Race and Religion Among the Chosen People of Crown Heights

Chapter 4: White Skin, Black Hats, and Other Signs of Jews

4 White Skin, Black Hats, and Other Signs of Jews One of the first things I noticed when I moved to Crown Heights were the gazes and glances that often followed me as I walked down Eastern Parkway and other busy blocks. Like many New Yorkers, Crown Heights residents are avid people-watchers. The streets of the neighborhood are shot through with lines of sight—with looks that carve up social space—as Blacks and Jews check each other out, looking for anyone who doesn’t fit in, does something unexpected, or somehow catches their eye. Of course, as a White secular Jew who often wore a yarmulke and other signs of Jewishness, but never grew a beard or looked the part of a Hasid, I was a textbook case of “doesn’t fit in.” And to some extent, I’m sure, my sense of being followed by the prying eyes of my neighbors was a projection of my own anxiety about doing ethnographic research. Yet I gradually realized that furtive glances and brazen stares like those I encountered on the streets of Crown Heights play a significant role in the everyday lives of many neighborhood residents. In a neighborhood where Blacks and Jews live segregated lives on integrated blocks, Crown Heights residents spend much of their time surrounded by oddly intimate strangers. This combination of proximity and anonymity is a defining feature of urban life, but it takes on added significance in Crown Heights, where a history of conflict has left many area residents somewhat wary of their neighbors. Crown Heights residents keep an eye on each other from across a politically charged divide—wondering about each other’s lives, trying to make sense of each other’s actions, and looking for clues to the identities of strangers. 161 This chapter will explore the visual (and other) signs that catch the eyes and imaginations of Crown Heights residents as they walk the streets of their neighborhood. How, I will ask, do Blacks and Jews experience and interpret their neighbors’ identities on an everyday basis? How, above all, do they try to tell—and understand—a Jew when they see one? My analysis will show how the streets of Crown Heights are cross-cut by intersecting axes of visible difference.1 While the previous chapters have often drawn relatively clear distinctions between “racial” and “religious” perceptions of difference, this chapter will survey a more complex terrain. Blacks and Jews on the streets of Crown Heights do not look solely for visual signs of race or religion. Their gazes tend to flit back and forth between phenotype and fashion, hats and skin, noses and necklaces, hairstyles and textures, dreadlocks and beards. Race and religion mix and mingle on the surface of the body, often intersecting in unpredictable ways. A visual sign like a woman’s dreadlocks may (or may not) mark a complex combination of racial Blackness, Caribbean descent, and Rastafarian beliefs. A man’s black hat and beard may (or may not) mark the Whiteness beneath. In Crown Heights, as elsewhere, most Jews are White and most Blacks are Gentiles. But they don’t always look the parts they are playing, or play the parts their neighbors expect of them. Men and women, for example, perform Blackness and Jewishness in dramatically different ways. And Black Jews perform both Blackness and Jewishness in ways that confuse most everyone else. Taken together, signs of race and religion define complex perceptions—and misperceptions—of difference. Moreover, Blacks and Jews often articulate different views of the relationship between these external signs and the inner selves they are thought to mark. Although Black Crown Heights residents often identify Hasidim by their distinctive clothes—speaking, as we will see, of “the people in the long black coats”—many doubt whether such ephemeral signs can truly alter the racial Whiteness beneath. One African American community leader expressed this common sentiment when he told me that racism is more debilitating than antisemitism because Jews, unlike Blacks, can always escape prejudice by changing their appearance: “A Jewish guy can take off his yarmulke, cut his side-burns, change his last name, and now he’s White! A Black person—I can’t take off my yarmulke, I can’t take 162 CHAPTER 4 off the color of my skin, can’t cut my side-burns, can’t change my last name—I...