:50 Eli Bastiaansen: Thank you. You married a man of during a time when interracial marriage had only been legal for a few years. It was made legal in 1967

00:09:04 Judith Kaufmann: And we were married in 1981.

00:09:08 Eli Bastiaansen: Yeah. Do you think you could sort of discuss either the community's reaction to your marriage or just I guess what that was like during a time when it was not very popular?

00:09:21 Judith Kaufmann: Let me back up. As I said, both of my parents were born in Germany fled because of the Nazis. And I remember my father telling me fairly early on in my life that there were good and bad people of all colors and of all religions. So from a fairly early age, we were taught and encouraged to see people as human beings and not judge them on race or religion. And I mentioned earlier that when in Chicago, there's no middle school or there wasn't when I went to school. So I went to the same school from kindergarten through eighth grade and the Chicago Board of Education at that point, we think of segregation as being a southern phenomenon. It's not at all, confined to the south. And this Chicago school board kept drawing the district lines for my little school to make sure it was kept pretty much all white until about seventh grade when they just couldn't keep it up anymore because they would've had to close our school for lack of enrollment. And then they took the seventh and eighth grade from a, I don't even want to say predominantly, I'm guessing it was close to a hundred percent black school within a few miles of where we were, and I'll say dump them in our school without any effort to ease the transition. And I think most of us who had been in high school were disposed to predisposed to think this was okay, but it wasn't always the easiest transition.
00:11:45 So that was another formative experience. Then we moved to Cincinnati. I started high school in Chicago, the high school, a public high school. A lot of my friends' parents put them into a private school in the area, but I went to the public school, which was again, vastly majority black. I'm not sure about Hispanic population at that point, but I was in, I guess what we call the talented and gifted now or the AP classes, although they didn't quite exist yet. So I was in a bubble in some ways. And then we moved to Cincinnati again to a public school, but it was what we'd now call a magnet school again for more gifted and talented, it wasn't completely diverse, but it was fairly diverse. I remember that the president and vice president of my senior class were both black. There was a fair amount of socializing and interaction. So I think that was another formative experience. And I'm not sure whether I'm still on topic or not.

00:13:20 Eli Bastiaansen: No, I think you are. And just the importance of being exposed to more diverse cultures, even when it was in a time when segregation was very recent in the memory of most individuals.

00:13:35 Judith Kaufmann: Yes. And having parents who'd explained the situation in Chicago, I'm not sure all of my friends understood the why and what, why our school was kept small. But you were asking then about marrying George. So yes, I had all these experiences and I had parents who clearly encouraged me to see people as individuals. So I think when I met George, it wasn't strange to me, even though yes, I was fully aware that there were still issues in this country. When I told my mother, who adored George, that we were going to get married, she was concerned for two reasons. One, and I remember this clearly was she didn't think the country was ready for it. And the second was she had some reservations about cultural differences and the impact that might have on our relationship, but there were never any obstacles put in my way. I think George is going to fill out his forms. I hope so. You can ask him what, if anything he heard from his family.

00:15:26 Eli Bastiaansen: Thank you. So I guess as you've sort of mentioned and touched on, your family had a very profound influence on your growing up and just their history as immigrants from Germany and their experiences, I guess during and after World War II.

00:15:48 Judith Kaufmann: And I mean Germany of course had virtually no people of other colors and clearly the Nazis saw the Jews as being the alien race quite deliberately. So yes, I think that was translated in some ways.

00:16:17 Eli Bastiaansen: Do you think you could talk a little bit more about the drawing of the school zones and I guess some maybe redlining and in the housing market in either Chicago or Cincinnati or if you remember anything of that?

00:16:34 Judith Kaufmann: No, that's beyond any memory. And I think I'm remembering correctly about the school board and being told that I don't know how I would've known besides being told by my parents and their friends. I'm not sure at that point that even my parents we rented, we didn't buy, we lived in an apartment building would've necessarily known about redlining. It clearly has impacted any city, but I certainly didn't know about it.

00:17:25 Eli Bastiaansen: Yeah, no worries. I guess at a younger age you received a lot of news and information from your parents. How do you,

00:17:35 Judith Kaufmann: Like most kids,

00:17:36 Eli Bastiaansen: How do you receive the news now and how has that sort of evolved with different technologies?

