WEEK 2 CRITICAL ANALYSIS

10 GETTING STARTED

2

Identities and Social Locations

Who Am I? Who Are My People?

Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey

Identity formation is the result of a complex interplay among a range of factors: individual decisions and choices, particular life events, community recognition and expectations, societal categorization, classification and socialization, and key national or international incidents. It is an ongoing process that involves several key questions:

Who am I? Who do I want to be? Who do others think I am and want me to be? Who and what do societal and community Institutions, such as schools, religious institu-

tions, the media, and the law, say I am? Where/what /who are my "home" and "community"? Which social groups(s) do I want to affiliate with? Who decides the answers to these questions, and on what basis?

The American Heritage Dictionary (1993) defines identity as

the collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is definitely known or recognizable;

a set of behavioral or personal characteristics by which an individual is recognizable as a member of a group;

These definitions point to the connections between us as individuals and how we are perceived by other people and classified by societal institutions. They also involve a sense of individual agency and choice regarding affiliations with others. Gender, race, ethnicity, class, nationality, sexuality, age, religion, dis/ability, culture, and language are all significant social categories by which people are recognized by others. Indeed, on the basis of these categories alone, others often think they know who we are and how we should behave. Personal deci- sions about our affiliations, culture, and loyalties to specific groups are also shaped by these categories. For example, in communities of color women may struggle over the question of race versus gender. Is race a more important factor than gender in shaping their lives? If a Latina speaks out publicly about sexism within the Latino community, is she betraying her people? This separation of categories tends to set up false dichotomies in which people often feel that they have to choose one aspect of their identity over another. It also presents particular difficulties for mixed-race, bisexual, or transgender people who do not fit neatly into such narrow categories ....

BEING MYSELF: THE MICRO LEVEL

At the micro level, individuals usually feel the most comfortable as themselves. Here one can say, for example, "I am a woman, heterosexual, middle class, African American,

IDENTITIES AND SOCIAL LOCATIONS I 11

Buddhist, with a movement disability; but I am also much more than those categories." At this level we define ourselves and structure our daily activities according to our needs and preferences. At the micro level we can best feel and experience the process of identity formation, which includes naming specific forces and events that shape our identities. At this level we also seem to have more control of the process, although there are always interconnections between events and experiences at this and the other levels.

Critical life events, such as entering kindergarten, losing a parent through death or divorce, or the onset of puberty, may all serve as catalysts for a shift in how we think about ourselves. A five-year-old Vietnamese American child of immigrants may experience the first challenge to her sense of identity when her kindergarten teacher admonishes her to speak only in English. A white, middle-class professional woman who thinks of herself as "a person" and a "competent attorney" may begin to give more weight to the significance of gender if she witnesses younger, less experienced male colleagues in her law office pass- ing her by for promotions. A woman who has been raped who attends her first meeting of a women's campus support group feels the power of connection with other rape survivors and their allies. An eighty-year-old woman, whose partner of fifty years has died, musdace the loss of her lifetime companion, friend, and lover. Such experiences shape each person's ongoing formulation of self, whether or not the process is conscious, deliberate, reflective, or even voluntary.

Identity formation is a lifelong process that includes discovery of the new; recovery of the old, forgotten, or appropriated; and synthesis of the new and old, as illustrated by sev- eral writers in this chapter who reflect on how their sense of identity has developed over the course of their lives. At especially important junctures during the process, individuals mark an identity change in tangible ways. An African American woman may change her name from the anglicized Susan to Aisha, with roots in Islamic and African cultures. A Chinese immigrant woman, on the other hand, may adopt an anglicized name, exchang- ing Nu Lu for Yvonne Lu as part of becoming a U.S. citizen. Another way of marking and effecting a shift in identity is by altering your physical appearances; changing your wardrobe or makeup; cutting your hair very short, wearing it natural rather than permed or pressed, dyeing it purple, or letting the gray show after years of using hair coloring ....

COMMUNITY RECOGNITION, EXPECTATIONS, AND INTERACTIONS: THE MESO LEVEL

It is at meso level-at school, in the workplace, or on the street-that people mrn1t frequently ask "Who are you?" or "Where are you from?" in an attempt to categorize us and determine their relationship to us. Moreover, it is here that people experi- ence the complexities, conflicts, and contradictions of multiple identities, which we consider later.

