Identity… to adapt or not to adapt

This week's readings brought many new concepts across my radar, which I definitely appreciate. My overall impression is that these issues--identity, oppression, how they affect one another--are never one-dimensional. These are complex systems.

I found topics that Cross(1998) discussed in his article to be fascinating and eye-opening. The explanation of contemporary black problems stemming from exactly what it says: contemporary problems, dispels the common idea that people have about the oppression that black people face (p. 391). Many people simplify the oppression, in this case by relegating problems to the aftermath of slavery. This denial of the modern-day shortcomings of our society impedes adaptation and the furtherance of equality.

As I am learning in my Management Information Systems class, a system that doesn't adapt will not survive. We live in complex adaptive systems and no one thing is the cause or the thing to blame. In this case, historical slavery alone isn't the main cause of black problems today. The fact that they are "contemporary" problems denotes that while we look back at history, we certainly cannot get our answers there.

Now there are substantial populations of other minorities, adding more factors into the system of oppression. Young's (2010) definition of marginalization illustrates how groups of people can be oppressed together, because no matter how different they are, the identity of being different than the dominant group applies to them (p. 38). When reading about Cross's (1998) identity types in the renewal process, I was surprised to find that I have also gone through a similar experience as a multi-racial person. I could see the assimilative, ambivalent, militant, and internalizing stages throughout my primary education years and more recently in college. For me, I ended up with more synthesized identity of "multi-ness".

I am sharing my own experience to illustrate how appropriate the term "contemporary" is because now it's not so clearly a black and white system of oppression. Not that it ever was, but the complexities are so much more apparent today. As mentioned in the article, black people are and will continue to experience an identity renewal that will become increasingly multi-dimensional because society is becoming so much more complex (Cross, 1998, p. 399). Marginalization demonstrates this, especially in the US, where many minority groups can identify with each other in this form of oppression while often it is not in the same way, on the same level, or to the same degree.

References

Cross, W., (1998). Black psychological functioning and the legacy of slavery: myths and realities. In Danieli, Y. (Eds.), International handbook of multigenerational legacies of trauma (p. 387-400). New York: Plenum Press.

Young, I. (2010). Five faces of oppression. In Adams, M., Blumenfeld, W., Castañeda, C., Hackman, H., Peters, M., Zúñiga, X. (Eds.), Readings for diversity and social justice (p. 35-45). New York: Routledge