I knew going into the SIT Study Abroad program in South Africa last fall that I’d be one of two white undergraduates in a group of less than a dozen students, each of whom came from a different American university. I took no issue with being a minority, rather seeing it as a learning opportunity. I was prepared to be uncomfortable. What I didn’t expect was how my experiences in the program would lead me to deeply question my own identity. And not in a good way.
“Multiculturalism and Human Rights” focused on examining the complex multiple identities that have shaped South Africa and continue to do so. I entered the program with a strong sense of personal identity. I felt that I largely knew who I was. Over the course of almost four months, though, the experiences I had challenged my sense of self. Over time, I almost lost myself entirely.
In early interactions with my African American classmates, they’d express something along the lines of “I’m not normally friends with white people” or “I hate white people and I hate interacting with them.” I believed this attitude had very little to do with me and was more the result of the context in which they lived, and their learned understanding of the history of oppression white colonists had imposed on other races. I took what my classmates said as something with which they’d spent years struggling. Confronting the apartheid system in South Africa brought wounds up that maybe they’d never really dealt with.
When I was fresh to the program, I talked about my Jewish identity, to share my own experiences, just like my classmates were doing. It became clear pretty quickly that the other students didn’t appreciate my talking about my Jewish character, which included attending Jewish middle and high schools, and being the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, at least not without intimately tying it to colonialism. When I asked my fellow students about their largely negative and uniform reactions, they told me that they felt that the way I was talking about my Jewish identity made them feel like I was diminishing their own identities and experiences.
I was shocked. I’d never been in a position in which my expression of being Jewish was seen as a way to tear down others. It was not my intention to make anyone feel less than. In response to the consistent and universal efforts to shut me down, I removed myself. I took my identity and placed it in a box. I stopped letting myself be myself. Over time, I started walking in the world differently. I became ashamed of my own identity and questioned who I was. I became angry at myself, at my classmates, at colonialism, and at the racial divides that seemed so intractable. Mostly at myself, though.
As the war started between Hamas and Israel, I began to feel more and more alone. My Jewish identity was increasingly weaponized in conversations with my classmates and over social media, especially TikTok, as the conflict accelerated. There was no one to turn to convey my emotions. When I tried to talk about my feelings with my classmates, they told me I was being selfish. My Jewish friends back home were too far away for me to reach out to them. I noticed myself losing myself.
It wasn’t until I met up with other South African Jews that I fully realized what was happening. I went to a family friend’s house for Shabbat (Sabbath) dinner and told them about my experiences. We talked about the different South African host families I’d stayed with, who included an elderly couple in a Black township, a large family in a rural village without indoor plumbing, and a Muslim household in Cape Town. Though they each exhibited strong attitudes about different races, all of them welcomed me in whatever ways their culture allowed. They never questioned my Judaism or made me feel as though it was something to hide.
My feelings of isolation had come mostly from my interactions with my classmates rather than the South Africans I’d been living with. The family I was having Shabbat dinner with were shocked and confused. It wasn’t until that moment, seeing my hurt reflected in their faces, that I realized the damage I was doing to myself.
Maybe the comments my classmates made were harmless and constructive. But they deeply stung me. They became my narrative, whether I realized it or not. This is not the way to heal racial divides. Quite the opposite; it leads to one group asserting dominance over another, essentially a repeat of toxic historical cycles. Yet it seems to be the dominant way in which young Americans, whether “woke” or conservative, Black, or white, are interacting with one another, in person, or on social media: my reality is your reality. It’s the only reality that exists.
Sara Moss, who grew up on Potrero Hill until she was eight years old, received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology with a minor in Environmental Policy from the University of Puget Sound last month.
Paul McDonald