The single most visible signifier of identity is physical appearance. How we look to oth- ers affects their perceptions, judgements, and treatment of us. Questions such as "Where do you come from?" and questioning behaviors, such as feeling the texture of your hair or asking if you speak a particular language, are commonly used to interrogate people whose physical appearances or behaviors do not match the characteristics designated as belonging to established categories. At root, we are being asked, ''Are you one of us or not?" These questioners usually expect simple and straightforward answers, assuming that everyone will fit existing social categories, which are conceived of as undifferentiated and unambiguous. Among people with disabilities, for example, people wanting to identify each other may expect to hear details of another's disability rather than fact that the person being questioned also identifies equally strongly as, say, a woman who is white, working class, and bisexual.

12 I GETTING STARTED

Community, like home, may be geographic and emotional, or both, and provides a way for people to express group affiliations. "Where are you from?" is a commonplace ques- tion in the United States among strangers, a way to break the ice and start a conversation, expecting answers like "I'm from Tallahassee, Florida," "I'm from the Bronx." Community might also be an organized group like Alcoholics Anonymous, a religious group, or a political organization like the African American civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Community may be some- thing much more abstract, as in "the women's community" or "the queer community," where there is presumed to be an identifiable group. Increasingly these communities may be virtual as the Internet links people worldwide. In these examples there is an assumption of shared values, interests, culture, or language sometimes thought of as essential qualities that define group membership and belonging. This can lead to essentialism, where com- plex identities get reduced to specific qualities deemed to be essential for membership of a particular group: being Muslim or gay, for example.

At the community level, individual identities and needs meet group standards, expecta- tions, obligations, responsibilities, and demands. You compare yourself with others and are subtly compared. Others size up your clothing, accent, personal style, and knowledge of the group's history and culture. You may be challenged directly, "You say you're Latina. How come you don't speak Spanish?" "You say you're working class. What are you doing in a professional job?" These experiences may both affirm our identities and create or highlight inconsistencies and contradictions in who we believe we are, how we are viewed by others, our role and status in the community, and our sense of belonging ....

SOCIAL CATEGORIES, CLASSIFICATIONS, AND STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY: MACRO AND GLOBAL LEVELS

Classifying and labelling human beings, often according to real or assumed physical, bio- logical, or genetic differences, is a way to distinguish who is included and who is excluded from a group, to ascribe particular characteristics, to prescribe social roles, and to assign status, power, and privilege. People are to know their places. Thus social categories such as gender, race, and class are used to establish and maintain a particular kind of social order. The classifications and their specific features, meanings, and significance are socially constructed through history, politics, and culture. The specific meanings and significance were often imputed to justify the conquest, colonization, domination, and exploitation of entire groups of people, and although the specifics may have changed over time, this system of categorizing and classifying remains intact. For example, Native American people were described as brutal, uncivilized, and ungovernable savages in the writings of early colonizers on this continent. This justified the near-genocide of Native Americans by white settlers, public officials, and the U.S. military, as well as the breaking of treaties between the U.S. government and Native American tribes. Today, Native Americans are no longer called savages but are often thought of as a vanishing species, or a nonexistent people already wiped out, thereby rationalizing their neglect by the dominant culture and erasing their long-standing and continuing resistance ....

These social categories are the foundation of the structural inequalities present in our society. Those in dominant positions are deemed superior and legitimate and those relegated-whether explicitly or implicitly-to subordinate positions are deemed inferior and illegitimate. Of course, individuals are not simply in dominant or subor- dinate positions. A college-educated, Arab American heterosexual man has privilege in terms of gender, class, and sexuality, but is considered subordinate in terms of race

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and culture. Depending on context, these aspects of his identity will contribute to his experience of privilege or disadvantage. Self-awareness involves recognizing and understanding the significance of our identities. For white people descended from European immigrants to this country, the advantages of being white are not always fully recognized or acknowledged .... As a result, white people in the United States tend to think of all identities as equal: "I'm Italian American, you're Polish American. I'm Irish American, you're African American." This assumed equivalence ignores the very big differences between an individualist symbolic identity and a socially enforced and imposed racial identity. Note that all Europeans were not considered equal when they immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Germans, English, Scots, Irish, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian Jewish people, for, example, were differentiated in a hierarchy based on skin color, culture, language, and their histories in Europe ....

