Find your identity, just don’t push others’ away

The first hike for new students up Bruin Walk this fall may well be their first expedition into UCLA’s rich community of student groups.

It may also mark their matriculation into these groups themselves, spurred perhaps by a free cupcake or a flier and an attractive smile.

Among the groups, one type will undoubtedly be both abundant and appealing ““ the identity group. These groups organize students around specific identities, such as race, sexual orientation or religion. Identity groups are important because they make space for students with shared identities to commune and provide forums for cultural exchange. But they have dangers, and students should take these into account when considering joining.

Identity groups can be isolating for students in or out of them. When students focus too much on their own identity, they miss opportunities to commune with those who don’t share it.

Consider the story of Jed Levine, alumnus, former Viewpoint columnist and editor-in-chief of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender campus magazine, TenPercent, now called OutWrite. When Levine, who is white and gay, entered UCLA as a freshman, the LGBT community was fracturing along lines of racial identity. Groups such as Blaque, La Familia and Mahu branched off from the all-embracing original group Gay and Lesbian Acceptance, which had been around since the 1970s, in order to assert their racial identities separately from what they saw as white-male dominance within GALA.

Levine wanted to participate in LGBT politics but was excluded, he said, because he was white.

“It was almost like race trumped sexuality,” he said. “Why do you need a group?” he remembered someone asking, “You’ve got Will and Grace.”

LGBT theorist Juana María Rodríguez wrote that an identity is “a self that is constituted through and against other selves … to establish the relationship between the self and the other.” Sadly, Jed was one of those “other selves” the identity groups formed against. He told me of minority students without strong racial identities who shared his fate.

For Levine, identity groups dissolved the LGBT community and destroyed the space for LGBT students without a strong racial identity to commune. While the identities were strengthened, relationships between those identities and others were not. Multiculturalism was dealt a fatal blow.

While Levine’s story tells of how identity groups push outsiders away, outsiders reject the groups themselves. In last spring’s USAC elections, voters rejected all but one candidate from Students First!, the slate run mostly by identity groups, which had dominated student politics for more than 10 years.

The reason was that Students First!’s campaign was alienating. Candidates spoke of “educating” the campus of the “struggles” of their identity groups. This platform was important to the slate because, as members of identity groups such as MEChA and the Afrikan Student Union, they had become acutely aware of the historical injustices committed against their groups, and wanted, correctly, for broader society to become interested in righting them.

Their trope, however, was condescending to outsiders, who would prefer to share in fights for social justice without notions of their own “other selves” pounded into their heads. For instance, as a white man, I know of the historical injustices my race has committed. But I’m not personally accountable for them, and I find it offensive when it’s implied that by association I am responsible.

The impression students got from the Students First! campaign was not that Students First! advocated social justice for all, but that they advocated social justice only for certain identity groups.

When Students First! lost the election, members formed a “circle of solidarity” in Bruin Plaza, chanting and holding fists in the air. The circle was symbolic, because, like the slate’s identity groups, the rest of the campus was left outside.

After the election, Students First! candidate Jamel Greer wrote in a public Facebook discussion group, “It is because of our crys for diversity, our unity circle, our fists in the air that our communities have survived and strived through years of oppression and marginalization.”

That is true, but UCLA is not as oppressive as antebellum America or even California at the time of the Chicano moratorium, so different tactics are needed. Students, of all identities, are more open than ever to learning about others and sharing in their struggles ““ we just don’t want to feel like outsiders while we are doing it.

So please, join an identity group if you must. Just consider what that means for those who don’t share your identity and how you interact with them once you’ve joined. Don’t make your fellow students into “other selves.”

E-mail Reed at treed@media.ucla.edu.

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