Fulfilling Fictitious Functions

Individual identity or artfully crafted projected identity is excellent and goodness knows we lack so severely in our nearly hegemonic (when we choose to be) society, that creative individualism. But besides dress sense and whatnot, we have race, religion and ethnicity and all of which begins to sour when we compare, divide and discriminate.

Determining a person’s mental capacity based on the size of their breasts or the amount of melanin in their skin is ridiculous; privileging and bestowing power on another based on their height, size of their noses or colour of their hair is absurd.

How can we allow such inane distinctions or uphold these definitions? Because it serves a function, does it not? Just like we need poverty or social deviants (criminals), we need a lesser-advantaged race (ethnicity or something) through which we can live vicariously and use as a teaching example for our children (because goodness knows we are too superior to stray). Besides, they are fun to mock with senseless jokes based on nothing more than ignorance and they therefore function as a form of entertainment in which we seek solace or escape from our own dreary lives.

So what really is race, religion or ethnicity? If these are abstract concepts then why do we still have them shoved so determinedly next to our faces on our identity cards?

The reason is that you need to identify me through my various identities for the instinct of fitting me into a schema. You need me to look a certain way so that you can place me into the predetermined social construct of what I will be. This is so that you will know quickly – sometimes too quickly – if I will rape, rob or render you speechless with my wealth and intelligence.

But who drew those lines and who assigned those qualities or faults? Cleary, separation by identities is purely functional for the beings that possess another abstract concept – power.

The only plausible reason why religion or “race” is called into play is when one wants to, under a faction, exclude their excluder thereby placing themselves in exactly the same place of that ex-excluder except that this new person will be drab in holy garb.

Perhaps those given power also felt it was necessary to first discount others to glean their people’s identity. That is, this “we” could only be if there is a “them” and this “them” is derogatory and situated on the periphery.

Then this negation of a “them” is that source of unnecessary conflict. The socially constructed margins that preach to preserve uniqueness will become dangerous because selfish beings created this schism that differentiates one from the other.

Churchill proclaimed, when he mobilised his men for war, “Let THEM die for their country.” Why was a distinction between a “them” and a “we” created and kept vehemently and vigilantly?

Edward Said said of identity politics that what is important is not who speaks but what is spoken and how it is read or heard. He also said that marginality is not to be gloried in, “it is to be brought to an end so that more, not fewer, people can enjoy the benefits of what has for centuries been denied the victims of race, class or gender inequality” (Said 380).

Really, if our so-called functional social divisions and our desire to degrade other alternatives dissipate, then society will be truly diverse and so much more accepting.

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Works Cited

Said, Edward. “The Politics of Knowledge.” Everyday Theory: A Contemporary Reader. Eds. Becky McLaughlin and Bob Coleman. Singapore: Longman, 2005. 370 – 380.

Sernau, Scott. Global Problems: The Search for Equity, Peace, and Sustainability. Boston: Pearson, 2006