During probably my second year living and teaching in the South, I explained to my African American GED students that I had not celebrated Halloween as a child because I was Jewish. One of my students said that she should have realized this, and when I asked why, she eyed me thoughtfully and said it was because I looked like the girl in the attic. The girl in the attic? You know. The one Hitler was trying to kill. Anne Frank.

Oh.

At about the same time, at my college teaching job, I realized that I had a problem. I had two blonde male students in the same class, and for the life of me I could not tell them apart. They looked the same to me. A little part of me felt slightly proud of this (I'm so not racist that white males all look the same to me!), but it also led me to realize the degree to which the people around me in the South don't look like the people I grew up with. It also seemed, according to my GED student, that I don't look like the people around me. So I had to think--do I really look white? And what does it really mean when people use that cliched racist phrase, They all look the same to me?

This wasn't the first time I'd thought about it. I had the somewhat unusual experience of growing up in a fairly insular ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in New York, where literally just about every person that I knew to talk to was of Eastern European Jewish descent. When I say every person, I can think of four people I knew growing up who were non-Jews. I took it for granted that we all looked white; my parents told me that on forms I should write "Jewish" instead of "white," but that really just meant to me that I was saying I wasn't gentile. I took it for granted that both Jews and gentiles could be white. In fact, I was very puzzled by Holocaust stories (of which we read many) in which Jews with dark hair dyed it so they could "pass" as gentile. I got that people at the time of the Holocaust believed that Jews didn't have blonde hair, but I knew Jews who I considered blonde. As a kid, I came to the conclusion that something about America had made Jews capable of having blonde hair (what that something was I wasn't sure. A chemical in the water, maybe?)

It wasn't until I got into grad school that I met an adult who was truly blonde, with the kind of pale blonde hair that I had formerly associated with babies and toddlers (since this is a hair color that, like blue eyes, Jews of Eastern European descent tend to outgrow). It took me a long time to understand that that color is what most Americans are talking about when they use the word "blonde." Hair that I characterized as "blonde" as a kid was what most people would consider "dirty blonde" or light brown.

Then I moved South, and discovered that not only did I have a hard time telling blonde students apart, but I can tell when someone I meet in passing is a Jew of Eastern European descent. It's not that there's some kind of defining feature I can point to--it's just that they look familiar, like someone I could have known growing up. As far as I know, I've never been wrong in this assessment.

When I really sat down and thought about these facts about myself, I came to two conclusions. One, that Eastern European Jews do look identifiably different than the people who were considered "white" in the 1930s and 40s. That was why it was hard for Jews during WWII to "pass," even if they were just walking across town. (This certainly makes sense, when you think about how long the Jewish gene pool had been relatively isolated). And two, that not being able to tell people of certain groups apart doesn't necessarily stem from being racist, which was what I had always assumed. It stems from residential and social segregation, even if that segregation is totally self-imposed (as it was for the community where I grew up).  If everyone you know shares certain features, then the lack of those features, or the presence of others, is what you really see when you meet someone who looks different. And if you never really get to know anyone who has those different features, they continue to be so marked for you that they're what you see first, last, and always. It's only when you get to know someone that you start to see past the lack of what's familiar to individual differences. Maybe saying they all look the same to me is considered racist because it registers an intent not to get to know individuals in the other group? Or a belief that there are no individuals in the other group, that they're all essentially the same? That last one certainly fits in with the idea of stereotyping, i.e., oh, all X do Y. All X are the same. And stereotypes are also easier to believe if you don't know people who belong to the stereotyped group personally.

All of this, especially in conjunction with Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent piece and ProPublica's ongoing investigation into present day racial segregation, makes me wonder about how people learn to visually identify races, or to see difference. (It's interesting to me that the central meaning of "discrimination" used to be the ability to tell one thing from another. Isn't that really, perhaps, the basis of racism? The ability to see the physical differences your society has somehow agreed are important?) So Eastern European Jews don't look white, but nowadays in America most people can't tell the difference. (It's instructive here to note that when F. Glenn Cross, a former Ku Klux Klan member, went out intending to shoot Jews in April, he killed 3 non-Jews by mistake. He thinks Jews are different enough to hate them, presumably, but he can't tell who they are.) How did that happen? How did Americans stop being able to recognize Jewish features as belonging to Jews?

Well, I think what happened, broadly speaking, was the GI Bill. Jews moved in next door, at least in the suburbs in the North. They became middle-class, which meant that a lot of the dress and language and food that had distinguished them before dropped away (and in the case of many Jews moving to the suburbs, they were careful that those things should drop away, just like any immigrant trying to assimilate). And maybe you (you, the non-Jewish homeowner) were not crazy about this, and maybe you even tried to stop it, but you failed and there they were. Unless you told them not to, your kids played with their kids. They sat next to them in school. They went with them to college. And to your kids, eventually, the physical features that distinguished them as a group became unmarked--meaning that they still existed, but weren't seen as particularly important, either to your kids or to society at large. They stopped constituting a group boundary. And then your children met Jews often enough, at work or in their social lives, so that they didn't always know they were Jews when they met them. And sometimes Jews and non-Jews intermarried, and Jewish features appeared on children who might or might not have considered themselves Jewish, might or might not have had Jewish last names. And eventually your kids and their kids forgot how Jews looked, because they didn't encounter them as a separate group, and were never taught to identify them by sight. And then Jews were white. Ethnic, perhaps, sometimes, in some ways. But white.

It's notable that while this happened to Jews in America, it happened for them almost nowhere else. Masha Gessen, a lesbian Jewish journalist who recently moved from Russia to America because of anti-LGBT legislation on the part of the Russian government, wrote for the NY Times in January about going from being a physically identifiable minority in Russia to a part of the white majority in America. The BBC recently reported on the rise of Jewish immigration from France to Israel, due to increasing anti-Semitism. The point I'm trying to make by saying this is that American Jews didn't become white because they just "looked" white. In fact, they didn't--don't. They became white because the same laws that prevented African Americans from assimilating to the majority allowed them to do so. Jews became middle class because of the GI Bill, they entered "white" social life on some level, and their features (my features, our features) became just part of a pool of characteristics that people recognized as possible for white Americans.  But African Americans, in all the ways detailed here, in Coates' piece on reparations, and in the ProPublica investigations, were purposely kept from making it through that process. It was and is segregation that continues to keep black and white Americans from becoming familiar enough to each other not to mark their differences--to see each other mostly as individuals rather than groups. There's nothing "natural" about any of this (if there was, wouldn't it happen by itself? Without all the government intervention that's taken place?) It's just social engineering on a grand scale. And if social engineering did it, we should be able to undo it. If there was the political will to make that happen,or if enough people remembered that that's what it was, maybe we could.