The Box: It’s a [White] People Thing
Befuddled. That’s the word I would use to describe my efforts to understand where Yascha Mounk is coming from in The Identity Trap. On the one hand I weighed his personal background: his mother lost most of her family in the Holocost, he became a teenage activist noting Germany’s lack of support of refugees, and called out his country’s passive stance on Crimea. I imagined these highlights of his lived experience were foundational in his journey to pursue his studies and ultimately his career as an academic and scholar. So how did he crossover the bridge in this ideology to a place that discounts fundamental concepts of identity development?[1] Perhaps because it is cradled in American Whiteness. [2] I don’t have enough word count to get into this thing called “Whiteness” so I’ll just add a footnote to the best description I’ve found this week. [3] Or perhaps it’s purely an intellectual exercise and not a practical tool (unless can can be weaponized, which is the opposite of what Mounk suggests.) Surely, this trap is more than just something to think about and I suppose it is in certain circles, but rarely for those who are most impacted by the trap. [4] I mention these options of perspective to establish foundational understanding related to why this book pissed me off: White people just don’t get this whole racial “identity” thing, for whatever reason.
Like Mounk, my early life experience guided future paths. What’s different? Living as a person of color in a world of Whiteness. Fifty years prior to the current “wokeness” I grew up as the only Black in an all-white town. I escaped Oregon whiteness to Oakland, CA to earn my bachelors in Communications with a minor in Ethnic Studies. Went on to get a master’s at an Ivy League institution researching the social construction of race in America. Spent years working in departments related to “diversity” or “multiculturalism.” Decades later we’ve added letters to some and new acronyms for others. Diversity has grown to DEIB (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging), gay or lesbian has become LGBTQIA+, and gender is now a pronoun integrated into conversations we have everyday. Now, I’m researching a doctoral related to “us” in relation to “them,” as it relates to healing and wellness, while fearing I’m pigeon-holing myself into a field that is mentally and emotionally exhausting with little reward and minimal impact. And still, I’m here.
I write all this so that you (mostly white readers,) might believe that I have some level of expertise parallel to Mounk. I could ask you to just “trust me” when I say I’ve done more than merely observe or study. Yet, I know how important it is for white folks to have the right degree in the right study to be taken seriously which is why I have used so much of my word count to justify both experience and study. Was this necessary? Maybe not, if I didn’t live in America where I have to prove myself. Or teach my children to do the same.
My mother did not teach me. She didn’t have the knowledge. She was a white hippie chic, born in the 50s in that same rural town I grew up in, and although she did her best to help me struggle through my identity development, (books were how she chose to communicate – Zora Neal Hurston, Alice Walker, etc.,) there was no actual conversation about my Black identity. This is why I went on to study the conversation so I could come to an understanding about this whole “race thing.” Which is why I felt so insulted that Mounk would casually dismiss my experience, my history, as if I don’t see the contradictions in today’s “woke” identity politics (or Identity Synthesis as he coins it – which is such a white people thing – claiming new terminology for something that has existed before they showed up to name it. Chimamanda Ngozi articulated this strange process of identity labeling beautifully, “I didn’t know I was Black until I moved to America.” [5]
Becoming woke is also a white people thing. DEI trainings, corporate workshops, and new laws or organizational policies are largely geared towards the comfort and understanding of white people. People of color, and others who live outside the norm defined by white folks, have lived boxed existences for hundreds of years prior to neo-liberal white folks waking up to our reality. I get was Mounk is saying – identity based on race, gender or any other box is a trap that limits and confines. But when forced to live in that box, to break free I must first concede that the box has been constructed so it can be dissembled and I can get out.
So as I read Mounk, I found myself more and more in my feelings. As I write this blog, I’m in my feelings. The more I read and tried to process objectively, the more I would keep coming back to the same emotion. And it was not befuddled. As I wrote – which usually has a calming effect – the harder I tapped on the keys. I realized I was feeling more than one emotion. Urgency. Insistence. Clarity. Rage. I know I don’t know a lot of things. I know I may be wrong about quite a few things. But I also know, I know what I know, not the Psalm 46:10 kind of knowin’, but knowin’ like my people know – in my bones.
Dr. Clark talked about this in our last meeting: this is my thing. When a book shows up in required reading that does not represent what I know about my thing, I’m fired up. I’m ready to research, study, and pontificate. Yet despite this readiness, and with all the reading done thus far about lessening the emotional and reaching for the logical, I kept finding myself in an emotional space. I kept repeating the same mantra before I wrote the next sentence. “Hold on. Breathe.” I referred back to Kahneman. “System 2… engage.” And then Friedman. “Am I feeling anxious?” Or all the way back to Coven. “Have I reached a threshold?” I spent time reflecting – more than I have with any other of our readings – and I’m clear: Mounk speaks only partial truth. Is it my role to fill in the blanks? Sigh. If the answer is yes, that feels exhausting. It’s largely up to the people of color in the room to fill in the blanks for white folks. I’ve decided I’m not going to do that today. I’ve got enough synthesis to work through. And y’all ain’t paying me. But….