00:17:45 Judith Kaufmann: Oh God,
00:17:48 Yeah. We doom scroll all the time and there's all too much to doom scroll about, which I'm not sure is good for us. So again, I'm a generalist, so I sort of dip in and dip out depending on the subject of the day. When I was working, I got a lot of my news just because that was part of what we were doing was looking at the news in the area we were working on. But of course it was otherwise it was magazines or newspapers and it was in Washington we were lucky to have the post. If I'd still lived in Cincinnati, my concept of the news probably would've been different.
00:18:58 The internet has made it both more means no matter where you are, you can if you want find the news, but then there's so much of it that I think we all tend to go to whatever sources, each of us as individuals think are reliable. And for better or worse, that means we probably pick based on what we want to hear. In growing up, it was the three news stations, and so if Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather came on, they were the voice of authority, now they're what, a hundred channels or more on my cable TV that we get here. So I think people still tend to, I know the people who go to MSNBC or CNN or I'm sure there's some here in our community who go to Fox, which so the current scene, we have the opportunity to know more, and yet I think we're funneled into silos more than we might've been before. When I was younger, everybody was watching the three TV stations. We were working from common information and we no longer are.

00:20:41 Eli Bastiaansen: Yeah. And there's no longer that emphasis on making one's own opinions because there's so many sources giving you the opinion, almost telling you this is what you should believe.

00:20:55 Judith Kaufmann: I think that's true too. I don't know that in the very old days with the three TV stations and your one local radio station or your few local radio stations that you were necessarily encouraged to form your own opinions, although people obviously did. I think for me, the biggest difference is we were all sharing the same news. It wasn't, I'll give you an example, 60 years ago, of course this past week was when President Kennedy was assassinated and we were all watching the same thing at the same time. No matter what our politics and no matter whether you hate Kennedy or love Kennedy. So that forms a certain cohesion. I think. Now I suspect if that had happened today, what you'd see on Fox versus what you'd see on MSNBC, the conspiracy theories on the web, and on some of these news sources just profoundly impacts how people think about the exact same event. But even 60 years ago, of course the conspiracy theories started, so we weren't entirely immune.

00:22:36 Eli Bastiaansen: Yeah. I also knew that you and George worked a little bit in Africa and as well as in the US with AIDS and HIV and I know that there were a lot of stereotypes, especially in the United States connecting individuals of color with AIDS and HIV.

00:23:03 Judith Kaufmann: Let me explain. We weren't working directly when we were in our two posts in West Africa, although we both remember vividly a conference, I've never been able to come up with a citation for. When we were in Senegal, there was an international conference on HIV, which was sort of our introduction to it. We came back to the states, George worked on things African as assistant secretary, and it was a big, well, let's see. Now I'm getting my timing mixed up. We came back. Yeah, where did I go after we came back from Senegal? Probably to, this is a good question. I'm terrible at dates.

00:24:26 Eli Bastiaansen: No worries.

00:24:30 Judith Kaufmann: So we would've come back, see, we went to Geneva and came 1998, so he would've been assistant secretary from 94. And yeah, let's, let me think about this. I worked on democracy and human rights, so not directly anything to do with HIV, but when he was assistant secretary, it was becoming a big issue in Africa. I don't think either of us focused too much on what was happening here. I mean, the stigma and discrimination were there, but I honestly don't remember it being tied to race at that time. Certainly tied to homosexuality and the whole thing about they deserve it and if they didn't sin, then this wouldn't happen. But I don't remember, but I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. Then when we went to Geneva, of course this continued to be an issue. And when I started to look to see if there was some way I could work there, since I was on leave without pay from the State Department, I was offered a contract with a joint UN program on HIV/AIDS.
00:26:13 And that's what got me into the health sphere. And again, a lot of our work was on stigma and discrimination. And in fact, that was one reason I was hired because the head of the agency said, the doctors and the masters of Public Health, they don't necessarily understand the diplomatic outreach that needs to happen. And when I came back, I continued to work on the issue with the State Department. I switched from AIDS to malaria when we were in Geneva, but obviously maintained that interest. So when I came back, I was involved with the creation of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria, and then peripherally involved with PEPFAR being set up, the president's emergency program for AIDS relief before it's sort of left my office, the AIDS portfolio, but I've never actively worked on domestic AIDS issues.

00:27:35 Eli Bastiaansen: Thank you.

00:27:35 Judith Kaufmann: I'll say what's sad, what I do know and what's actually I think still happening, but as I said I don't follow it closely, is that a lot of the stigma and discrimination in the black community came from black pastors. And it was a continuation of that discrimination against the LGBTQ plus community and the whole concept of sin and sexuality.

00:28:16 Eli Bastiaansen: Thank you. And excuse me, to transition a bit more to directly speaking about the Black Lives Matter movement, how did you first encounter the movement either on media or through the news or through communication with George or other community members?

00:28:41 Judith Kaufmann: I think George would say the same thing. First of all, this was happening in the wake of George Floyd and during the pandemic. So we weren't out a whole lot in the community and probably wouldn't have encountered it there in our community anyway, which tends to be more white and more upper middle class. Not that that's any kind of protection or reason, but so it was all through media.

