Content Objectives
This unit focuses on a selection of short readings or excerpts from a variety of genres and writers. The pieces are selected based on themes and issues that I hope will help the students gain a better understanding of what shapes their own identities while becoming more respectful of and empathetic toward those whose identities may be far different from their own. It is important that students understand that everyone has reasons why they interact with the world in a certain way, and that people should be free to exist and express their identities in any way they feel comfortable.
The types of literature we will cover are fiction (novels, short stories), expository and persuasive nonfiction (essays, speeches), memoir, and poetry. We will read excerpts for the sake of time constraints, but I will urge the students to seek the full texts outside of class. The readings represent a variety of American identities (race, class, sex, gender, sexuality) that the students will either identify with personally (sameness) or will encounter over the course of their lives (difference).
I will begin the unit by defining identity and having the students define identity before we focus on concrete and then abstract aspects of identity. Students will examine and express concrete, physical features of identity before we begin exploring intangible, abstract aspects of identity.
Defining Identity
Before the students can really begin exploring “kinds” of identities, we will need to address an essential question: What is identity? Philosopher Hilde Lindemann Nelson describes it as “the interaction of a person’s self-conception with how others conceive her: identities are the understandings we have of ourselves and others.”2 The majority of this interaction takes place unconsciously, but developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson notes that the process becomes conscious when “inner conditions and outer circumstances combine to aggravate a painful, or elated ‘identity consciousness.’”3 In order to really define this conscious identity, we need to look at texts that address these moments of aggravation or elation.
Identities based on social indicators often intersect and create a spectrum of identities on which “types” of identities are interconnected/intertwined in multiple ways to create unique identities/voices. We now understand these overlapping “types” of identities as intersectionality. Kimberlé Crenshaw first coined the term “intersectionality” in her 1989 legal text entitled “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” to explain how black women were marginalized in both the feminist and anti-racist movements because they didn’t fit perfectly into either group even though their identities were “multiply-burdened” as an intersection of the two.4 Today, intersectionality has expanded to include other marginalized groups. In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Christine Emba explains:
Although the term was originally used to describe how race and gender could intersect as forms of oppression, intersectionality has broadened to encompass a number of additional social factors — sexual orientation, nationality, class, disability and others.5
The broadened concept of intersectionality is important to share with students. The authors we will explore as a part of this unit, as well as the students themselves, will embody intersectionality as we understand it today. We will explore how the intersectionality of identities creates each individual voice. Through the exploration of texts from authors who represent a variety of identities, students should begin to understand their own, likely intersectional, identities.
From Physical to Abstract Identities
The concept of identity is fairly abstract, and my students have difficulties understanding abstractions. I believe these difficulties are developmentally based, and I only have to look back at my educational psychology notes to remember that Jean Piaget’s “formal operational stage,” where children begin thinking in abstract ways, occurs from age eleven through adulthood. From my observations and experience, Piaget’s theory is fairly accurate, but many of my students seem to take a little longer to begin thinking abstractly because they are rarely asked to think critically or metacognitively outside of the classroom.
In order to build a bridge from students’ experiences to abstract thinking, it will be helpful to begin in the physical realm. The physical body is concrete and my students are acutely aware of their bodies, so why not begin there? Aspects of identity manifest physically in, on, or through the body, and can be experienced with the senses. Race, class, sexuality, and gender all leave traces on our physical bodies, sometimes changing them (leaving marks or transitioning) or erasing them entirely.
These manifestations are not always damaging or traumatic, and we can explore the more celebratory side of physical identity by starting with a piece from Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street entitled “Hairs.” In “Hairs,” the main character, Esperanza Cordero, describes the different heads of hair in her family. She quickly glosses over Papa’s hair, her own hair, Carlos’ hair, Nenny’s hair, and Kiki’s hair before lingering on her mother’s hair, which merits a whole paragraph of imagery. Everyone’s hair is a part of their identity, and students can use this short chapter as a model for their own writing about hair. They can describe their own hair along with the hair of their family members, taking more time to describe the hair belonging to the person most important to them, or the person whose hair is a bigger part of their identity. A person’s hair is also an indicator of race or culture, which is also important to discuss with my students.
From hair we can move to teeth. While the majority of this unit’s content features texts from persons of color, I am also interested in something that affected me personally: poverty manifesting in the teeth, which isn’t exclusive to white poverty or my personal experience. Nevertheless, I found an easily accessible short essay entitled “Filling,” by Sailor Holladay, a white woman who grew up working class. I, like Holladay, “come from a long line of bad teeth.”6 Since many of my students assume that most white people are wealthy, I think it is important that they read texts that tell a different story. We all have teeth, but they are in various stages of repair or disrepair often based on income. If you’re genetically predisposed to having “bad” teeth, the preventative care you receive is directly tied to your circumstances. I knew I made it out of poverty once I stopped getting cavities and was able to start replacing the metal fillings with porcelain, but I still fear the stereotype of the toothless hillbilly that reappeared on the “throwback” Mountain Dew label. Mountain Dew ruined and continues to ruin many Appalachian teeth.
