We often think that our identity is the essence of who we are, but that’s not true. We might want to say, simply and definitely, “This is who I am.” But that statement is always incomplete and unfinished. Instead, our identity is a combination of some internal, you could probably say genetic, tendencies, with narratives and images imposed by others. As a result, none of us settle easily or completely into our identity. Instead, we wrestle with the mixed elements throughout our lives. Let me try to explain.
Early in the 1619 Project, Ijeoma Oluo tells us that her mother is White and her own “skin is not the rich deep brown of my father’s.” She is clear that she loves her mother but she, herself, is Black. Not a combination of Black and white. Black. “Until the systemic functions of whiteness that began with the whipping of Hugh Davis (an African slave) are dismantled, I cannot claim whiteness. And as long as my survival is tied to my ability to resist the oppression of white supremacy, I’ll be damned if I’ll let whiteness claim me.”
Today would have been my father’s 104th birthday, and this week, Oluo’s declaration has got me thinking about imposed identities of a different, smaller kind—those we carry with us from our families.
All of us struggle to reconcile our various identities, particularly, as Oluo demonstrates, the frequent struggle between what we feel is deeply true, and how others define us. Family loyalties, for instance, almost always, present us with mixed messages that we wrestle with for much of our lives. We are asked to declare our fundamental self and to minimize or hide or, in extreme cases, eliminate qualities that don’t fit with our declared self.
I was the first of three children in my family; and I was said to be my father’s son. Throughout my childhood, family friends told me that I looked and acted like him. My school successes were attributed to my father’s, not my mother’s genes. Since my father seemed to be the star of the parental couple, I readily accepted the identification with him as the star child. And the induction into this identity formed much of my character for years, even decades.
This, in spite of the fact that my brother and sister were every bit as talented as I. Maybe more to the point, I wasn’t all that much like my father. My parents’ friends might have cooed: “You’re so much like your father.” But I didn’t look like him. His skin was much darker, his hips, hands, and feet larger, his moods and thoughts were darker and more hidden. He was a quiet man; I couldn’t contain my energy. He revealed little about himself. I loved to have ‘meaningful’ talks with friends.
Even as the differences became clearer, I was reluctant to give up the identification—until my forties, maybe my fifties, when my mother’s energies and passions, and her loyalty to progressive political values began to feel more familiar, more compelling. I found myself thinking and talking about her influence, eventually saying: “In many ways I am more my mother’s child.”
This represented a radical shift. My parents and their friends were gone. None laid a literal claim on my identity. The battle for my soul had gone inward. Who was I? For a while, I felt cast adrift, filled with internal conflict. Which version of me would prevail? It felt late in life for an identity crisis but the crisis was undeniable. It must have taken a decade of introspection and observation to achieve an newly integrated narrative about who I was. I watched myself interacting with friends and colleagues and, of course, with my wife and my children. Eventually the obvious dawned on me. I was a child of both parents—and, no duplicate of either, I was my own person.
I came to believe that allowing each of my identities or identifications to grow, to soften and harden and change shape, finally made me a more complex person, a richer person.
These days, the notion of intersectionality has come into vogue. One definition (Google) goes like this: “The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.” Something like this seems to play out within families.
No question, my own family discriminated against women, particularly in the form of my mother, though my sister endured a similar loss of status. Societal norms, embodied in my family, pressed me to be a man, like my father. But, of course, it was my mother who spent far more time with me and I had to do something with her influence, despite it coming from what our family narrative defined as a lesser person. I have finally come to believe that identifying with her—at least as much as with my father—turned out to be both an expansive and liberating experience.
These days, I have begun to feel another powerful social pressure that is at least partly represented within my family. They—and I—have begun to identify me as an old man, which, at almost 80, I am. For the most part, the identification has led to kindly treatment—“Can I do that for you, Dad”—and wonderful , witty teasing from my younger grandsons. They tell me that I’m pretty good for an old man. My wife, through kindness and, occasional impatience, simply takes on tasks I had done before or instructs me on how I should do them.
I know that I could move steadily into the old man identity. The combination of my own biology with family and social pressures makes it hard to resist. It would, in fact, look silly and obstinate to resist. But I resist. I’ll be damned if agism claims me. I suppose I have some work to do, integrating younger versions of myself with the man I am now.
Barry Dym 