When we watched Gentleman's Agreement in class, I was reminded of a modern-day "equivalent": white women wearing hijabs in order to try to experience the world as a Muslim woman. But a major difference in how they experienced the world — versus how many Muslim women experience the world — came from their perceived race/color. I read an account describing an experiment like this a few years ago, and I remember the woman who'd attempted to live as a Muslim woman describing how people treated her differently — more respectfully — when they couldn't see the color of her skin, compared to when they could. In section, we talked about how the concept of whiteness in the 19th century was, of course, different than the concept of whiteness today: then, only people from a certain part of Europe and of a certain class could be, from some perspectives, truly considered "white", with whiteness being the dominant, "superior" class in a hierarchy of racial power and oppression. We talked about whether Jewish people today can be considered people of color, considering that Jews are an ethnoreligious group while reaching conclusions about context and perception can play large roles in one's race.
In the documentary Little White Lies, the reactions of the people around Lacey to her physical features and, later, her realized identity play a huge role in her struggle to come to terms with her own identity, her place in the Black and Jewish communities, and the impact her mother's secrecy has had on her relationships with the people around her. As a kid, she felt uncomfortable in her own skin in her majority-white community, wishing for lighter skin and wondering why the people around her pressed her, time and time again, for reasons she looked the way she did when both her parents were white. When she realized that she was a Black, Jewish woman and tried to speak about this to the people who'd surrounded her in her childhood, she was often met with a color-blind approach: after Lacey struggled to tell her father that she now identified as a Black woman, she felt dismissed by his response that it was no surprise because of the people she surrounded herself with, the music she listened to, and so on. Even at Rodney's funeral, relatives and family friends remained silent on her connection to Rodney, demonstrating how difficult it can be to discuss race, especially in the context of Lacey's mother's infidelity. When the people around her didn't acknowledge her Black identity and color, Lacey didn't feel seen. Lacey's experiences as a "white" person, Jewish person, and Black person show how discrepancies in one's perception of themselves and their community's can create conflict in one's identity, while raising questions about how much of one's identity is determined by one's biology, life experiences, and interactions with the people and society around them.
In the documentary Little White Lies, the reactions of the people around Lacey to her physical features and, later, her realized identity play a huge role in her struggle to come to terms with her own identity, her place in the Black and Jewish communities, and the impact her mother's secrecy has had on her relationships with the people around her. As a kid, she felt uncomfortable in her own skin in her majority-white community, wishing for lighter skin and wondering why the people around her pressed her, time and time again, for reasons she looked the way she did when both her parents were white. When she realized that she was a Black, Jewish woman and tried to speak about this to the people who'd surrounded her in her childhood, she was often met with a color-blind approach: after Lacey struggled to tell her father that she now identified as a Black woman, she felt dismissed by his response that it was no surprise because of the people she surrounded herself with, the music she listened to, and so on. Even at Rodney's funeral, relatives and family friends remained silent on her connection to Rodney, demonstrating how difficult it can be to discuss race, especially in the context of Lacey's mother's infidelity. When the people around her didn't acknowledge her Black identity and color, Lacey didn't feel seen. Lacey's experiences as a "white" person, Jewish person, and Black person show how discrepancies in one's perception of themselves and their community's can create conflict in one's identity, while raising questions about how much of one's identity is determined by one's biology, life experiences, and interactions with the people and society around them.