I need help.
If you’ve been reading my pieces for some time, this will come as no surprise. I imagine many of you read my stuff and think “this guy needs some serious help”.
But what I need help with is getting to grips with ‘modern’ terminology.
It has been going on for a while. I never quite got what it meant to be “represented” by someone in a movie. Hannibal Lecter is white. Does he represent me? No, not at all. I prefer Barolo and Patate al Forno with my liver.
I did get some measure of understanding of this term when my friend’s 8-year old daughter bemoaned the relative dearth of female superhero characters. Her brothers could play and pretend they were Hulk or Thor, or even Thanos, but she didn’t have too many characters to choose from.
I get that. The Imperial nettle patches in the late 1970’s in our local areas of ‘wilderness’ were often in mortal danger from young ‘Jedi Knights’ as we wielded our light sabres (wooden sticks).
It’s wrapped up in questions of identity. Who am I? Who do I want to be? I suppose we all daydream, even as adults, and I’ve sometimes ‘wished’ I could have the skills of Ip Man and indulge in a spot of mindless, but exceptionally skilful, vigilantism. How dare you assault that lady? Here, have a Lin Wan Kuen1.
Identity seems to be the burning question of our age.
You’re in this group? Great. You’re in that group? Shut the fuck up, and let those people in the other group have some space.
What we are ‘allowed’ to do, how we are supposed to act and think and feel, seems to be predicated (in some people’s mind, at any rate) on what identity group we inhabit. Indeed, if you don’t think in the ‘right’ way you might be summarily ejected from the identity group you thought you belonged to. You have conservative views? Sorry, you can’t possibly be gay. Out of the LGBTQQ2SAPPIGRFDERA&&$THJU+ group you go.
I mean, come on white people, don’t you know that ALL black people, everywhere, irrespective of actual cultural heritage, “own” certain hairstyles?
It has even gotten to the point where in some places you can be hounded out of business if you cook food you’re not, ethnically, “entitled” to cook.
Identity, it seems, is serious business.
But what is it? How do I answer the question Who am I?
The other day I was feeling a bit down and I was a crotchety old fart. A day or two later I was in a more positive mood and went about saving stranded kittens and helping little old ladies cross the street.
Which one of those very different characters am I?
I have been assigned, presumably by God, the standard2 meat and two veg that used to be indicative of membership of the identity group male. So I suppose that could be one component of my identity.
Where I choose to stick my meat and two veg might be an another aspect of my identity.
But, really, they’re not very interesting components of an identity are they?
I’m right-handed too.
Being white I am, of course, infused with lashings of toxic whiteness - it comes naturally and I haven’t had to “internalize” anything. Not much I can do about that - us crackers, us mayo monkeys3, just have to live with it and “do the work”.
These days it has become de rigueur to use the phrase “identify as”.
I don’t really know what this means. It seems to imply some active thing, some deliberate choice.
If you’re a man, you can “identify as” a woman, but if you’re white you can’t identify as black. Something about not having had the requisite lived experience as a black person is the rationale there.
Oh, really? And what lived experience of being a woman does a man have, pray tell?
It’s different. Because reasons.
I don’t identify as a physicist, I am a physicist. Perhaps I transitioned to become a physicist after years of study and work? Although there’s an interesting question there, too. At what point in this process did I become a physicist?
At what point in the process of transitioning from female to male does the person become male? I would say never, of course, but a question like this will elicit the answer “they’ve always been male”. Unless they choose to de-transition, of course, but we try not to speak about those identities too much.
To avoid these kinds of issues it is supposed there is some “authentic self” lurking in the background within each one of us.
Yet another bloody phrase that makes little sense.
This is me, the real me. The me you saw last week was the fake me. Next week I’ll be a different real me.
We seem to be spending so much time and energy on trying to be something, and we’re forgetting to just be.
Those who give credence to the notion of an “authentic self” would argue that society is holding back people from being who they actually are. These people are not, simply, allowed to be. I suppose I have be privilege, because I haven’t had this lived experience.
There are some who really do feel they’re the wrong sex (sex, not gender). Honestly, I don’t know what ‘we’ do about that. It’s a complicated mind-body issue and I would suggest we have close to no understanding at all as to why it happens or how best to help those individuals.
It ought to go without saying but I want everyone, even the spiciest blue-haired freak with a dog’s tail shoved up their arse, to live a great life as best they are able. I poke fun, of course, but I don’t wish any harm - even though I recognise that poking fun might hurt the feelz a bit. It would be a dull world indeed if we couldn’t poke fun.
After a couple of days of rumination, a cogitative state where the outward expression of my identity (my resting cogitation face of misery) didn’t match my inner state (rather enjoying the cogitative process), I am still no closer to understanding what my identity is.
I haven’t explicitly tried to identify as anything - I’ve just tried to answer the question Who am I?
Ultimately, although I’ve enjoyed the process as an intellectual exercise, I don’t really give a shit.
I am who I am4 - and that might change on a daily basis. Like it or lump it.
A chain punch in Wing Chun (courtesy of Google, which is where any ‘expertise’ I have in Wing Chun comes from)
Next time, God, do you think you could manage to make me a little bit better than just merely ‘standard’?
One of the more interesting slurs used to describe white people
Although I don’t have any idea who I am
That updated pride flag is a bit like a 'flower power' teatowel I still have from my youth!
As for all the identity nonsense, I've concluded that some people today have far too much spare time on their hands (the devil makes work for idle hands). I look forward to the complete economic collapse that we are heading for when they might have to put their effort into digging the vegetable patch, where they won't be worrying too much about their identity except for the fact that they don't identify a a very good gardener.
"It has even gotten to the point where in some places you can be hounded out of business if you cook food you’re not, ethnically, “entitled” to cook."
It happens in music too. A friend of mine was in a drumming group led by a (white) woman who taught the group some rhythms she had learned in Jamaica. When the group played at a farmer's market, a (black) woman wrote to the town select board and complained that the group was Bad because they were white people playing black music. So the select board banned the group from ever performing again at the farmer's market. Justice was served!