The Complexity of Identity – Who are we anyway?

Who am I?  I was asked this recently in another class as part of a “get to know” a little bit about your classmates exercise.  Interestingly enough, I used my observations from this exercise as my first observation assignment for our Social Justice class.  What I observed was that certain students answered the question (“Who am I?”) by defining themselves more in relation to their relationships (i.e., mother, sister, brother, uncle, student, employee, woman, etc.), while others described themselves more in terms of certain traits (i.e., passionate, humorous, good listener, caring, etc.).  Most students described a mixture of both types of responses, but leaned more heavily in one area.  Where do these ideas of self come from?  As taken from our text, Erik Erikson (psychoanalytic theorist) introduced the idea that “who we are” is a puzzle with many pieces and that our social, cultural and historical context is the base for which our individual identity is embedded.  I really liked his statement that “We deal with a process “located” in the core of the individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture” (Adams 2010, p. 5).  Putting our puzzle together is ongoing and includes pieces from one’s past, present, and future.  

Which parts of our identity capture our attention first?

This is where Tatum, in her selection from “The Complexity of Identity” begins to explain her idea that while many trait descriptions emerge, there are also examples that come to the surface of how we identify ourselves.  We tend to identify ourselves with both “dominant” and “subordinate” groups.  However, we seem to focus on (and describe ourselves by) the subordinate groups we associate ourselves with.  An example from my observation would be in the area of gender.  There were several women in the class that identified themselves as such.  Not one man in the class did so.  The same held true for “mother.”  While there were women that described themselves also as mothers, not one male in the group mentioned being a father.  I agree with Tatum’s idea that when we associate ourselves with a dominant or “advantaged” social group, we take that element of our identity for granted and that this occurs because the dominant culture also takes it for granted.  And, because we take this association so for granted, we don’t even think to mention it when describing ourselves.  This is where our “inner experience and outer circumstance are in harmony with one another, and the image reflected by others is similar to the image within” (Adams 2010, p. 6).   

So, with the above in mind and, knowing that we are very complex ever evolving individuals, isn’t it possible that even in these identities we sometimes take for granted, there might at some point be contradiction or confliction?  As Kirk and Okazawa-Rey discuss in their selection from our text, it is in our social location, “the point where all the features embodied in a person overlap,” (Adams 2010, p. 14) that we express the core of our existence in the social and political world.  This position places us in individual relationships to others, our dominant national culture, and to the rest of the world.  Our social location places us with access to certain power and privilege, as well as in situations where we are powerless and without privilege.  It is in these multiple identities that we will question at times our loyalty to particular individuals and/or groups. 

So…who are we anyway?

NOTE:  As I read the text, the whole idea of social location was intriguing to me.  I found a link from the New York Times education section that gives instructions for mapping one’s social location.  It was written as a lesson plan for a language arts class, but I found the whole exercise very interesting.  Here’s the link:  http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/express-yourself-crafting-social-location-maps-and-identity-monologues/