Teeth naturally bring us to food, which my students could talk about for hours. My students already realize that diet is a part of their identities, so the key to this aspect of the unit is to get the students to express their identities through food writing. Before they explore food through their own writing, it is important for the students to read how other authors have shown parts of their identities. Given the emphasis on nonfiction reading and essay writing in eighth grade, the majority of my ninth graders will be very inexperienced with poetry outside of song lyrics. They still struggle with figurative language that isn’t obvious, and they have pretty limited vocabularies. But perhaps the way to poetry is through the stomach. Kevin Young edited a food-themed anthology called The Hungry Ear: Poems of Food & Drink that has many poems that my students will find accessible and enjoyable. Beyond the obvious food references and food imagery that will appeal to their love of all things tangible, students will be able to begin grasping deeper, more abstract meaning from the poems.
It would be great to begin discussing food poetry with “Butter,” a poem by Elizabeth Alexander, which is a great example of how a poet can use descriptions of food to express her racial identity. She moves from concrete descriptions of dishes containing butter, but then ends with an allusion to a racial stereotype that she both rejects and embraces: “We are/Mumbo and Jumbo’s children despite/historical revision, despite/our parent’s efforts, glowing from the inside/out, one hundred megawatts of butter.”7 In one stroke, she rejects “historical revision” in order to embrace the overtly racist image of Sambo. In “Butter,” Alexander doesn’t care that the food is stereotypical because in these childhood memories, she and her brother are joyful and glowing… and butter makes everything taste better. We can celebrate and critique our identities by reading and writing about the things we eat.
Our voices, our vocabulary and our accents, are also part of our identities. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance recalls a moment when, among other class markers, he noticed that people in power had “TV accents” while he and his family did not. He was in court with his family after a traumatic incident happened to him at the hands of his mother, and he takes in the scene around him:
I remember sitting in that busy courtroom, with half a dozen other families all around, and thinking they looked just like us. The moms and dads and grandparents didn’t wear suits like the lawyers and judge. They wore sweatpants and stretchy pants and T-shirts. Their hair was a bit frizzy. And it was the first time I noticed “TV accents”—the neutral accent that so many news anchors had. The social workers and the judge and the lawyer all had TV accents. None of us did. Those people who ran the courthouse were different from us. The people subjected to it were not.8
This moment seems to be when young Vance gets his first taste of class differences vis-à-vis different accents and wardrobes. While Vance is referring to how “hillbillies” talk versus a “neutral” accent, my students can easily make the jump from Vance’s experience to their own experiences with “TV accents” or with people who do not use the same slang that they do. OR the fact that one of their teachers always wears business suits, so she is “classy.” Vance’s memoir touches on manifestations of class identity that I believe will resonate with the students. Particularly, I will have the students read an excerpt from page 69-80, which recounts the incident with his mother, the courtroom, and a trip to California that made him further realize his hillbilly identity. On the surface, J. D. Vance is the picture of the white privilege he certainly benefits from as an adult. However, his identity is more complicated beneath his surface markers, and I think my students will be surprised by how much they can relate to this part of his memoir.
Hair, food, teeth, and voices can all be experienced via the senses. While we may have different hair, eat different food, have different dental histories, and different voices, humans have these features pretty universally. By being rooted in the physical realm, students can easily understand how identity manifests in tangible ways. Once we have explored the physical realm of identity, we can begin exploring how we can infer or draw conclusions about aspects of a person’s abstract identity based on how abstract concepts affect their physical bodies.
Racial Identity
In Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates asks, “In accepting both the chaos of history and the fact of my total end, I was freed to truly consider how I wished to live—specifically, how do I live free in this black body?”9 Coates acknowledges and understands history’s influence on his identity, and that identity is still in pursuit of liberation. While there are limitations when addressing history’s influence on individual identities, history is integral to African-American identity as explored in the pieces my students will read in this unit. James Baldwin echoes Booker T. Washington. Claudia Rankine and Ta-Nehisi Coates echo James Baldwin. The more things change, the more things stay the same. We remain “down in the ditch” that Booker T. Washington warned us about in “An Address on Abraham Lincoln.”10 In an essay entitled “Many Thousands Gone”, James Baldwin explains how African Americans, as all people, cannot escape their historical origins:
For it means something to be a Negro, after all, as it means something to have been born in Ireland or in China, to live where one sees space and sky or to live where one sees nothing but rubble or nothing but high buildings. We cannot escape our origins, however hard we try, those origins which contain the key—could we but find it—to all that we later become.11
Your ancestors’ origins, triumphs, and traumas mean something; their lives and experiences are a part of your identity, and knowing those events and their effects can help you make sense of how you interact with the world. Even if you do not know your origin stories, you cannot escape their effects. Baldwin continues: “The man does not remember the hand that struck him, the darkness that frightened him, as a child; nevertheless, the hand and the darkness remain with him, indivisible from himself forever, part of the passion that drives him wherever he thinks to take flight.”12 You may not know or remember the events that shaped your life, but those experiences stay with you. They are a part of your identity, and they influence how you experience and respond to everything you encounter. You cannot control those automatic responses. Conversely, in Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine conveys the same inescapable influence of one’s origins in a more nuanced way:
To live through the days sometimes you moan like a deer. Sometimes you sigh. The world says stop that. Another sigh. Another stop that. Moaning elicits laughter, sighing upsets. Perhaps each sigh is drawn into existence to pull in, pull under, who knows; truth be told, you could no more control those sighs than that which brings the sighs about.13
You cannot control your reaction, just as you cannot control the events that spark the reaction. Both Baldwin and Rankine seem to describe the ultimate effect that a history of violence and subjugation has on an individual: meaning and responses that were predetermined by what came before.
