Community Essay : ‘Perhaps None of Us Really Wants to See’

There has been much talk lately about illegal immigration. Various plans have been proposed that would eliminate the incentives for coming to this country illegally: discontinue medical care for immigrants without paperwork, amend the Constitution so that children born in this country do not automatically become citizens. We have also heard, to a lesser extent, proposals that attack the problem from other fronts--by cracking down harder on employers of undocumented workers or using the armed forces to enforce our borders.

Much of the language of these discussions is xenophobic, if not racist.

But I was not thinking of immigration, xenophobia, or racism when I drove to San Diego recently. I was vacationing from the policy questions raised at my regular job, the Wilstein Institute for Jewish Policy Studies and thinking of my other work. I drove to San Diego from Los Angeles in pursuit of an acting job.

I turned on a talk radio station at one point to pass the time. The subject: illegal immigration. So hateful were the messages that I had to change stations and settle for sports talk.

I am relatively new to Southern California. I had never driven to San Diego before. It was a shock for me to see signs announcing that pedestrians might be crossing the highway. Barely had the words of that sign registered, when I saw a pictorial image, communicating the same idea. It was a yellow sign with black figures: a mother, leaning forward, pulling a pig-tailed daughter behind her, running across the road. Chills went up my spine. I said out loud, alone in the car, rather stupidly: “Do people know about this?” I looked at the passengers in the other cars, to see if I could detect their surprise. But, as far as I could tell, their world had not slowed to a strange, molasses pace, as mine had.

I recalled a news story about a man who was killed trying to cross the highway, so that he could enter the United States unimpeded. Seeing these road signs, I realized that his case could not be unique.

The pictorial image of mother and daughter would not leave me. I thought of the first adult novel I ever read, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and the slave Eliza running across the ice to freedom.

I was called back to San Diego for another audition. This time, I anticipated the sign. It turns out, my vision had been quite selective. The sign was of two adults and a child. Leading the mother and daughter that I remembered, was a father, his head down in concentration, rather than looking out in the direction he was running.

As a Jew whose family survived the Holocaust by immigrating to various countries, legally and illegally, I felt complete empathy for the human picture before me. In fact, I read myself--a single woman--so completely into the picture that I erased the male figure entirely.

I was astounded at so gross an error. Perhaps my mistake helps to explain how some miss these signs altogether and how we all miss things all the time.

Shortly after the place where the signs are posted, a government official of some kind stopped traffic at the “weighing station.” He waved most cars on, checking a few that held Latino passengers. No one slowed down to look as those cars were checked. Perhaps this is because routine checks according to one’s race are no longer unexpected, perhaps it is because none of us really wants to see.