Racial Identity: Blessing or Curse?
Today, in the United States, cultural and ethnic and racial sensitivity are all approached from the perspective of inclusiveness and equality. In that sort of social climate, the notion of racial identity has more positive connotations than negative ones, as everyone is encouraged to celebrate his or her heritage and to respect and value those of others. In that respect, racial identity is a positive thing that allows all of us to maintain a psychological familial connection to our ancestors and to our heritage in a positive way that adds value to our lives. However, racial identity is only beneficial when it is something of our own choosing and when we live in a society that values all people equally in that respect. It is quite another thing entirely when our racial identity is something that is foisted upon us, as members of a racial or ethnic minority, by members of the racial or ethnic majority, and when the only context of our racial identity is in connection with our being oppressed, discriminated against, and defined by others as second-class citizens without equal rights.
Both Zora Neal Hurston and Richard Rodriguez provide views of racial identity in entirely different contexts in which racial identity (especially in the case of Hurston) is something that is associated with only negative connotations. In her 1928 essay How It Feels to Be Colored Me, Hurston provides a heart-rending account of what racial identity meant in the negative sense during the lives of the first few generations of African-Americans living in post-slavery America. Writing almost 80 years later in his Aria: A Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood (2007), Richard Rodriguez recounts a different type of negative experience in relation to racial and ethnic identity that deals with more subtle, yet still negative and sensitive aspects of living within a society where one's...
She describes herself as having been just "a Zora" until she arrived in Jacksonville,
Florida, where she discovered that Zora was "no more"; instead, Zora discovered that she was now "now a little colored girl," based purely on the identity that other (i.e. white) people forced on her without any opportunity for her to establish what we might consider today to be a racial identity in the positive sense. She writes that she "found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown -- warranted not to rub nor run." This is an obvious reference to the realization by a young girl that she would now always be perceived and defined by others as a Negro and that nothing she could do or achieve of any merit or value could change the fundamental way she was defined by society.
Hurston writes disdainfully about the fact that other African-Americans of the time typically bought into the negative assumptions about their race by doing whatever they could to deny it as much as possible. Specifically, she writes that she is "the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief," an obvious sarcastic reference to the fact that many African-Americans sought to
escape from the weight of their racial identity by fabricating a mixed racial heritage. Eighty years after Hurston's essay, contemporary African-American comedian Chris Rock has a joke in his comedy routine referencing the same exact idea, in connection with how Caucasian men introduce their African-American girlfriends to their friends, making up a more "exotic" and (presumably) more "acceptable" ethnic identity than admitting they are dating a black girl. The difference is that in Chris Rock's era, the…
