In Harris-Perry’s chapter titled “Crooked Room”, she discusses how black women in society have these identities assigned to them by society. She took a quote from Charles Taylor in this chapter and it says, “A person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves” (p. 43). What I found so intriguing in this quote is that it is packed with so much truth that I can myself relate to on a personal level.
Being a biracial woman, I have experienced a suffocating amount of identities that I have placed myself into. Now, being 21 years old, I still struggle to figure out who I am and who I want to be. I have realized however that a lot of my struggle has come from the fact that for basically all my years in school and in society I have been associated with certain attributes because of what I look like. Those attributes which were associated with me stuck on like glue. I began to believe that those attributes were who I had to be because it was what was expected of me as a biracial woman. I have experienced this from both sides of my heritage; black and white. I have felt like I don’t belong anywhere because I wasn’t meeting the expectations placed on me.
Thinking about identity, and this quote. I was placed in this confining box by society and thus suffered the consequences of feeling lost and unsure where I can fit and who I can be. I think this can apply to a lot of citizens in this country today. I think we can look at social movements like Black Lives Matter and misunderstand because we decide to place these individuals into a box in hopes to make them fit and in hopes for us to understand. What we don’t realize however is that the labels that we continually push onto people confine them and creates this reality in them that shouldn’t exist. I consistently wonder what would happen if we ceased to label people, and what effect that would have on our ability to create our own identities. In a YouTube video by Prince Ea, he talks about how the color of our skin should not be something that is used to define who we are. He says, “I am not black, I mean that’s what the world calls me, but it’s not me.” This is crucial to me in that my skin color is not the only thing that applies to me. Even things that are associated with people of my race do not define me and it shouldn’t for anyone else. It should not create my identity for me. I should have the chance to do that for myself.
See YouTube video here.
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