The Identity Crisis

I can really like No Telephone to Heaven. Mostly because I can relate to Clare’s perceived identity crisis. The confusion of her “mixed” identity is amplified in her constant inability to fit in no matter what place or space she places herself in. I think one’s racial (thus social) identity crisis is not caused by not knowing who you are in the context of yourself but in the context of a world interrupted by colonialism that insists on living with a pre-colonial mindset. A post-colonial world using pre-colonial standards of identification will leave anyone who thinks long enough confused. It is not that you are lost but that the world has not updated its understanding of you to a 21^st century globalized context which leaves you frustrated. It’s not that you don’t know who you are; it’s that you can’t be who they expect you to be. It’s not black and white for you. The illogical logic of race has no application to a 21^st century body. Think of the way we label people “African American”, or the way people say I’m French or I’m Jamaican because their grandparents were from there, or those who would claim “I’m half-Italian.” I mean how can you be half a nationality? How can a Jamaican be born in America, or an African be born in Alabama? This is impossible in reality, but apparently not in racial theory. It is these inconsistencies that leave one without identity in a world with such outdated categories. My parents have been here longer than most Europeans so how am I still fall under the hyphenated category of African but whites are just American? And how could I be African and American? I was either born in one place or the other. So I was born in America yet oftentimes I find myself feeling like a foreigner here. It cannot be because my forefathers were immigrants because the founding fathers were immigrants. It feels like I am an outcast in my own home. Does African-American simply mean that I am and my children will always be refugees in their own homeland? That we will never be welcome, that we will never be able to fly the American flag in our yards here in Smalltown, AL without feeling mixed feelings and a conflict of identity? Will the second-border of whiteness as American always be so tightly patrolled to disbar people of color from the American identity? Being American seems to have a silent (white) in front of it. It appears that all others are not truly included within the definition of American if they do not first fit into the structure of whiteness. We are constantly disenfranchised from partaking in the social atmosphere of our peers because to them we are African. We are “different.” Because of my their (American) whiteness and my blackness, many see themselves more related to people across the world than to the people they grew up in the same city with. Whiteness means that you are the same as an Englishman and I am the same as an African. But I have nothing in common with a continent on which I have never lived. We don’t eat the same foods, or speak the same languages, yet we are supposed to be culturally identical, more so than my English speaking hamburger eating peers. Yes, somehow I am grouped in the geographically proximity with people millions of miles away and not with the person across the table from me. In some insane way I am considered historically contiguous with millions of people in numerous countries and numerous continents that me nor my ancestors ever stepped foot on, but not with the country we grew up in. This is the logic of race theory. It can leave people of color like me and Clare frustrated with the confusion of the world’s delusional duality expressed in the term African-American, or with the word “Creole” and leave people not of color oblivious to their own identities as a citizen of the world and nothing more, as my kinsmen and nothing less. It is the aforementioned logic that is confused, not our identities. It is the system that is lost, not I. I am American. That sentence doesn’t confused me one bit, but it will confuse the ones around me who want to label me by an outdated, disproven system of human race that is perplexed that I have not need to fit into it.