The years 1988 to 1993 were a strange time to be an undergraduate at UC-Berkeley. We protested when a minority faculty member didn't get tenure. We objected when the football team played in the Copper Bowl in Arizona, a state that didn't recognize MLK's birthday as a holiday. A professor tried to get people to drop his crowded philosophy class by reminding students that they would be studying only dead white males (Descartes through Kant).

At the same time, the Loma Prieta earthquake, the Oakland hills fire, a hostage-taking and shooting at a popular Berkeley bar and the unsolved stabbing of a Filipina student on campus lent a dark backdrop to our increasingly ordered understanding of racial and social injustice -- throwing everyone a little off balance and constantly reminding us of our own mortality.

I silently congratulated myself when I was arrested after dramatically protesting the Rodney King verdict. Yet I went to Italy for my junior year, not Nicaragua; I studied Italian, art and literature. I wasn't following any strict PC party line. I was also hanging out with a group of friends that resembled a haphazardly assembled rainbow coalition. At Berkeley, back in the days of affirmative action, diversity wasn't just a buzzword -- I met people of every conceivable origin. Half Chinese/half Mexican and half Russian/half Nigerian were two of the more interesting combinations. Whites either were or seemed like a minority in the dorms.

It was also a time of serious racial tension. Identity -- that catch-all term for the non-individual selves we inherited at birth -- became the lightning rod for much of our intellectual and social strife. White males were often put on the defensive in class, just for being born part of the "patriarchal hegemony." People of mixed race were often asked, "How do you identify? What do you consider yourself?" Light-skinned blacks wore T-shirts emblazoned "It's a black thang -- You wouldn't understand" in order to clear up any confusion.

In my sophomore year, I was eager to spend my free time on some kind of meaningful extracurricular activity. Many people in my group of friends worked for Smell This, a new student-run art-and-literature magazine for and about women of color. I asked my acquaintance Rosa Flanagan (half Mexican/half Irish), who worked with the mag, if you had to be "of color" to join. She said, "No, just down with the cause."

I felt I was pretty down with the cause, which in my mind was a stew of notions about racial and sexual equality. Academically, socially and politically I felt immersed in issues of race. I had also always felt somewhat "of color" and ethnic myself, especially as a short, dark Jewish girl at my WASPy high school. In addition, I was into both art and literature -- a perfect fit, I thought.

So I joined, along with my friend Erika, who is African-American. At first it was fun and interesting. Erika and I were on the art staff. Once a week, we'd meet, look at students' submissions and decide what was good enough to make it in. After several meetings, however, I started to feel a little uncomfortable.

For one thing, looking around me at the meeting, I didn't see any other white women who were just "down with the cause." Everyone was (at least half) "of color." In addition, the primary discussions were less about collective sexual and racial inequality and more about how each of us had been victimized and oppressed, disrespected and discriminated against.

I don't know why it surprised me, but my experiences didn't correspond with the rest of the group. To say I felt victimized and oppressed would have been untrue. But I also tremendously admired the magazine's founders and frankly envied their zeal and conviction.

It was already halfway through the semester when I began to feel like I really might not belong. I knew I would soon be leaving for my year abroad, so I figured I'd work for Smell This until I left. In the meantime, I was an active contributor. I tended bar at fund-raising parties and recruited works from (woman-of-color) artists in my drawing classes. I sometimes wondered if Rosa Flanagan had been wrong about the "just down with the cause" thing, but I wasn't sure. No one had ever questioned my presence at the meetings, so I had no reason to think white women were officially excluded.

In mid-March, Erika and I went to the usual Wednesday night meeting. This time, there was something in particular the managing editor wanted to discuss. A group of Jewish women had come to the heads of Smell This and asked to be involved. The question for us, then, was whether or not to admit Jewish women.

This unleashed a barrage of heated polemics from all sides of the room. One very serious Chicana woman thought we should definitely not admit Jewish women, as it would make her Palestinian friend very uncomfortable -- should this friend ever decide to join. She also pointed out that a slumlord in her neighborhood was Jewish and he was a terrible man.

An African-American woman across the room strongly disagreed. Her Jewish friends were among the most "ethnic" she knew, she reasoned. They went to synagogue, followed strange rituals and certainly did not identify as white. "Not to mention oppression, " she went on. "Don't tell me Jews haven't been oppressed."

