The Radical Intimacy of Identity: Yours, Mine, Ours
Identity is not a linear experience. It is a circle that you revisit so you can relearn about yourself over and over again.
– Diva Armas Luther, A Peahce Project artist
The Agency of Yours, Mine, Ours
Korean-American student Arden Yum says that while growing up, she felt like an impostor. Media representations were lacking, and while attending a predominantly white school, Yum constantly questioned her identity. Not white nor fully Korean—she was in limbo—doubting where she fit in and feeling trapped in the self-fulfilling prophecy of the shy Asian girl stereotype. She said, “I had to withdraw and whitewash myself in order to fit in. I wanted to scrub clean all of the Asian parts of myself.” When Yum went to Hong Kong as a teenager and was immersed in communities with people from across Asia, everything changed—she no longer felt like an outsider or a fake. Returning to the States, Yum created The Peahce Project, a platform to explore race, culture, identity, art, activism, and education through the underrepresented Asian voices from around the world.
In my previous post, I explored the challenges in handling conflicts, referencing Diane Musho Hamilton and her co-authors’ assertion that identity causes approximately 60% of the world’s conflict. This is not surprising. Identity “is one of the most defining aspects of our personal psychology and social orientation.” Identity as “the totality of what we recognize as ‘me’,” through orienting beliefs, memories, experiences, and roles, is “the story that we tell ourselves and others about who and what we are.”
The authors outline four distinct stages of identity—egocentrism, where we strive for personal power to develop a healthy sense of “I”; ethnocentric expands our identity to include all those important to us (family, tribe, group, nation); worldcentric functions from universal human values and identifies with all of humanity; and finally, kosmocentric lives in the fluid spaciousness of interconnectedness, not bound by hope and fear or space and time. Each person “walks the territory of our growth,” evolving in a unique, deeply layered manner.
How can we co-create from the provocative complexity of this landscape of identity diversity?
Waking Up as Yourself
Senator Sarah McBride
How many of us would say that each day we wake up and function from an authentic, fully recognized identity?
Newly-inaugurated Delaware State Senator Sarah McBride talked with CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Rita Braver about her road to becoming America's highest-ranking transgender elected official. From her earliest memories, McBride says she remembered lying in bed praying that she would “wake up as herself” and that she would be judged on her merits. She didn’t see the possibility of being transgender and involved in politics. Not until college did her experience, courage and insights bring the realization that “the things she told herself would heal the pain, wouldn’t.” When asked what it felt like to claim who she was, her response was, “complete and utter relief.”
How can we witness each other without trying to change one another?
Right Relationship & Radical Intimacy
Systemic coaches and educators Suncica Getter and Anne-Marie Desai were guest speakers on a recent Humanity Rising webinar exploring the illusion of safety through othering. Getter and Desai introduce what they call “right relationships”—not as opposed to “wrong”—but through comprehending that we have agency to create conscious relationships. According to Getter and Desai, right relationships stem from an awareness that we choose how to engage, and therefore, it requires some action, such as a conversation or social engagement.
Starting with agency of self, we can recognize the dominant (such as being a mom or having a particular job) parts of our identity and understand how they effect relationships with others. When we place these different identities in a hierarchy and are unable to embrace the “lower” parts of ourselves, we can’t embrace it in others either—leading to judgment and criticism. This is the beginning of othering, where comparative identity—the need to be better than—sets in motion its vexing behavior.
Getter and Desai say that we can avoid such triggers by intentionally bringing heart into relationships and allowing vulnerability and curiosity to open us up to compassion.
What part of your identity prompts you to “other” someone else?
To practice conscious relationships, our challenge is to recognize the value in what we don’t know. Because not knowing is okay. One of the ways we can build relations, find commonalities, and respect identities dissimilar to our own is by getting personal—connecting through story.
Telling Our Stories
It started as a photography project with Humans of New York, then, for the next eight years, photographer Brandon Stanton roamed the streets of cities in 40 countries around the globe, asking people who captured his interest if he could take their photo. Stanton says that the photo became secondary to what the individuals shared with him. He chronicled their lives, telling the stories that unveiled who they were, while witnessing the commonalities of humankind.
When you sit down there with somebody on the street, even if you're a stranger and they don't know who you are, and you go to that place, you've seen a part of them that nobody else has seen before, and it's extremely powerful.
—Brandon Stanton
Through DNA tests and historical research, host of Finding Your Roots, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. brings a different type of storytelling to life. Gates’ PBS program has revealed the ancestry origins of many dozens of people. On a recent program, Kasi Lemons, African-American director of Harriett, learned that she was 47% European. Surprised, Lemons laughs when Gates further reveals that she shares DNA with actor Kevin Bacon. She says, “Our histories are so intertwined. We inform each other.”
Stories connect us, bringing us intimately closer to the people whose identities we are unfamiliar with. Felt experiences of one another are a crucial way to move away from “othering.” We identify as many things as we evolve on our life journey. When we identity as human—a unique, flexible part of a whole—the circle of growth and development endures.
Join Greg on Monday for the final session of Body and Soul: The Mind of Culture, on the theme, “Giving Birth to an Emergent Wisdom Commons,” featuring Jordan Hall, Zak Stein, and Jamie Wheal. Feb. 22, 2021, 5:30-7:00 pm ET.