Ta-Nehisi Coates writes to his son in Between the World and Me, which evokes James Baldwin’s “A Letter to My Nephew.” Excerpts from Coates can be read alongside Baldwin’s letter in its entirety where they both speak of the realities of black identities in the United States fifty-three years apart: Coates published Between the World and Me in 2015 and Baldwin wrote his letter in 1962, exactly ninety-nine years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. When reading the two, one is immediately struck by just how little has changed in the half-century between the texts. Baldwin and Coates are participating in the “running record” of racial identity, in which they detail just how firmly we have remained in the ditch. Baldwin explains:
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that for the heart of the matter is here and the crux of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.14
The letter is attempting to offer explanation with a warning that young James is going to face subjugation and oppression simply because history placed him there. The irony of “this innocent country” is lost on no one, and the dispute with this country continues to this day with new voices interrogating this country and its violently imposed racial identities. Coates adds his voice, addressing his son but inviting all of us to witness:
I did not tell you that it would be okay, because I have never believed it would be okay. What I told you is what your grandparents tried to tell me: that this is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find some way to live within the all of it. I tell you now that the question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.15
Both Baldwin’s argument and Coates’s “question” have the same crux, which is essentially a continuance of acknowledgement and interrogation. Both writers advise the next generation to recognize that this world is theirs, and they must learn how to live in it. Or as Nas (and Pete Rock) sang in the time between Baldwin and Coates, almost as a meditation: “It’s mine, it's mine, it's mine - whose world is this?/It's mine, it's mine, it's mine - whose world is this?/The world is yours, the world is yours.”16
I intend to have students read Baldwin’s letter alongside excerpts from Coates and excerpts from Rankine. They will compare and contrast the three authors’ works, likely noting more similarities than differences. When students read these texts and make the connections between them, they will also see where they can contribute to the conversation. My students are very aware of their races, but the majority of them are too busy living to really examine how it affects their identities and conditions. Janet Mock explains this functional blindness well when remembering the women in her family:
My grandmother and my two aunts were an exhibition in resilience and resourcefulness and black womanhood. They rarely talked about the unfairness of the world with the words that I use now with my social justice friends, words like intersectionality and equality, oppression, and discrimination. They didn’t discuss those things because they were too busy living it, navigating it, surviving it.17
My students, like Mock’s grandmother and two aunts, are resilient and resourceful, but they really have not had the time to think about these social justice concepts. By contextualizing and offering voices of African American writers who came before them, my students should be able to see themselves and their families reflected in the texts.
Gender and Sexual Identity
Most students can understand how their personal experiences contribute to their own burgeoning identities, but they have very little exposure to the experiences of people different from them. Most personal experiences that people experience are directly related to the intersections of their societal indicators.
While some students already identify as LGBTQ or questioning, one of this unit’s goals is to tackle homophobia and transphobia (or the internalized versions of both) by sharing fictional narratives, poems, and memoirs about and/or by LGBTQ writers. Because of the homophobia I have witnessed within my school’s community, I believe it will be most effective to read texts that aren’t overtly “gay,” because the students would shut it out quickly. But here’s the thing: gender and sexual identity are everywhere. LGBTQ writers are woven throughout the whole unit. The fact that LGBTQ writers have always been here and will continue to be here is an essential understanding I need my students to grasp. Being queer is not abnormal; it just is and will continue to be.
The fact that Janet Mock appears throughout this unit is not an accident. She is a visible, living example of intersectionality. She is transsexual, native Hawaiian and African American, female, a former sex worker, and a sexual abuse survivor who grew up in poverty. Her identity is an intersection of all of her societal indicators and experiences. As we read, we will explore other authors whose intersectionality includes their gender identity and sexual orientation. I am especially interested in exploring poetry by LGBTQ poets of color, which include Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Langston Hughes. By highlighting these intersectional writers and ensuring their visibility, students will ideally become more comfortable with these types of identities in textual representation and in real life.
Comments: