So Much Depends on Identity
Lucinda Garthwaite, ILI Director
One hundred years ago this year, physician and poet William Carlos Williams published a little poem titled, “The Red Wheelbarrow.”
“So much depends/,” the poem begins, “upon//a red wheel/barrow//glazed with rain/water//beside the white/chickens.”
That’s it. That’s the poem. It’s widely anthologized and discussed. An internet search about what it means yields many results. But almost all agree the poem works by drawing both sharp distinctions, and painting a whole, familiar scene.
So much depends, the poem seems to say, on holding difference and relatedness at once.
So it is, I think with the ways people think of themselves in terms of what’s often called social identity, like race and class, gender, biological sex, religion, physical and mental ability and disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, nationality, and age.
So much depends on those differences. Social identity grounds culture – music, food, tradition. It makes community, the ease of being with others who see the world through a similar lens, who share history as well as experience of the present day. Social identity helps people understand themselves, gives shape to the way they move through the world.
It’s also true that many social identities are constructed things, often created to serve ill purposes. Consider race: Historians and social scientists have made the case that race was constructed to justify domination, not least enslavement, for economic gain. Historian Nell Irvin Painter says it plain, “race is an idea, not a fact.”
Recent genomic research underscores those assertions. Vence Bonham, deputy director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, summarizes consistent findings that “There is more genetic variation within self-identified racial groups than between them.” Increasing numbers of scientists argue for jettisoning concepts of race altogether. Michael Yudell, a professor of public health at Drexel University, says race is a concept “too crude to provide useful information.”
Still, there’s no denying the shared experience of racism. Anthropologists Audrey and Brian Smedley write, “Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real.”
Race is a fiction, yet racism is real, and so is culture based in the shared history and experienced of those who identify with a particular race. Which is fiction.
It gets confusing. But I keep going back to that poem: so much depends on difference and relatedness. Both.
Consider gender, and biological sex, persistently conflated but actually very different things. Biologists and geneticists have long known that a significant number of people are born with markers and physical traits that defy characterizations of male and female.
Those facts, writes developmental biologist Claire Ainsworth, “do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms.” Stubborn constructions of gender are at odds with biological facts. They’re also at odds with historical and changing realities of what it has meant and means to behave a “male” or “female.” At odds with emerging expressions of being human that eschew binary gender, or even gender at all.
And yet, to many around the world, sharply drawn definitions of gender are critical to cultural and religious expression, and to intimate understandings of one’s place in the world.
So much depends on social identity that losing it can lead to serious depression and anxiety. Social identity offers belonging, connectedness; for many it offers a road map to being human.
Confoundingly for some, social identity is often exclusionary. People who share a social identity, constructed or not, close ranks in communities, social gatherings, and other events. Those who are excluded ask, why separate when we want a more inclusive world? Aren’t we all of the same species, sharing what it means to be human?
It’s out of this place that some objections to social identity emerge, when people say things like “I don’t see color, I see people.” When they say, “You’re not a gay person to me, you’re just you.”
But, I’ve wanted to say more times than I’ve said it, I am gay, and I love that. I’m proud of what I have overcome, and what gay people have accomplished together. When I hear, “you’re not gay, you’re just you,” it’s a part of me being erased. I don’t want to lose that difference between us.
Some scientists would like to see the concept of race dissolved altogether. Some people would like to see gender dissolved as well. John Lennon wrote of a world without religion. But social identity is, for many, as precious as air, though much, much more particular. It’s not just a wheelbarrow, it’s a red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain. And it’s their glistening, red wheelbarrow.
It’s uncomfortable to live with paradox, with things that seem to clash against each other. I struggle to hold the particulars of social identity, especially those that have been constructed precisely to undermine shared humanity. It seems at odds with the world I want to know. But is it?
The world I want to know will affirm difference and relatedness. So, I’ll strive to hold them both - because so much depends on it.
___________National Human Genome Institute.
From the website, “we believe that advances in genomics research are transforming our understanding of human health and disease. Building on our leadership role in the initial sequencing of the human genome, we collaborate with the scientific and medical communities to enhance genomic technologies that accelerate breakthroughs and improve lives.”
Race as biology is fiction, racism as a social problem is real: Anthropological and historical perspectives on the social construction of race. By Aundry Smedley and Brian D. Smedley. American Psychology. January 2005.
Race is a Social Construct, Scientists Argue. By Megan Gannon. Scientific American. 2/5/2016
The History of White People. By Nel Irvin Painter. W.W Norton. 2011
For a 30 minute interview with Painter about this book, click here.
Sex Redefined: The Idea of 2 Sexes Is Overly Simplistic. By Claire Ainsworth. Nature Magazine. 10/28/2018.