"Identity", an essay from my friend Henry.
[hr style="width: 100%; height: 2px;"]
People use different means to identify themselves and distinguish their own selves from other people. How you do this says a great deal about you, where you came from and where you are going.
The elementary question of "who am I?" gets answered differently by everyone, but there are quite a few ways we identify ourselves with others that make a big difference in how we perceive the world. Being gay or being straight matters more to some people. Very few people who have not lost their sight think of themselves as seeing or not blind. Deaf people see the world as filled with Deaf people and Hearing people.
Some people put religion in first place - belonging to a religious sect is as important to some people as being gay is to many gay people. Lots of people think that being American or Japanese or German is a big deal. Some people want other people to know that they're successful or intellectual or physically fit. Many fat people experience being fat as something they are, like it or not, much as many people have felt about being black in white America. Being poor is its own stigma in the post-Reagan USA. Lots of people identify themselves by what they do - a teacher, a doctor, or a janitor.
What we expect of other people is often determined by how we have identified them. Gay people accept gay people and Deaf people accept deaf people with more tolerance and greater expectations - also, gay people have lower expectations of straight people and deaf people have lower expectations of hearies. I even knew a person who was so partial to Theodore Dreiser that any person named Theodore stood higher in their imagination than a person of any other given name.
Does this make any sense? Some of it may make sense, sometimes. We spent tens of thousands of years in a tribal existence where belonging was a key aspect to survival and reproduction. We're still essentially tribal, but now in our more "advanced" civilization, our tribes are much more varied and complex.
One interesting aspect of various chat places on the Internet is that they give people an opportunity to pretend to be other identities than they really are - with impunity and few consequences you can be a black woman, a lapsed priest, a teenage boy discovering being gay, or an old matriarch. I don't know if such role playing is of any lasting value, but for some people it is therapeutic. Imagine what it would be like, in some future society, if you could construct an artificial persona in a holodeck and be that person for a week. I'd like to think that this kind of exploration might make people more tolerant of other people, different from themselves. I wonder if it really would have that effect?
For many years now, I have made an effort within myself to disassociate myself from my various tribes. I don't want to be white or black, gay or straight, American or British: I just want to be another wandering homo sapiens, on a par with a few billion others. I don't want to give preferential treatment to others just like me - I want to give everybody the same breaks, however different they are from me. Whether by birth, or by accident, or by choice, who they are ought not to automatically disadvantage some and advantage others. I can't help being what I am, but I can try to refuse to use that as a scale against which to measure other people.