00:29:23 Eli Bastiaansen: And how did media, I guess, shape your initial interpretations and opinions and reactions to the movement and to the death of George Floyd as you cited?

00:29:36 Judith Kaufmann: I was thinking about that today, knowing I was going to talk to you and trying to remember why or think about why George Floyd's murder was the catalyst it was. And of course, I think it was in fact the pandemic and that therefore it was more visible and more reported on than might otherwise have been, I shouldn't say of course, that's a theory. And to me, at the time, the slogan Black Lives Matter, and it still does. I understand what it's meant to convey. As time went on though, the whole idea of the sloganeering, the very short thing, defund the police, Black Lives Matter, I think in some senses became a poison pill in that they allowed others to say, well, wait a minute. White Lives matter too. Which is true, but that's not what the Black Lives Matter movement was meant to convey. But when you try and reduce it to slogans, it's too easy for people to purposely or accidentally misinterpret the slogans.
00:31:24 It did lead us here at our community. I remember we had a memorial service or a sort of vigil out on our front lawn 'cause we couldn't do it inside because of the pandemic. And I remember we had news media there. We all made posters. They were all put on our outside fence. And we started, I joined a committee, our spiritual life committee, because they had started, they had put together a couple of programs to help residents try and understand something more about the realities that black folks face. How successful it was, I don't know. But I joined the committee to help with that. We're still the speaker series that we're doing still, it had existed before, but it's still focused on racism. And this year what we did was a classmate of George's from college who was a college professor, now retired, and a colleague of hers have an eight part course on structural racism. And we've been doing that via Zoom with her 'cause they're out in Wisconsin, no, Michigan, sorry. And it's been quite successful. We started out with over 50, but we're still getting 35 or so people once a month, which isn't bad.
00:33:17 So that was my involvement. Also doing some more reading myself and realizing what I hadn't known about things like redlining, about theories about why we spend so little on public universities anymore. Things like the swimming pools that were closed, denying both whites and blacks, a place to swim in hot summers. Just a whole range of things that I've been vaguely aware of, but that I could dive into a little more because more information was available.

00:34:12 Eli Bastiaansen: And I think the more that people are able to discuss these concepts and read about them on their own, the better the community will be in the end.

00:34:27 Judith Kaufmann: It will, but it's become so polarized and it's been done cynically by many. But I also think that if we're going to move forward and have real discussions, then as I said, we all have to be more sensitive to language. And I don't know how we do that. But I remember thinking even before George Floyd with Hillary Clinton's campaign that she'd start a lot of her speeches. If you look back, she'd talk about black communities and Hispanic communities and LGBTQ and other minorities, and she'd never talk about white Americans. And that's exclusionary itself. And I understand that she was appealing to people that she needed to be elected.
00:35:50 But the whole identity politics thing has fed into the narrative of those who don't want to see us make progress on racial conciliation because it's all too easy to say, see, they don't care about you. And I think about how programs have been structured, and I can understand how a lower middle class white family might say Affirmative Action helps everybody but my kid. So we are starting to talk about is it social class or is it race? We've been forced to by the Supreme Court decision, of course, and I don't have the answers to that, but in some ways the slogans I fear have played into some of the stereotypes. Now, I hasten to say a lot of what's happening in a lot of these goes back to reconstruction. And even before when it was in the interests of, for instance, white enslavers to make sure that poor white folk and enslaved black folk didn't realize that they had common interests because that would've really threatened the white enslaving elite. And clearly those forces are still there, and we see it with election law and lots of other things, but I don't think we need to help them make the case to alienated whites that their interests are different from those of folks of other colors, other ethnicities, other religions.

00:38:00 Eli Bastiaansen: Would you say that the Black Lives Matter movement is more similar or more distinct than the Civil Rights movement?

00:38:13 Judith Kaufmann: Again, I'm not sure I know enough about the Black Lives Matter movement as a movement. My understanding is it's very decentralized, and that may also have been a disadvantage. The Civil Rights movement wasn't completely centralized, but you had strong groups that were meeting together, discussing. And then of course, you had some very strong leaders like Mike Luther King, but many others too. So there was a more central focus than I see with Black Lives Matter. The same thing happened with the, what was it called? The wasn't the 1%, the Wall Street thing. They were so decentralized that they sort of just faded without a trace.

00:39:19 Eli Bastiaansen: Yeah. Do you think you could also further expand on the role of the pandemic in the Black Lives Matter movement?

