What is Your Identity?

Recently when I checked out at my grocers I had my typical conversation with the bagger and the checker.  I have been going to this grocer for years, and these two have worked there for years.  In the course of weekly trips to stock my pantry we have had short conversations in which we have learned a bit about one another – our families, our ups, our downs, our hometowns, our sports teams, our likes and dislikes, etc.  We are not really friends.  I refer to them as the tall, good bagger and the checker from the Midwest.  They probably refer to me as something like the old lady who always buys Vernors and potato chips.  I think we all enjoy our brief conversations.  Before and after I enter their checkout space, I sometimes hear them have similar type conversations or joking with one another.

The bagger is Black.  The checker is what one might refer to as a Redneck.  I am an old white lady.  Somehow these external identifying characteristics have never interfered with our jovial and caring interactions.

Until, that is, the Left made it impossible to ignore the dehumanizing and superficial characteristics of identity politics.  About halfway through our most recent interaction, into my mind came the currently unavoidable disruptive voice of identity politics.  I wondered if the Black bagger was thinking of me as some “Karen” type racist or some sort of white supremacist.  I wondered how the Redneck and the Black really felt about one another.  Did the Redneck have a confederate flag tucked away somewhere?  Was the Black man an active supporter of BLM and its lists of demands against Whites?  These and other such thoughts crept into my brain, making me for the first time ever self-conscious as we conducted our banter.  That is, it interfered with our ability to relate to one another as the human beings that we are.

And then I reminded myself that is exactly what we are – individual human beings, each with our own story.  We are not one-dimensional representatives of Left-defined identity groups.  But, then, why would anyone want us to see one another as if we were? I see two possible reasons.

First, it is possible that the Left, who would define us all one-dimensionally based upon the identity group into which they place us, actually see people this way.  Perhaps, because they live in their own one-dimensional worlds, not ever really interacting with those unlike them, they are only able to see others by external and superficial characteristics which they then use as definitions of the entire person of anyone possessing those characteristics. 

The second possible reason is more sinister: dividing people into one-dimensional identify groups serves a deeper purpose of which many Leftists are fully aware.  If you can get people to accept that they are defined by one characteristic only, then create the perception of their identity placement as victimhood,  and then set various defined identity groups against one another, you have a good breeding ground for fomenting some sort of Socialist revolution. 

I think both reasons are valid explanations.  I also think that both are toxic to society and to humanity.  Somehow the Left has managed to convince us that it is OK to define people not as people but as one-dimensional members of one or another identity group.  At the same time they have encouraged the rise of the victim status and its codependent partner – hate for some other identity group.   

People, more and more afraid to speak their own individual minds, thus become more and more defined by the identity group into which someone else places them.  As everyone more and more goes to their own separate corner, it becomes harder and harder to join together as complex individuals each with individual characteristics yet all a part of one human race.

As these divisive techniques and results of identity politics more frequently creep into my brain, I will try to remember the innocent and very human interactions between the Bagger, the Checker, and Me.  Not defined by external or superficial characteristics.  Defined by stories of each’s family and individual history and experiences.  Unique to each of us.  Not one of a group but one of a kind.

These are the interactions that a healthy society has and that it needs.  They used to be fairly common.  But now, overshadowed by the hateful specter of identity politics, they become more and more rare. If we are to save ourselves – both individualy and as a part of humanity – and if we are to save our society and its freedoms, we must cast off any identity that is not uniquely our own and we must see only the full and unique identity of others.  We must stop defining and being defined by group labels.  To the Left that pushes them more and more forcefully upon us we must just say NO.