This week God has been pretty loud in His wisdom. It manifested in a random reel about 1) worship and 2) last night’s bible study about gifts of the spirit. First, worship is not about the songs we sing before service, it’s about the sacrifice we make between services. Secondly, I know my gift (teaching). So in an act of worship, even when I don’t feel like it, I am going to teach this one thing – and it is not going to come from a German-American political scientist who got his degree from Harvard. I’m going to quote myself, the Black girl whose grandfather was Swiss-German. The woman who was stereotyped and marginalized as Black, who eventually got her graduate degree from Cornell University as a single mother. Though we have things in common, Mr. Mounk, I respectfully disagree. Race IS the “dividing line of life” for those who live a racialized existence. [6] We don’t want to walk this line. We would love to “just be” human, but we don’t have that privilege.
Further, it’s not a liberal or conservative thing. [7] It’s a common, every day thing. Simplification of a complex history re-traumatizes generations of people who have suffered and continue to struggle daily under the cloak of invisibility and silence. We didn’t create the boxes. We don’t benefit from them except to get scraps of resources distributed by systems created to determine who gets what and how much – all based on the boxes we are stuffed into. Your ideology simply adds fuel to be used by other identities – who were conveniently not studied in your book, i.e. right-wing conservatives – to justify dismissal of the reality that manifests in the moments of the lives who exist in these boxed identities. If we want to live in a just and equitable world, we must consider identity as an integral part of our being so we can finally come to a place of peace with simply “being” as we have the divine right to be – God designed, outside of the box. Anything less is a [fill in the blank/box] worldly thing.
[1] https://umana-taylorlab.gse.harvard.edu/files/gse-umana-taylorlab/files/murchison_eri_fact_sheet.pdf
[2] https://medium.com/3streams/the-conspicuous-absence-of-white-identity-from-yascha-mounks-trap-aacb860788b0
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/20/the-invention-of-whiteness-long-history-dangerous-idea
[4] https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/white-privilege
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prlY0YDAQPM
[6] Yascha Mounk, The Great Experiment (New York: Harvard University Press, 2019)
[7] Yascha Mounk, The Identity Trap (New York: Harvard University Press, 2018)
About the Author
Erica Briggs
5 responses to “The Box: It’s a [White] People Thing”
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Erica,
I have been looking forward to your post, wanting to learn from your perspective. Thank you for your honest reflection.
Hi Erica, thank you for your post.
As you strongly disagree with Mounk’s assessment of the identity synthesis, can you share your thoughts on an alternative to reduce the polarization in our country?
I guess I am also a bit confused by your post. I am a Japanese-American, so I am half white. It feels like there is an over generalization of white people (which I can only half-way identify with), so I’m not sure what to do with that, as it didn’t seem to leave much room for nuance. Can you help me understand your perspective on the room for nuance?
I can answer both your questions with the same answer. Engage in conversation with the person first, as an individual human being and all the divine uniqueness they exhibit, those lovely nuances you refer to. I’d proceed this way unless they showed me they prefer their box, or try to put me in box they think I should be in. Then I decide if I want to join them, which I usually don’t simply because I have spent too much of my life trying to get out of the box. I value my freedom too much to waste time explaining why the box doesn’t fit. If they prefer it for themselves, fine. I don’t judge. I understand how comfortable the box can be, it feels safe, consistent, and supported by the rest of the world. Nuance introduces cracks in the box which makes some folks nervous. It’s easier to create a new box (i.e. Bi-racial) as opposed to getting rid of the boxes altogether- which I believe is the answer in order to fully see both our similarities and that which makes us so unique.
Hi Erica,
I’ll tag on to Christy’s dialogue. I appreciate your answer to her above: “It’s easier to create a new box (i.e. Bi-racial) as opposed to getting rid of the boxes altogether- which I believe is the answer in order to fully see both our similarities and that which makes us so unique.” As someone who is a minority in my world and harassed daily because of gender and race, I agree getting rid of boxes would help us all more easily thrive in our worlds.
What do you think are practical steps that individuals can take to “get [rid] of the box” in their own lives?
What are you doing to help yourself not put all “white people” in a box?
Thanks for the question, Kari. As I mentioned in my response to Christy, I wait for people to show me themselves who they are and respond accordingly. I also find myself making a conscious effort – especially here in Oregon, a predominately white space – to gauge race on a sliding scale, rather than a set condition. This would take way too many words to breakdown but I recognize that there is considerable “within group” diversity for every “box.”