00:39:31 Judith Kaufmann: Look, I can't say for certain. I just wonder, and this is maybe for academics, maybe something's been written, I wouldn't know. But why it was the George Floyd case that caught the imagination of so many people. It was horrendous, but it's not the only case. And we're still seeing cases of murder by police officers of black people, and they get reported, and there's an outcry in the community, but not the kind of national response. So I don't know why. And George Floyd, you have to say, George Floyd's murder was the lead in to Black Lives Matter. So the only thing I can think is that we needed to focus on something, or the media did. And the pandemic when things were sort of was either focused on the pandemic or focus on, there wasn't much else. Well, yes, there was politics and maybe it was who was in the White House that made it stand out. I honestly don't know. But just in thinking about it, I wondered if it was because it happened during the pandemic and if otherwise, even if there were news reports about it, because we had Eric Garner with I Can't Breathe, and that didn't ignite this kind of movement. So it was pure speculation on my part.

00:41:43 Eli Bastiaansen: How has Black Lives Matter and learning about Black Lives Matter changed the way that maybe you talk about race or even interact with other people? Or has it even influenced the way that you interact with others?

00:42:06 Judith Kaufmann: I want to separate, and that's why I said I wasn't sure I could help in this project. I don't think it was Black Lives Matter that led to the exploration such as it was on my part and on the part of others. For instance, in my community, it was that whole agglomeration George Floyd, the demonstrations, yes, of course. And in Washington, we have Black Lives Matter Plaza now, but reporting by organizations like the Washington Post, which really dug into some of the statistics and the cases of police violence. There were books being published, and I don't know that I would give Black Lives Matter credit except for keeping it alive for at least a while. But it was only a while. And would we have done the kind of reading or discussion? We have a little book club here for a while. Very short while if we hadn't been blocked up because of the pandemic, that's another question I would ask, but I think it's too much to give all the credit or blame to the Black Lives Matter movement. I am not convinced it was all that effective.

00:43:58 Eli Bastiaansen: So do you think that the Black Lives Matter movement succeeded?

00:44:05 Judith Kaufmann: Since I don't even know what their goal was. I can't say that. I mean, that's where some of the defund the police came from. And that was, I felt right from the beginning, a stupid slogan, a stupid effort for a very complex problem. And that's clearly not succeeding. I'm not sure what else it was. Can you tell me what their goals were?

00:44:38 Eli Bastiaansen: I mean, I think much of it was against the systemic racism and against the criminal justice system. I think a lot of it was also about black pride in a system that often subjugates people of color.

00:45:02 Judith Kaufmann: And on that maybe, but in the absence of solid polling or other ways of knowing, I can't tell on the black pride, yes, criminal justice, but if you have those as stated goals and you have, you have to work on that in a political way, and I don't see that that's happened. If anything, I would say that things and systemic racism may have taken several steps backward, that the backlash among a significant percentage of the population, including the political class, Republicans, has set back many of those very vague kind of goals. And where you do see things that they might have wanted like around where I live, where there've been some progressive prosecutors elected, it's in predominantly white, liberal white communities.

00:46:38 Eli Bastiaansen: And even further polarized politics, even along racial lines.

00:46:47 Judith Kaufmann: I am not going to blame them entirely for that or at all. The Republicans have political reasons for wanting to roll back voting rights and wanting to keep the current criminal justice system wanting to keep property rights the way they are. You can go down the list. I don't think it helped in changing minds or hearts.

00:47:29 Eli Bastiaansen: Do you think there was a,

00:47:32 Judith Kaufmann: And it would be interesting in what you're doing and what the school's doing. I'm a white person, so it would be more interesting to see what the black community thinks Black Lives Matter did or did not accomplish.

00:47:53 Eli Bastiaansen: And I think we're trying to get a full range of perspectives and reactions and approaches in order to create a more comprehensive database. Is there anything else that you would like to add and even maybe discuss the almost generational aspects of race relations and how this has sort of evolved through your lifetime? Sorry, I know that's a very big question.

00:48:27 Judith Kaufmann: I mean, we don't have kids, I have to say, we probably should have but haven't talked with our nieces who are all on Georgia's side of the family or their adult kids directly about, I think we had some conversations right around the time of Black Lives Matter, and I think there was some hope for change. They had different perspectives even earlier than George and I did not surprisingly, and they've probably had, I know they've had different experiences, but I'm not really able, again, because I do live in a predominantly white world to make those kinds of comparisons. I think, I mean I watch you and your brother, and clearly you are much more sensitive to that racial dynamic in this country. But I don't know how widespread that is, how widespread it was in your high school in Colorado Springs, or how you found it at Luke, at Swarthmore, and you now it's Sewanee.

00:50:17 Eli Bastiaansen: Well, thank you again so much for taking the time and for contributing to this project. I'm very grateful for just your opinion and insight that you're able to bring. So thank you.

00:50:27 Judith Kaufmann: Thank you.