On Identity

Amin Maalouf is a Lebanese-born writer who moved to France when he was 27 years old. He writes in French although he speaks fluent Arabic. He is a Christian, not a Muslim. With the incisiveness of a philosopher, Maalouf discusses the inquiry into and the dangers of identity. I am reading his short, but intense book “On Identity,” because in this wildly coded presidential election, we are experiencing America’s brand of identity politics.

“The identity a person lays claim to is often based, in reverse, on that of his enemy.”

Every time John McCain or Sarah Palin asks the question: Just who is Barack Obama? in essence they are questioning his identity. They are eliciting caution, fear, and racial hostility from their white audiences. (There were only 36 African American delegates at the Republican National Convention.) As the son of a white woman and an African father, a man who left the family when Barack was only two, does Obama consider himself white, having been raised by a white mother and her white parents, or black, as he is seen by the world? In his first memoir, “Dreams from my Father,” Obama explains how he journeyed to his sense of self, to his identity as an African American man in the true sense of the word.

“…each individual identity: it is complex, unique and irreplaceable.”

Yet he has carefully avoided the issue of race throughout the campaign. With the one exception during the primary when he responded to the revelations about his then pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright whose fiery sermons appeared on YouTube and then repeatedly on every major news network. That speech, as eloquent and touching as it was, appears to be his only major statement on race.

According to Maalouf, one of the dangers of identity, especially since most of us have complex and specific sources of identity, is that no matter what we say, we are questioned as to what is our one true self.

“It presupposes that ‘deep down inside’ everyone there is just one affiliation that really matters, a kind of ‘fundamental truth’ about each individual, an ‘essence’ determined once and for all at birth, never to change thereafter.”

By asking repeatedly who is Barack Obama, McCain and Palin are piercing into the depths of white distrust of African Americans, unleashing a rabid violence that is associated with the foreign, the unknown, the stranger, especially the dark skinned stranger.

For us to move forward, we must examine our attitudes towards race. We must understand how much we limit our potential, and the potential of others through our labeling.

"For it is often the way we look at other people that imprisons them within their own narrowest allegiances. And it is also the way we look at them that may set them free."