Originally posted here in 2016.
Micro-aggressions have been on my mind lately. Easy for us white guys to dismiss, but when a cab doesn’t pick us up or someone confuses us with some other white guy they once met at a party, it doesn’t trigger an identification with the victims of 500 years of violence and oppression. We rarely take it personally. The key is identification, not identity, though it arises from identity. Identity is how others perceive us (male/female, white/black, gay/straight, the usual social categories). Identification is how we perceive ourselves. It’s a kind of cultural/historical DNA. We all have at least one in our identity-braid (mine is made of multiple-helix strands of Scots-Irish, Canadian, New England Presbyterian, old gray haired bearded guy, working class guy, etc., etc.). Those are the ones I was born with; and there are others you pick up as you go along. My kids are Jewish because their mother is Jewish, and their response to the slightest anti-Semitic seeming micro-aggression is quick and very different than mine. I never take it personally. They can’t help but take it personally, even when it’s not directed at them and they just happen to read about in the paper and it’s occurred in France. A lot of what I’m calling identification is unconscious, or starts out that way. I have a black grandson, adopted Ethiopian, 7 years old, who is gradually learning to identify not with Ethiopians but with African-Americans. Interesting and challenging process for all involved, even for the grandparents. I find myself taking quick offense when I pick up on some asshole at the playground giving him and me more than a cursory glance. Identify is a verb; identity is a noun. I like verbs: they signify change, process, movement, expanding consciousness. Here’s a story. My grandson’s charter school class in LA was visiting the Getty Museum, and the docent, a nice kindly white lady, showed the class a large, famous history-painting of Washington crossing the Delaware, very familiar to us all, I imagine. There’s a black servant/slave in the boat, and the docent called my grandson out and stood him against the painting so the class could see the similarity. Yes, this happened. The class, mostly white and Asian 7-year-olds, likely hadn’t made the connection yet, hadn’t realized the image of the black slave was a portrait of their classmate, Bedelu. He was embarrassed and confused, naturally, and ran back to the safety of the cluster of students. Then along came a black guard, male, and Bedelu raced over to him and high-fived the guy. Identity generates identification.
Well, hope you don’t mind my dropping by with two cents. It’s a fascinating and I believe important subject. Baldwin wrote, “My inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting. My birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance.” That’s what these pissed off kids at Brown and Princeton and Smith are doing, accepting their inheritance. And it’s what Bedelu has to do, too. And so do we privileged white guys, who have our own “particular, specifically limited and limiting” inheritance to accept, before we can claim our birthright.
Adapted (with permission) from correspondence with First‘s editor.