I saw my first Klansman in person last fall. We were standing a stone's throw apart at a rally to take down the Stars and Bars-bedecked state flag on the University of Mississippi campus in Oxford, a protest organized by the on-campus chapter of the NAACP.
Black students stood in a tight circle at the center of scores of university supporters chanting "Take down the flag." The Klansmen hung back by the periphery, holding homemade hate signs identifying themselves and waving Confederate flags.
Looking at this man, dressed in jeans and a worn tee shirt, not the fearsome Birth of a Nation garb I'd expected, I saw the poor gamblers who play the slots at casinos in Tunica, a Mississippi River town. With his shabby clothing and cheap cigarettes, he appeared pathetic.
Looking at me, he saw a white woman.
We were both wrong. He's a terrorist and I'm a Jew.
My skin is as pale as that of a great-great-granddaughter of the Confederacy, but the pallor is Ashkenazic, inherited from generations of East European ancestors.
In the binary world of race in Mississippi, and across the country, I read as "white." I check off boxes marked Caucasian on health forms in doctor's offices.
I can walk around expensive department stores without being tailed by security. I can take a drive with my son assuming that he won't be shot down at a traffic stop while I try to collect evidence by live streaming the aftermath of his murder. I can drive on the back roads of the small towns here without fear that I'll stand out as "other."
But am I white--or am I passing?
For many Americans, Jews are reviled as a race apart. We might move through the world under the cover of whiteness, but a quick look at some of the recent tweets of Trump supporters is a sobering reminder of just how tenuous our welcome is. How quickly our secure lives would change if our identities were as readily recognizable as those of black people.
It's especially easy to go undercover in Mississippi. The signifiers of Judaism in the North--for example my middle name, Hurwitz, on my university email signature--ring no bells here. I could wear a necklace with a chai and a Star of David, and the semaphore would signal nothing to the vast majority of people I encounter each day.
Even the bottles of Manischewitz wine I've spotted on liquor store shelves across the state--Southerners love syrupy-sweet drinks--sit incognito next to the Kendall Jackson. When I once pointed out the Hebrew on the label, the Star of David, and the word kosher to a store clerk, she was politely befuddled.
"I think the Confederate flag belongs on no college campus" and "I believe the gunning down of blacks by police is criminal" are important public statements.
Adding "As a Jew" to the start of those sentences increases their power. Who better to speak out against government-sanctioned racism than the people whose forebears were rounded up and systematically killed by state actors?
To do this, though, would require change and some relinquishing of white camo. It may make me feel less safe to identify myself more publicly as a Jew, but what better time than now? And what better place than America?