One Cannot be a "Self" by Oneself

As illustrated in all three readings, identity is something you create for yourself while it is simultaneously being shaped and created by a larger social context. Regardless of how you may self-identify and regardless if it is your own lived experience, the complexity of identity and power that others cede to it make analyzing identity incredibly important. As brought up in the Higginbotham article, people tend to "know [race] when they see it" but are confused when pressed to define it. We use race as a prime characteristic, trait, qualifier, and key component of identity despite its historical fluidity and inconsistency.

The malleability of identity becomes apparent in examples from Higginbotham and Waldstreicher. The ability of some blacks to rise to a higher socioeconomic status did not allow them to surmount larger societal rules and codes; a member of Congress in Illinois being rejected from riding in the first class railroad car shows the power which we ascribe certain aspects of identity. At the time of Jim Crow, race far outweighed class in the eyes of many white Americans. Even though Higginbotham mentions racial uplift allowed some blacks to rise up the social ladder by "acting proper and respectable", the mere idea that a black man would be 'worthy' enough of sitting in the first class railroad car was enough to reject even the class part of his identity. Waldstreicher writes about the self-fashioning of identities that runaway slaves engaged in and this more than anything highlights the arbitrary nature of common descriptors or stereotypical features we apply to a specific race. Not only was it embarrassing for slave owners to admit their slave subverted their authority by running away, but now these white men had to struggle to define the slave's phenotypical features. Cleverly deceiving white people by cutting their hair, changing their clothes, etc, runaway slaves could read how they were described to be and morph their physical appearance in order to disguise their actual identity. While slave owners were defining their slaves, the slaves were constantly redefining themselves (literally).

In both instances, we see how identity is both self-constructed and socially constructed. This relational nature of identity is vital to understanding the complexity and an underlying theme within all three. Whether it is gender, race, class or some other descriptor, our identity does not exist in isolation and does not have stability. Recognizing that one's identity is such precisely because others live the way they do or define themselves the way they do is important. As Elsa Brown puts it: "middle-class white women's lives are not just different from working-class white, Black, and Latina women's lives...White women and women of color not only live different lives but white women live the lives they do in large part because women of color live the ones they do." The same goes for any descriptive identity - how we perceive ourselves reflects the social context that we are in.