Everyone, everywhere should be allowed to choose their identity

I listened to a talk about how one’s identities shift through life by Canadian journalist, author and public speaker Malcolm Gladwell this week, in which he contended that we have multiple identities and have the right to rank them in the order we choose. “One of the things that irritates me about the world is that the world sometimes chooses for you how to rank your own identities,” he said.

Gladwell, who is of mixed-race descent, went on to use the example of his mom, a black woman whom he thinks may have identified with different parts of her identity at different times.

“The idea that there are many parts of us and we choose which part is most important is, I think, what I picked up from all those shifting situations and environments when I was a kid,” said Gladwell.

People tend to have strong views about identity, whether it be racial, cultural, political or sexual. These views include being dismissive of it by asserting that “identity politics” can be polarising. Then there are some who feel that identity is a critical part of how they navigate the world, while others think of it as a way of ensuring that their experience is foregrounded and acknowledged as they move through the world.

I have found, however, that the more privileged you are, the more dismissive you are. This is often because you haven’t experienced persecution or discrimination simply owing to your categorisation in society.

So, if your identity or personhood has never been threatened but always centred, in fact, it is likely you would not understand the need to assert it because it is guaranteed.

But those who come from marginalised communities, who have faced the threat of an identity being extinguished, have to cling to it because they are often threatened with being stripped of it as a form of being subsumed into the dominant system. After all, once you can no longer assert who you are, you can be assimilated and moulded into being compliant and submissive.

I agree that we occupy multiple facets of being. The tension arises when society wants to tell you what or who you should be identifying as and at what time, as opposed to you asserting that yourself.

I, and many others I’m sure, was captivated by Hana-Rawhiti Kareariki Maipi-Clarke, a young New Zealand MP who recently broke into a traditional Māori haka in parliament as she defiantly tore up a bill that proposes the reinterpretation of the British Crown’s founding treaty with the Māori people.

The bill would effectively undo efforts to redress past colonial wrongs against Māori – wrongs that threatened to annihilate an entire people and render them invisible to the world.

The haka as performed by Maipi-Clarke was a powerful symbolic move and an inspiring invocation of Māorian culture and identity in the face of a potential injustice. It was a rousing call to express cultural pride, a means of storytelling and a way of asserting the right to their heritage and existence.

We are the sum total of our experiences, and we have a right to hold on to our identities. We have the right not to be dictated to by the world as to when we are allowed to stand strong in that. DM

This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.