Identity Politics: No One Knows You Better Than You Do

Theme song: How About You Be You (And I'll Be Me)?

It didn't take me long to decide, in the wake of the Rachel Dolezal story, that individuals have a right to choose their own identities.

Just in case this story passed you by, Rachel Dolezal is the NAACP leader whose parents outed her for being white. As these stories will, this one got complicated--and tabloidy--with Rachel and her family appearing on different news shows and making public statements. There were multiple law suits involving the family as a whole, and Rachel herself may have been playing both sides of the race question--perhaps changing racial identities when it suited her.

I'll just point out a couple of things here.

People Lie All The Time

Lying is not cool, it's true, but it happens all the time. Presidents lie, business owners lie, husbands and wives lie, and we learn lies (at the very least of omission) when we are growing up in school. I wish people didn't lie, and I keep lying to a minimum in my own life, but just because Rachel Dolezal lied, if she lied, the basic right to choose an identity is still hers.

No One Knows You Better Than You Do

We are living in Caitlyn Jenner (formerly Wheaties dude Bruce Jenner) times. Our culture is a relatively fluid one, famously characterized by "self-made men" and people who come to our country poor and make good. We have pioneered many things in our country that have changed, for example, what it means to be a woman. Very few people today, for example, say that "girls don't play sports," and although we do know that few women program computers, they are allowed to do it.

Throughout history there have been many examples of women living as men, blacks living as whites, Jews living as Christians, and gays living as straight. Much of the time, these decisions were based on an understandable desire to survive. The ability to "pass" and the decision to do so is fraught. But just because it is fraught doesn't mean you can't do it.

My take is that other people do not get to decide who you are for you. For whatever reason, people love to categorize each other. I suppose it makes them feel safe. And race is an especially polarized issue in our country. In the holocaust, Hitler needed to be able to define and sort people in order to murder them. His racial definitions were such that a sizable minority of the people who were taken to concentration camps did not even identify as Jewish. Yet Hitler decided for they were Jewish and organized their murder.

I am definitely not saying that if today I decided I were a tall black man, people would believe me. They would look at me and decide for me: Anna is a short white woman. Maybe they would think I was crazy, or they would feel hostile because I was "playing games." Alright. If you don't like it, you don't have to like me or what I stand for. Plenty of people have taken unpopular stands and been harmed and ostracized as a result. That is nothing new.

I stand firm: I'll choose my identity and you choose yours.

P.S. I read a really awesome 80 pager on legal conceptions of elective identity in the Georgetown Law Journal courtesy of Laura Johnson. It's dense but worth the read if this topic is of special interest to you: http://georgetownlawjournal.org/articles/elective-race-recognizing-race-discrimination-in-the-era-of-racial-self-identification/