MAINTAINING SYSTEMS OF STRUCTURAL INEQUALITY

Maintaining systems of inequality requires ongoing objectification and dehumanization of subordinated peoples. Appropriating their identities is a particularly effective method of doing this, for it defines who the subordinated group/person is or ought to be. This happens in several ways:

Using the values, characteristics, features of the dominant group as the supposedly neu- tral standard against which all others should be evaluated. For example, men of a particular racial/ethnic group are generally physically larger and stronger than women of that group. Many of the clinical trials for new pharmaceutical drugs have been conducted using men's bodies and activities as the standard. The results, however, have been applied equally to both men and women. Women are often prescribed the same dosage of a medication as men are even though their physical makeup is not the same. Thus women, as a distinct group, do not exist in this research.

Using terms that distinguish the subordinate from the dominant group. Terms such as "non-white" and "minority" connote a relationship to another group, white in the former case and majority in the later. A non-white person is the negative of the white person; a minority person is less than a majority person. Neither has an identity on her or his own terms.

Stereotyping. Stereotyping involves making a simple generalization about a group and claiming that all members of the group conform to it. Stereotypes are behavioural and psy- chological attributes; they are commonly held beliefs about groups rather than individual beliefs about individuals; and they persist in spite of contradictory evidence. Lesbians hate men. Latinas are dominated by macho Latinos. Women with physical disabilities are asexual. Fat women are good-humored but not healthy. As philosopher Judith Andre (1988) asserted, ''A 'stereotype' is pejorative; there is always something objectionable in the beliefs and images to which the word refers."

Exoticizing and romanticizing. These two forms of appropriation are particularly insidious because on the surface there is an appearance of appreciation. For example, Asian American women may be described as personifying the "mysterious Orient", Native American women as "earth mothers" and the epitome of spirituality, and Black women as perpetual towers of strength.

In all three cases, seemingly positive traits and cultural practices are identified and exalted. This "positive" stereotyping prevents people from seeing the truth and complexity of who these women are.

14 I GETTING STARTED

Another aspect of romanticization may be cultural appropriation, where, for example, white people wear nose studs or dreadlocks, have their hands decorated with henna, or claim to have been Native American in a former life. Fashion is always seeking something new. Typically, consumers do not think too much about the culture or history of the people who created the styles that are now commodified and sold in the global market place. Thus, objects and styles are lifted out of their original cultural context and become "cool stuff" for other people to buy ....

Given the significance of identity appropriation as an aspect of oppression, it is not surprising that many liberation struggles have included projects and efforts aimed at changing identities and taking control of the process of positive identity formation and representation. Oppressed people often use the same terminology to name themselves as the dominant group uses to label them. One crucial aspect of liberation struggles is to get rid of pejorative labels and use names that express, in their own terms, who they are in all their humanity. Thus, groups may change the name they use to refer to themselves to fit their evolving consciousness. As with individual identity, naming ourselves collectively is an important act of empowerment. One example of this is the evolution of the names African Americans have used to identify themselves, moving from Colored to Negro to Black to Afro-American, and African American. Similarly, Chinese Americans gradually rejected the derogatory label "Chink" preferring to be called Orientals and now Chinese Ameri~ans or Asian Americans. These terms are used unevenly, perhaps according to the age and political orientation of the person or the geographic region, where one usage may be more popular than another. Among the very diverse group of people connected historically, culturally, and linguistically to Spain, Portugal, and their former colonies (parts of the United Stated, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America), some use more inclusive terms such as Latino or Hispanic; others prefer more specific names such as Chicano, Puerto Rican, Nicaraguan, Cuban, and so on. Also, many transgendered people now use the broad term "trans" rather than medical terminology developed by doctors and psychotherapists that suggests abnormality and pathology.

