November Blog-Goldie Johnson

Identity Construction

Identity is constructed through culture. It seems culture has its own idea of how everyone’s identity should be formed. In the crooked room, it talks about how black women are stereotyped into one of three categories: Mammy, Jezebel and Sapphire. It compares it to them standing in a crooked room, unable to stand up straight and be who they are because they have been taught that this is what other people except out of them. I remember making a friend in a drama camp I went to over one spring break in my high school years. She was an African-American girl and we got along really well. I didn’t know about these stereotypes then and she is one person I didn’t see play into them. I haven’t talked to her in years because we grew apart and lived so far away, but I remember seeing a Facebook post she had made a while ago, talking about this. It surprised me because I had never thought of her struggling with this until she posted it. She talked about the stereotype of the “female back friend” and how some of her white friends had been putting her in that box and how tired she was of it. It was a good thing for her to post, because it made me think that maybe there is more to this myth that meets the eye.

I know the ‘loud, female, black friend” stereotype well. I’ve seen it in movies, in shows, and even heard people talk about it. And I didn’t think much of it until I saw my friend’s Facebook post. When I read this and when we talked about this in class that was one of the first things that I thought of.

A woman talking about the Stereotypes of Mammy, Jezebel and Sapphire: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNkECP9OwGE

Our culture has other ideas for men. For men, there is a stereotype that to be a “manly man” you are not allowed to be afraid. Or show any other “negative” emotion beside anger. When Andres Gomez talked about having so much fear as a kid, it reminded me of me when I was little. But I was allowed to be afraid. If I had been a male would it have been different? He talked about changing and making a switch to doing all the things he was afraid of instead of cowering away. He did this at a very young age, because that is how men were supposed to be. Not afraid, but brave. It also fed into that men should fight. Men should fight their own feelings. The myth that men are fighters has been hammered away at so many times within our culture, so many people just accept it as fact now without questioning it.  

10 Responses to the Phrase “Man Up”- Warning Profanity- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFoBaTkPgco

There are other stereotypes and identities that this culture tries to smash people into, whether that’s a gender box, a race box, a religion box or something else. We see people represented in the media and we as humans tend to think that’s the truth, when really everyone is different and no one should be shoved into any sort of box.