Since the beginning of the United States of America, the subject of race has always been the one people could not easily see past. Both the variety of racial identities and their contradictions to one another are embedded in the nation’s DNA. America was started on a base of at least a dozen lines of traditions, cultural identifications, nationalities, types of ethnicity and three main races: white, black, and Native American. Despite the conceptual underline of the American nation being the land of endless opportunities for everyone, what can be observed de-facto differs significantly from it. Ethnic minorities, especially people of Afro-American, Latino communities and Asian Americans live under constant pressure from institutionalized racism, which shapes their identity inside its particular cultural constraints.
The most obvious racial conflict that has been building up in the recent years, following the instances of brutality against African Americans, affected this community constituting about 44 million as of 2019 (Statista). It has always been at the center of racial tension. African American population has experienced oppression, deprivation of their civil and human rights, since America as a country was established and developed its economy, becoming one of the most stable nations, on the basis of institutionalized slavery. The perception it brought to the white population is exactly the ideology they project on the members of African race, at the same time strengthening the belief in African image among the African Americans.
The problematics of one’s identity lie in, essentially, one’s rights to claim that identity. In addition, the questioning becomes more intricate as one comes to the realization of the identity being infinitely broad and multi-faceted. W.E.B. Du Bois expressed the outlook incredibly well, saying “[the Negro], gifted with second-sight in this American world, —a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world” (Du Bois). Thus, outlining the effects a certain perception can produce when ideology meets reality, he paints a realistic depiction of the extent to which lack of identification can lead to. Identity turns out to be a fragile concept all of a sudden – however, when rooted deep in ideology, it becomes almost impossible to recalibrate.
Nowadays, members of oppressed minorities overcame and repurposed their collective memory of their ancestral oppression. Nonetheless, the oppression changed its form once again – and the Black rage spiked through the recent years due to the omnipresent instances of injustice from the police. African Americans have been speaking up openly since the 2013, and along with the problem of police brutality, discussed other topics. Cultural appropriation, producing a caricature of one’s identity, became a highly debated. On the example of appropriation of Black culture in media, the nature of one’s cultural identity can be traced to its roots. The process is similar across all the minority communities – the difficulty to decide where to belong can haunt a person for a long time, resulting in identity crisis. As Lahiri puts it, “I felt intense pressure to be two things, loyal to the old world and fluent in the new, approved of on either side of the hyphen”. The practice of self-identification is connected not to something as simple as skin color, but also to the cultural objects the individual perceives themselves through and considers to be “their own”.
To conclude the debate on the nature of racial and ethnical identity, it is safe to say that the problematics of it are no less diverse than the layers of cultural identity itself. However, it is apparent that the self-identification is always influenced by the outside factors. Political and social situations have their effect, although the basis for affiliation with a certain ethnic group can trace back thousands of years through genetics – but it is certainly not limited to that in its semantic makeup. Identity can be fluid too, and assigned and changed according to the perception of the self by the individual.