Passage: How Others See Us

Even when we are clear about how we want to see ourselves, we may still have difficulty in being able to persuade others to see us in just that way. A non-white person in apartheid-dominated South Africa could not insist that she be treated just as a human being, irrespective of her racial characteristics: She would typically have been placed in the category that the state and the dominant members of the society reserved for her. Your freedom to assert your personal identity is often constrained by how others already see you; and the freedom to assert our personal identities can sometimes be extraordinarily limited in the eyes of others, no matter how we see ourselves.

Indeed, sometimes we may not even be fully aware of how others identify us, which may differ from self-perception. There is an interesting lesson in an old Italian story — from 1920s when support for fascist politics was spreading rapidly across Italy — concerning a political recruit from the Fascist Party arguing with a rural socialist that he should join the Fascist Party instead. "How can I," said the potential recruit, "join your party? My father was a socialist. My grandfather was a socialist. I cannot really join the Fascist Party." "What kind of an argument is this?" said the Fascist recruiter, reasonably enough. "What would you have done," he asked the rural socialist, "if your father had been a murderer and your grandfather had also been a murderer? What would you have done then?" "Ah, then," said the potential recruit, "then of course, I would have joined the Fascist Party."

This may be a case of fairly reasonable, even benign, attribution, but quite often ascription goes with denigration, which is used to incite violence against the vilified person. "The Jew is a man," Jean-Paul Sartre argued in Portrait of the Anti-Semite, "whom other men look upon as a Jew; ... it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew." Charged attributions can incorporate two distinct but interrelated distortions: misdescription of people belonging to a targeted category, and an insistence that the misdescribed characteristics are the only relevant features of the targeted person's identity. In opposing external imposition, a person can both try to resist the ascription of particular characteristics and point to other identities a person has, much as Shylock attempted to do in Shakespeare's brilliantly cluttered story: "Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is?"

The assertion of human commonality has been a part of resistance to degrading attributions in different cultures at different points in time. In the Indian epic, Mahabharata, dating from around two thousand years ago, Bharadvaja, an argumentative interlocutor, responds to the defense of the caste system by Bhirgu (a pillar of the establishment) by asking: "We all seem to be affected by desire, anger, fear, sorrow, worry, hunger, and labor; how do we have caste differences then?"

The foundations of degradation include not only descriptive misrepresentation, but also the illusion of a singular identity that others must attribute to the person to be demeaned. "They used to call me a man," Peter Sellers, the English actor, said in a famous interview, "but I had to straighten that out." The need for as well as the challenge of resisting false ascription is the surgical implantation of a "real me" by others who are not only allowing no escape but also defining what we make. Organized attribution can prepare the ground for persecution and burial.

Furthermore, people will — in particular circumstances — have difficulty in convincing others to acknowledge the relevance of identities other than what is marshaled for the purpose of the imposed label. This applies, for example, to Jewish people in Israel today, rather than in Germany in the 1930s. It would be a long-run victory of Nazism if the barbarities of the 1930s eliminated forever a Jewish person's freedom and ability to invoke any identity other than his or her Jewishness.

Similarly, the role of reasoned choice needs emphasis in resisting the ascription of singular identities and the recruitment of foot soldiers in the bloody campaign to terrorize targeted victims. Campaigns to switch perceived self-identities have been responsible for many atrocities in the world, making old friends into new enemies and odious sectarians into suddenly powerful political leaders. The need to recognize the role of reasoning and choice in identity-based thinking is thus both exacting and extremely important.