Here is New York Times Columnist Charles Blow's straight-to-the heart Op-Ed on Identity; accepting differences we perceive in others and --accepting ourselves as we are:
"Self-acceptance, of all stripes, large and small, is always an inherently political and profoundly revolutionary act...
E.E. Cummings once put it: 'To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.'”
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed
Columnist- Charles M. Blow
Age
of Identity
“Hair is
political.”
That was the
line that stuck with me when my 17-year-old daughter recently regaled me with
the minutiae of a lighthearted argument she’d had with a friend. It was about
my daughter’s staunch resistance to straightening or altering her hair in any
way.
The friend had
insisted that such alterations were no big deal, to which my daughter took
umbrage and shot back, “Hair is political.”
In my
daughter’s view, such alterations were a sign of suppressive concepts of worth
and beauty of which she would have no part. Presenting herself as nature made
her was an act of self-loving defiance that demanded not her alteration but the
alteration of others’ attitudes about how we expect people to bend in order to
belong, about how many destructive subliminal messages we’ve all absorbed and
how we must search ourselves for the truth of our own prejudices.
It reminded me
of the profound commentary on the subject by the
actress Tracie Thoms in Chris Rock’s 2009 documentary “Good Hair”: “To keep my
hair the same texture as it grows out of my head is looked at as revolutionary.
Why is that?”
But to me, my
daughter’s message was bigger than her, or hair, or a debate between teenagers.
It was a life lesson that we all have to learn, over and over: Self-acceptance,
of all stripes, large and small, is always an inherently political and
profoundly revolutionary act.
We are so
suffused in a mix of misogyny, patriarchy, racism, sexism, homophobia and
hetero-normative exclusionary idealism that we can easily lose sight of the
singular acts of ordinary bravery that each of us displays every time we choose
not to play along.
Life is an
endless negotiation with ourselves and with the world about who we are — the
truest truth of who we are — and whether we have the mettle to simply be us,
all of us, as we are, backlash notwithstanding.
And every time
we answer “yes” to the question of courage, we stand an inch taller and we rise
closer to the light.
In fact, Michaela Angela Davis, a self-described
“image activist,” calls this the “Age of Identity and Intersections.”
It is a time
when more people are asserting themselves as nonconformists as they recognize
that there is a variety of intersections to subjugation. It’s a twist on the
idea of diversity: not simply honoring a variety of origins as positive, but
uniting under a banner that reminds us that the diminution of the very concept
of variance has been a historical tool of psychic violence against those deemed
“different.”
It is about
developing kinship and alliance among the historically alienated.
It is about
understanding that open hatred of — or even subtle, sometimes subconscious
devaluing of — women, minorities (racial, ethnic, religious or otherwise) and
people who don’t hew to sexual or gender norms are not discrete dysfunctions,
but are of a kind, a cousin of flawed consciousness.
And when that
is understood, the fight against them all becomes more focused. You stop
hacking at the branches and start digging at the root.
Sometimes,
when we are confronted by another overt act of intolerance in the news —
another racial epithet, a further effort to erode women’s access to a full
range of reproductive options, one more state attempting to hold on to its bans
against marriage equality, another manifestation of rape culture — it can seem
that we are going backward in this fight rather than forward.
But I don’t
think so. I think that, as the saying goes, it’s darkest before the dawn, that
these cases stand out not necessarily because they are growing, but because
they are so at odds with this country’s moral trajectory. (Although, it must be
said that there are increasing efforts, particularly in Republican-controlled
states, to restrict women’s health care.)
Young people
in America are growing up in a country that is quickly becoming brown, where women
outnumber men in colleges, where acknowledgment of sexual identity
is increasingly met with shrugs.
This doesn’t
mean that they are immune to bias, but it does give hope that bias will
diminish as difference becomes more mainstream, historical privileges become
more identified and gender roles become less rigid.
That is why I
greet with overwhelming optimism the continuous stream of people who refuse to
conform and who insist on acknowledgment of their own identities, as they are,
in all of their inherent glories and by way of their “revolutionary acts.”
E.E. Cummings
once put it: “To be nobody-but-yourself — in a world which is doing its best,
night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle
which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
And when we understand
that that struggle against conformity and control is a shared, unifying
experience, the accomplishment is made a little bit easier — and a whole lot
sweeter.
Truth is
political.