COLONIZATION, IMMIGRATION, AND THE U.S. LANDSCAPE OF RACE AND CLASS

Global-level factors affecting people's identities include colonization and immigration. Popular folk lore would have us believe that the United States has welcomed "the tired, huddled masses yearning to breathe free." This ideology that the United States is "a land of immigrants" obscures several important issues excluded from much mainstream debate about immigration: Not all Americans came to this country voluntarily. Native American peoples and Mexicans were already here on this continent, but the former experienced near-genocide and the latter were made foreigners in their own land. African peoples were captured, enslaved, imported to this country, and forced to labor and bear children. All were brutally exploited and violated-physically, psychologically, culturally, and spiritually-to serve the interests of those in power. The relationships between these groups and this nation and their experiences in the United States are fundamentally different from the experiences of those who chose to immigrate here, though this is not to negate the hardships the latter may have faced. These differences profoundly shaped the social, cultural, political, and eco- nomic realities faced by these groups throughout U.S. history and continue to do so today.

Robert Blauner (1972) makes a useful analytical distinction between colonized minorities, whose original presence in this nation was involuntary, and all of whom are people of color, and immigrant minorities, whose presence was voluntary. According to Blauner, colonized

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minorities faced insurmountable structural inequalities, based primarily on race, that have prevented their full participation in social, economic, political, and cultural arenas of U.S. life. Early in the history of this country, for example, the Naturalization Law of 1790 (which was only repealed in 1952) prohibited peoples of color from becoming U.S. citizens, and the Slave Codes restricted every aspect of life for enslaved African peoples. These laws made race into an indelible line that separated "insiders" from "outsiders." White people were designated insiders and granted many privileges while all others were confined to systematic disadvantage .... The role of labor unions, community organizations, and political parties, as well as the crucial importance of racism, is usually left out of these accounts, which emphasize individual effort and hard work. ...

On coming to the United States, immigrants are drawn in to the racial landscape of this country. In media debates and official statistics, this is still dominated by a Black/ white polarization, with the addition of "Hispanics" as a non-white third category. Demographically, the population is much more diverse but often characterized in binary terms: people of color or white people. Immigrants generally identify themselves accord- ing to nationality-for example, as Cambodian or Guatemalan. Once in the United States, they may adopt the term people of color as an aspect of their identity here. Chandra Talpade Mohanty notes her transition from "foreign student" to "student of color" in the United States. "Racial and sexist experiences in graduate school and after made it impera- tive that I understand the U.S. in terms of its history of racism, imperialism, and patriarchal relations, specifically in relation to Third World immigrants."

This emphasis on race tends to mask differences based on class, an important distinction among immigrant groups. For example, the Chinese and Japanese people who came in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century to work on plantations in Hawaii, as loggers in Oregon, or building roads and railroads in several western states were poor and from rural areas of China and Japan. The 1965 immigration law made way for "the second wave" of Asian immigration. It set preferences for professionals, highly skilled workers, and members of the middle and upper middle classes. The first wave of Vietnamese refugees who immi- grated between the mid-1970s and 1980 were from the middle and upper classes, including many professionals; by contrast, the second wave of immigrants from Vietnam was composed of poor and rural people. The class backgrounds of immigrants affect not only their sense of themselves and their expectations but also how they can succeed as strangers in a foreign land. For example, a poor woman who arrives with no literacy skills in her own language will have a more difficult time learning to become literate in English than one who has formal schooling in her country of origin that may have included basic English ....

MULTIPLE IDENTITIES, SOCIAL LOCATION, AND CONTRADICTIONS

_ The social features of one's identity incorporate individual, community, social, and global fac- tors. Social location is a concept used to express the core of a person's existence in the social and political world. It places us in particular relationships to others, to the dominant culture of the United States, and to the rest of the world. It determines the kinds of power and privilege we have access to and can exercise, as well as situations in which we have less power and privilege.

Because social location is where all the aspects of one's identity meet, our experience of our own complex identities is both enriching and contradictory, and pushes us to confront questions of loyalty to individuals and groups. It is through the complexity of social loca- tion that we are forced to differentiate our inclinations, behaviors, self definition, and politics from how we are classified by larger societal institutions.