In Squaring Off, Zócalo invites authors into the public square to answer five probing questions about the essence of their books. For this round, we pose questions to Gary Younge, author of Who Are We – And Should It Matter in the Twenty-First Century?
A person’s identity is the product of many components, from immutable traits like race and gender to chosen ones like political affiliation and religious expression. How we define ourselves necessarily affects every part of our lives, but identity can quickly become limiting. Gary Younge, a Barbados-born, British-raised, New York-dwelling journalist for the Guardian, argues that while “identity can make connections over oceans, languages, generations and cultures,” it can also divide us.
1) You write that we must embrace our identity – in all its myriad forms – for the sake of diversity, but not be limited by it. Sounds like a good goal, but is it possible? What does the middle ground look like?
I think identity is a great place to start and a terrible place to finish. At its most useful, it’s the basis for a conversation you might have with others. At its most dangerous, it’s the end of the conversation and the beginning of division. The former requires a combination of empathy, imagination and solidarity. As Maya Angelou told me some time back: “I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn’t have to translate. But if I make the effort to learn the language and respect the mores then I should be able to get along anywhere and with any kind of people. I think I belong wherever human beings are.”
But an ability to distinguish between embracing our identity and fundamentalism isn’t only possible, it’s normal and crucial. Before we become Americans, Muslims, straight or black, we are people. What does the middle ground look like? It has looked like Frederick Douglass supporting women’s suffrage, Northern Irish Catholics singing “We Shall Overcome” and Jews fighting for civil rights and against apartheid. More recently it’s looked like Tahrir Square (a range of sects, religions and both genders out on the streets as Egyptians), the international campaigns against global warming (after we’re all dead it doesn’t matter if we were Americans, Muslims, straight or black) and Rachel Corrie, the young American woman killed trying to prevent house demolitions in Palestine. The connections people make on the basis of their common humanity aren’t inevitable or easy – they take work – but they are certainly possible.
2) One major reason we retreat into our identity groups is for security – and fearing “the other” is intrinsic to all animals. So how do we go about getting over that fear in order to emulate Frederick Douglass or Rachel Corrie?
It’s true that many people retreat into certain identities for security, but many also reject the impulse, and the evidence suggests it doesn’t make them more secure. After 9/11, many Americans retreated into patriotism and some Muslims retreated into their religion. The result was a further series of wars and terror attacks that made no one safer. But most Muslims and many Americans resisted that temptation and argued for an approach that looked beyond those boundaries. How? Unlike most other animals, we have the power of empathy and imagination, not to mention compassion and solidarity. Be it through religion, politics, charitable work, economic necessity or neighborliness, in any one day the world is full of people who make the connection between their rights and aspirations and those of others.
3) Are there different strategies we should be using to move past different types of identity classifiers? You point out that any individual has many facets of his or her identity, but clearly some (like race, religion, politics) are much more difficult to break away from than others because of both internal and external forces.
The power of any identity is entirely contingent on its material context. A hundred and fifty years ago, regional identities in the U.S. were so strong a war was fought through them; today they are not. A century ago, the primary religious division in the U.S. was between Catholic and Protestant. Today six Catholics sit on the Supreme Court; few know that, and even fewer care. So the strategies for moving beyond them also shift with context. But principle means of moving beyond them, I believe, is through the active pursuit of common interests that go beyond any single group. That’s where solidarity comes in.
Climate change offers the best example of this because none of these identities really matter if we’re all dead. So you can’t mount an effective campaign on the basis of nation, religion or race. It has to be on the basis an appeal to something bigger. That’s why it’s been so tough. It’s also why it’s so necessary. But these things rarely sink in in the abstract. It’s through working, engaging, negotiating and struggling with other groups that limiting classifiers break down and more liberating identities emerge. In the words of Jesse Jackson during his 1984 campaign when appealing across racial lines: “When they close down your factory or foreclose on your farm, and they pull the plug and the lights go out, we all – we all – look amazingly similar sitting there in the dark.”
4) So if we use your climate change example, does solidarity only work among people who all have the same opinion? After all, millions of people don’t believe human-created climate change exists, which seems to preclude solidarity even if we leave intrinsic identity characteristics behind.
We need compatible values and broad goals, but not necessarily the same opinion. Most of the greatest achievements of recent times – anti-apartheid, women’s suffrage, civil rights, anti-colonialism – were gained from coalitions of people who agreed on nothing other than their immediate goal. I’ll come back to climate change, but first, take the issue of women’s clothing. For the last decade or more Muslim women have been under legislative and physical attack for wearing hijabs, headscarves, niqabs and burqas. These have coincided and in some moments spearheaded a broader attack on Islam as a backward and dangerous religion incompatible with liberal, western ideals. Some “feminists” insist that these legislative attacks – they have been banned in France – are valid on the grounds that such clothing denotes a craven submission to patriarchy.
I understand the situation differently. I don’t know the individual motivations of each woman or their domestic situation. But I simply don’t believe the state has the right to tell women what to wear. These values were tested in a different way recently when “SlutWalk” emerged as a more situationist movement demanding the right for women to wear sexually-provocative clothing free from attack or stigma. It really heartened me to see some Muslim women in Britain making the link and attending and supporting SlutWalk in their headscarves. It’s the kind of linkage that forces a reassessment, and who knows what kind of new communities and coalitions might emerge?
Where climate change is concerned, it’s true you can only have solidarity with people who believe in similar goals. There’s no guarantee you’ll be a majority (although with climate change, I believe a majority does exist). But those who do join together over that issue move beyond race, region, religion, nation, etc. to one of action in defense of the environment. They don’t abandon those identities. Indeed they may mobilize through them, saying “As Christians, as Indians or as indigenous people or whatever, we have this responsibility.” Either way, the key issue here is that the debate will be underpinned by the question of what people believe, can prove and argue, not who they are.
5) So if I’m sitting here feeling helpless because I’m ready to move beyond identity in the service of my chosen cause but I don’t feel like many others are, what should I be doing to bring about real change?
Well I guess the main thing is always to both keep your eyes on the prize and understand that prizes are often elusive. There are no guarantees (Mandela didn’t know he’d end up president when he was put in prison) and the point is to advance your cause, not to move beyond a given identity. But when straight people challenge homophobia, when gentiles take on anti-Semitism or men object to sexism, however few they might be, they help transform and broaden the public perception of those struggles from vested interests to campaigns for human rights and equality.
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*Photo courtesy of Takver.