Excerpts from NY Times - About Identity

Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself

The “as a” concept is an inherent feature of identities. For a group label like “white men” to qualify as a social identity, there must be times when the people to whom it applies act as members of that group, and are treated as members of that group. We make lives as men and women, asblacks and whites, as teachers and musicians. Yet the very word “identity” points toward the trouble: It comes from the Latin idem, meaning “the same.” Because members of a given identity group have experiences that depend on a host of other social factors, they’re not the same. Being a black lesbian, for instance, isn’t a matter of simply combining African-American, female and homosexual ways of being in the world; identities interact in complex ways.

The literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote, “If I tried to ‘speak as a lesbian,’ wouldn’t I be processing my understanding of myself through media-induced images of what a lesbian is or through my own idealizations of what a lesbian should be?” In the effort to be “real,” she saw something fake. Another prominent theorist, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, thought that the “as a” move was “a distancing from oneself,” whereby the speaker became a self-appointed representative of an abstraction, some generalized perspective, and suppressed the actual multiplicity of her identities. “One is not just one thing,” she observed.

What Is Identity?

Appiah believes we’re in wars of identity because we keep making the same mistake: exaggerating our differences with others and our similarities with our own kind. We think of ourselves as part of monolithic tribes up against other tribes, whereas we each contain multitudes.

Appiah’s project is to point out our most common errors in thinking about five types of identity, all conveniently beginning with the letter “c”: creed, country, color, class and culture.

Among the errors we make: On “c” No. 1, creed, we tend to think of religions as “sets of immutable beliefs” instead of as “mutable practices and communities.” We make religion a noun when it should really be a verb, which gives rise to fundamentalism. When religion is “revealed as an activity, not a thing,” it is easier to accept that “it’s the nature of activities to bring change.”

On country, we create “a forced choice between globalism and patriotism.” We prefer people with simple answers to the question “What are you?”; we disparage and deport those Appiah calls “the confessors of ambivalence.” We often forget that a modern, pluralist, liberal democracy like America is “not a fate but a project.”

On culture, he argues that we should “give up the very idea of Western civilization,” because the notion of a distinct Western essence — “individualistic and democratic and liberty-minded and tolerant and progressive and rational and scientific” — ignores basic facts about the West and everywhere else. But just as people on the left finish clapping at that, he decries the left’s complaints about “cultural appropriation,” because culture is too complex to have a clear chain of title and, he says, because “those who parse these transgressions in terms of ownership have accepted a commercial system that’s alien to the traditions they aim to protect.”