Who am I? My statistics are as follows. I am a Caucasian American of Irish/Swedish descent, born of a middle-class working family in a small farming town in the most conservative county in California. As a result, I am often assumed to be ignorant of culture, traditionalist, an Evangelical Christian, possibly racist, definitely homophobic, and though I have probably never the left the continental United States, I will when I get my high-paying job in a corporate office somewhere. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. But the distance of these stereotypes from who I actually am as a person is not because they are distant from the actual stereotypes that define me, because a list of contrasts, such as multicultural, progressive, Unitarian-Universalist, racially accepting, homosexual ally, world traveler and social justice oriented, would be just inaccurate. Both lists somewhat reflect me, but neither entirely or precisely does. Why?

It has always intrigued me on the Chico State campus how there are organizations, advocacy groups and grant programs for nearly every kind of ethnicity and lifestyle except my own heterosexual whiteness, even though the “minority status” which justifies these organizations is largely a thing of the past. Yet if there was a club celebrating white people or heterosexuals, we can be sure the backlash would be as potent as it was irrational.

The problem, I think, is that we orient ourselves, our identity, our location in culture and time, by categories, generalizations about how things are and what people mean to each other. Even though geneticists have discovered that there is often a greater percentage of genetic variation between people of the same ethnicity than between two people of two different ethnicities (according to my Physical Anthropology class, anyway), we still organize around Latino clubs and African-American clubs, finding a bond in the common culture and appearance that we inherit from our parents. We want to be with people who are like “us,” not with “them” who are so different from us, whose values and cultural practices we do not understand. Since I am a member of the patriarchal white society which persecuted all these minorities, I am the untrusted, I am “them” no matter what, I am the representation of all that has made them sequester themselves so tightly into their racial- or lifestyle-basedcloisters.

What motivates our categories, our demarcations on job applications and census surveys? Some of it is fear. We are afraid of what we do not understand. Some of it is simple complacency. We want to surround ourselves with what we are used to, the familiar, the expected. But some of it is a result of our linguistic heritage. Languages were not designed; rather, they evolved naturally as the human cognitive capacity for abstract thought formed. Abstract thought is the ability to ignore the particular differences of some individual so that they can be considered solely by their similarities with other individuals, allowing all the individuals, with their differences negated, to be subsumed under a single category. This cognitive ability has been extremely useful for developing language, because it allows a single noun, say a “rock” or a “tree” or a “Caucasian,” to be used to name many different things, rather than having to develop names for each individual entity.

However, language of this sort has been present in human culture for so long that we have begun to think the world really is carved up the way our language suggests, that people really are “Caucasion” or “African-American” or “homosexual” or “homophobic” or “ignorant” or “pluralistic.” That the nice, neat labels in some way really describe reality, rather than just being a linguistic convention resulting from really efficient cognitive processing. 

Rob Burton mobilizes an idea from Homi Bhabha called “doubling,” arguing that a “doubling relation”suggests a “movement between positions,” rather than a static fixedness at one set of identities (Burton 18-19). I am a white middle-class college student, and that is one position I can take, but I am also an Iraq war veteran and former Army Sergeant of 5 years, which is another position I can take. “Doubling” is the idea that rather than thinking of me as one or the other of these categories, I am a fluid movement between them, constantly “doubling back” from one to the other.

I want to take Burton’s idea a step further and argue that the “fixed poles” of these identities are themselves not fixed, at least not in reality. “White middle-class college student” and “Iraq war veteran” are themselves abstractions that speak little to nothing about me as an individual person. These abstractions are not the poles I double back between. Rather, they are abstractions people make of the life that I have lived—it is the lived practice of making decisions given the parents and monetary means that I have, and the experience I underwent as a Army soldier, that has oriented my life and defined me. The particular “livedness” provides the only position for my doubling, a constant movement from experience to experience. The resultant characteristics can not be abstracted, because they are unique only to me. The only way to understand them is by getting to know me as an individual. That is where my real identity and metaphysical reality lies. In other words, my real self isbeyond the categories we use to define each other. I am not a “veteran” or a “hero” or a “racist” or a “pluralist” or an “ally”. I am just myself, indefinable, indescribable, but knowable nonetheless, not as a set of categories, but as an individual person that you can meet, converse with, and even befriend.

I suggest that if the doubling relation is real, then the categories are not. If we want to move into a truly global society, we will have to deflate the categories. We will have to begin to see each other as surprising and unique. We will have to lose the politically charged labels and actually be vulnerable enough to get to know each other. We will have to stop seeing each other as “gay” or “Latino” or “punk” or “liberal” or “Republican”. We can continue to celebrate our heritage, our culture, our communities, the local contexts which have shapes our values and goals. But we must stop seeing those contexts and cultures as in someway sharply divided from other contexts and cultures. There are just individuals and the interactions they produce. We are not abstractions. We are persons. Only in discovering each other as persons can we overcome this tendency to suck the soul out of each other with labels.

Reality is in the particular.



Works Cited:

Burton, Rob. Artists of the Floating World. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2007. Print.

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