I spent my formative years in South Carolina. It was a simpler time. Everyone around me was Christian, and they were all either black or white. Everyone was a red-blooded American.
As a Jew with dark features and olive skin, whose parents spoke foreign languages and regarded popular culture with suspicion (blue jeans were considered frivolous, so they sent me to school in putty-colored Dickies) I didn’t fit neatly into a social category. As more than one person commented to me, “You ain’t regular white.”
No, I sure wasn’t. But I also didn’t really think about it. This was decades before the notion of intersectionality permeated every aspect of life, so I wasn’t conscious of identity as a thing; I just knew that, wherever I went, and whoever I was around, I was considered “weird.”
That’s not to say that the kids at school were mean to me. They weren’t. I wasn’t bullied or belittled. I was just there; more or less accepted, but never quite belonging.
My experience may have been amplified by social awkwardness, ethnic ambiguity, and the cultural incongruity of my upbringing, but the intervening years have given me reason to suspect that my feelings of dissociation were far from unique. It seems that many people (perhaps all people) sometimes feel almost-but-not-quite-like everyone else.
For me, the sense of disconnection persisted, regardless of context. Jewish people are often accused of clannishness and insularity. That was not my experience. In public school, I was always the only Jew in my class. My interactions with other Jewish people were limited to the year or so leading up to my bar mitzvah. My parents joined a synagogue we’d never previously set foot in. I met with the rabbi a couple of times, and, for a few months, went to classes on Sunday mornings with a handful of other b’nai mitzvah students. They all knew each other. None of them knew me.
Here too, the other kids weren’t mean to me. They didn’t shun me or mock me; they just ignored me. I hadn’t been raised with them, or in the way they had been, so once again I was the weird one. Even with “my own kind,” I was still on the outside looking in.
The bar mitzvah itself was anticlimactic. A handful of synagogue regulars were there – old people I didn’t know. One of my friends from school – a red-haired, freckle-faced Mormon boy – showed up, which I appreciated. After the service, there was some food, and then it was all over. It didn’t feel much like a spiritual rite of passage.
I didn’t go back to that synagogue, or any other, until many years later.
Outsiders often regard the South as being defined by rigid, unspoken cultural boundaries between black and white. While that’s not entirely incorrect, it is an oversimplification – especially for children. No matter what they might hear at home, kids are genuinely interested in each other. And it is difficult to keep yourself apart from something you’re interested in.
I attended third grade in an almost all-black school; when we would line up for class, the girls behind me would pat the back of my head. I didn’t understand why, and complained to my parents about it. My father awkwardly explained that the girls had probably never had the chance to touch hair that wasn’t like their own.
I was curious about my classmates too. Not their hair, but the way they spoke, joked, and argued in an rapid-fire patois peppered with Gullah Geechee words and phrases. Their tendency to burst into dance or song at random moments. Their absolute, unvarnished candor – tactless at times, but devoid of artifice or self-consciousness. All of this was alien to me, fascinating, and a little awe-inspiring.
I think that curiosity is almost the exact opposite of prejudice. To be intrigued by the ways in which another person is different from yourself is a beautiful, innocent thing; it’s completely incompatible with viewing that person as bad or inferior.
In retrospect, it was easier to be in the third-grade role of a stranger graciously welcomed to a strange land than the part I found myself playing during subsequent years. In a more racially integrated school (at that time, there was a quota system: 60% white, 40% black), I was still very different, but (aside from the Dickies and other questionable fashion choices made by my parents) less obviously so. Among kids who looked more like me, I was neither insider nor outcast, but something occupying the space between.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the most salient memories I have of experiencing grace and acceptance from other kids during my childhood do not involve those most similar to me – the white boys, but those most dissimilar – the black girls. Like Terrie, who valiantly ran over and peeled a pack of second-grade boys off me, after I foolishly threw a stick at them for taking over my sandbox. Or Jamila, who more than once took it upon herself to patiently smooth and sort the mass of crumpled papers that erupted from my backpack and spilled out of my three-ring binder when I sat down next to her in class.
It’s funny what memories linger, decades later. Kids by nature aren’t malicious, but they also aren’t altruistic. I don’t remember ever showing that kind of compassion to anyone else. Maybe I did and forgot about it, or maybe it never occurred to me to do it.
If I have a point to these reminiscences, it’s this: ethnicity and religion can form the framework for a sense of community – and, for most of human history, they have. But ultimately what brings people together as individuals, what lets them feel seen and cared for, has nothing to do with beliefs or skin color. It is the helping hand, the understanding smile, the kind word.
As children, we watch movies and read books with clearly defined characters, and we expect ourselves to be like them. But more often than not, we are neither heroes nor villains; not a pattern of neatly checked boxes on a form, but scribbled notes in the margins of a story that never seemed intended to include us.
Looking back on my childhood, it wasn’t anyone’s fault that I didn’t fit in. It’s just the way it was. I didn’t know how to reach out for connection, and neither did my peers. We were just kids. Now that we’re all grown up though, I wonder what it would be like if we did things differently.