"But what about Irish-Americans," someone else piped in. "Are we going to admit them because they were once oppressed? I don't think oppression is the issue."

"And some Jewish women are darker than you are," someone else yelped.

"That's not the point. I don't think we can decide strictly based on color."

"That's right, 'cause otherwise you wouldn't be here, girlfriend." And on it went.

Erika and I turned to each other in wide-eyed silence. It was suddenly clear to us that something wasn't right. No one turned to me and asked what I thought about the Jewish issue. We realized they had no idea what I was.

Erika and I had been good friends since eighth grade, when we had both felt like something "other" next to the volleyball-playing preppies at our school. I had painstakingly unbraided the extensions from her hair. We had joked about the fact that her light-skinned black/Native American grandmother looked a lot like my olive-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish grandmother -- were we actually related, way back on the family tree? I also knew, of course, that Erika had had to deal with racism in a way I never would, and that in truth we were not regarded as equally different from the mainstream.

That week I had a nightmare that I was uncovered by an enemy as a double agent and thrown over a cliff. I didn't need Jung to interpret that one. At the end of the next meeting I approached the managing editor. "Um, I'm not sure what you guys think I am," I started. "But I'm Jewish. And that's it."

"Oh," she said. She was almost at a loss for words. "Really. I'm really surprised."

At the beginning of the next meeting, she announced to the art staff, "It has come to our attention that Emily ..." she looked over in my direction, "is Jewish."

All eyes were on me. I smiled weakly. After a beat of silence, the invectives started flying. The serious Chicana, whose mother had worked a lifetime as a maid so her daughter might go to Berkeley, turned to me: "I feel betrayed. All this time I thought you were Chicana. I looked over to you when we were talking about things because I thought you understood. I can't believe this."

"Yeah, we all thought you were Latina," some others chimed in.

I was taken aback. I had never pretended to be anything I wasn't. I didn't even speak Spanish, and my last name is Miller, for crying out loud. Without knowing it, I had been passing. With my curly black hair and brown eyes, I had been passing as a woman of color in Berkeley's strange world of identity politics.

I decided not to attend the next couple of meetings. Meanwhile, people I hardly knew would approach me on campus to tell me how I'd really gotten those Smell This girls in a fix. I heard that the core staff was having special meetings to talk about the "Emily situation." On the one hand, they appreciated that I had been an active member of the staff; on the other hand, some felt that I had been disingenuous. I think they were also embarrassed; they had looked at me and all-too-easily mistaken me for being "of color," throwing their whole mandate into question.

I had also set a bad precedent. If they let me stay, they would have to open the floodgates to every odd member of the master race, the theory went. And soon enough Smell This would be overtaken by liberal white feminists. I decided to make things easier for them by resigning.

My white male friends at school were appalled by what happened, calling the women reverse racists. But I empathized with their need to have their own voice on campus, and I didn't feel too much bitterness toward them. After all, I, too, had felt that I didn't quite belong there.

Nonetheless, it was strange for me to momentarily be caught in the middle of the shifting realities of an unanswerable question: What makes someone "of color" anyway? Skin color is hardly foolproof. Verbal arm-wrestling over whose holocaust was bigger is an ugly -- not to mention unreliable -- way to determine such a thing. When we look at the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, I think many of us are struck by how "like us" they look. More specifically, they look white. If they were in America, they would assimilate into the dominant culture as soon as their language skills were up to par -- or at least by the next generation. But in Europe, centuries pass with the same ethnic hatreds still in place. Interestingly, in Europe, the fulcrum of oppression is not what someone looks like, but what someone is.

But in America, color counts. Color, not religion, is what people take you for, what you can't get away with pretending you're not. Passing is the exception; it's what happens out on the border of identity, where what you look like and what you are might not correspond. As the melting pot continues to simmer and the world starts looking like one big Berkeley campus (circa 1992), it will happily become harder and harder to identify who's what on the basis of looks.

The women of Smell This had taken society's label of "color" and proudly coopted it as their own, ` la Queer Nation. Their only problem was that they still hadn't figured out how to define it themselves. "I know it when I see it," seemed to be their solution, but in my case this proved incorrect. For me, it was a difficult lesson to learn: that to certain hard-liners, a white girl couldn't have anything useful to say about women of color. It was their thang, and I just didn't understand.