Identity

As someone who is going to graduate in exactly 72 days, and being the first person in my entire family to graduate, it's definitely a huge life change to face. And for the past half a year, it seems my entire person keeps changing around. At first, I thought I was just a late bloomer to figure out who I am. Fortunately, Tatum's book "Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?" offers welcome comfort about the process of defining an identity. According to Tatum, the process of defining one's identity goes through multiple phases. Sometimes, people go through these phases multiple times throughout their lives.

One of the aspects of identity that many come into contact with is that of race. I never really thought about my race. Part of that is because of the way I grew up.

Growing up, my dad's side of the family never really got together or talked about anything serious when they did, so I won't talk about them much. My mother's mother's side of the family was about as racist as they come without actually shooting colored people. They threw around the "n-word" like it was nothing and could tell racist jokes all day long. That was until one of my cousins married a black man. I'm not sure if they started being afraid to say anything racist or if they suddenly became aware of how wrong many of their stereotypes were.

Now, my mother's father's side of the family was the opposite. One of my favorite stories is about my great-grandfather, who founded a church in Concord, NC. When he opened the church, a man offered him a lot of money to turn black people away from the church. He refused. So, growing up in that church until I was about 17 years old meant I was around both black and white people all the time. While I might have seen color, it was more a matter of thinking that it was cool that people had different skin tones. After all, if everyone looked the same, people would be boring to look at.

I did wonder in high school why there weren't many colored teenagers. Part of that was the fact that not many colored people lived within my school district. Most of them lived out in Spencer, NC, which was what I knew as "the bad part of town." Looking back, I didn't know why it was bad. I knew that there were some "bad" people out that way, but never really connected it with race. I'm sure if I knew more about housing prices, I could see that it was cheaper to live out there.

 It wasn't until I started my first "real" job in fast food that I actually thought about being white. One night, I was the only white worker in the store. The rest were black. They were all people I had worked with for many weeks at this point, so I felt comfortable around them. One man came up to me, though, and said  something along the lines of, "How does it feel being the only white person here? Now you know how we feel." It was the first time I had felt awkward about my whiteness. I didn't say much the rest of my shift. The people I had been perfectly comfortable with turned into people that I didn't know how to act around because my whiteness had been thrown in my face.

This week was the first time I'd thought about my race identity. I continue still to not think about it as often as I think about, say, my religious identity or my age identity or even how I fit into my family and coworkers. I must say, I feel I have a long way to go before I figure myself out - not to mention before I figure out how my upbringing reflects on how I view the world and start to tweak it if need be.