yesterday, i worked on the upcoming identity issue of blueprintreview, and mailed with a friend about the different roles each of us takes / plays / represents throughout a day: partner, colleague, friend, customer.. - and this morning, while browsing blogs, i ran into a post that very much is about identity, here the link and a quote:
We Are Not One. We Are More.
We are not simply our appearance.
We are not simply our employment.
We are not simply our gender.
We are not simply our ethnicity.
We are everything we do, connect with, and more.
When someone wants to hurt you or belittle you, they will often try to characterize you as just one thing. Always remember, you are more.
such important lines. and the ending note, about the mechanism of belittling others by characterizing them as 'just one thing' brought me back to an essay that i wrote with a friend, a reflection that moves from racism to ethnical food, to political in/correctness, to skin colour and to ethnical mockings. it includes passages that are very much about this belittling by reducing someone - or a whole group - to just one thing. here's a quote:
"Seen like that, it is a little amusing that racial/ethnic slurs are sometimes based on the food people eat - garlic-eater, beaner, kraut, limey (british). Actually, the more I think of it, the funnier it is, because it is so stupid that this is all the better we can do — to make fun of the food."
seen from that angle, this kind of name-calling is a perfect example of the cruel psychological mechanism of belittling. here's the link to the whole essay which originally got published in Sage of Consciousness: "Food Slurs: an e-flection on multicultural mockings"
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