Paper #1 Revised

What is an identity? Each person that is asked that question may assume different things. Legal identities are a major indicator for knowing who people are, a person’s personality, social media accounts or what they think of themselves. Kwame Appiah’s “Why identity is a lie we can’t live without” and John Gravois’s “A Toast Story” helps us answer three general questions about identities; What is an identity? What do they do for us? Why do they matter?

In Gravois’s “A Toast Story,” he begins conversation by sharing his discovery about the popularity of toast in San Francisco. He then begins talking about Giulietta Carrelli and her schizophrenic like condition which causes her to have episodes and forget where she is and won’t know what’s going on. We first learn about her personality when he mentions the relationships she lost and her landlords kicking her out. She was able to maintain a job at a coffee shop for three years, eventually the owner gave her a small fortune and she was able to open her own shop.  When she opened Trouble she began talking to every person that walked in the door. Her goal was to create a network of people who know who she is so they will recognize her. She wears the same clothes everyday so people will see her and identify her as the owner of Trouble. This is the first key concept that starts to answer the three key questions.

To Guilettia, her identity does matter, immensely. She depends on people to recognize her on the streets when she’s having an episode. To other people, Carelli’s identity lets other people who know her, help her. It also gives them the opportunity to start a conversation with her when someone sees her because she is known as the owner or trouble. “Trouble is a tool for keeping her alive. I’m trying to stay connected to the self, she says. Like one of her old notebooks, the shop has become an externalized set of reference points, an index of Carrelli’s identity. It is her greatest source of dependable routine and her most powerful means of expanding her network of friends and acquaintances, which extends now to the shop’s entire clientele,”  (Gravois).

In Appiah’s “Why an identity is a lie we can’t live without,” he interviews Sean Illing about identities and his book. In the interview they talk about the different identities people are given based on what they look and act like. The first identity being political, people will always assume your choices are based on what side your on, which is inescapable. They also talk about people’s sexual preference as an identity. People have different preferences based on who they want to date or who they want to be, this identity is also categorized by people. The whole point of the interview is to find out why an identity is a lie we can’t live without. An identity can be a lie because no one person has only one identity, everyone has different identities to different people in different places. Also, people can assume someone’s identity based on what people have heard, which also shows the point that an identity a lie we can’t live without because that person doesn’t know their true identity but they still will believe they do.

The most major was people are categorized is based by their race/ ethnicity identity, “If you allow your identity to be totally shaped by your opposition to a dominant culture, as many racial group have done because of the history of racism and xenophobia, you can become locked into that minority status. The first time a group becomes conscious of itself as an important social group, it is because they realize that they’re all being subjected to something.” Ultimately, classifying other people shows your true identity and what you think about them.

When Illing was asked why he called an identity a lie in the lie his response was, “There’s something misleading or mistaken about the pictures that underlie these identities and yet they bind us together in spite of that. They do bring people together, as well as divide people, and I think that the lies, the untruths, are often a very important part of how they work. They’re important to how people are held together,” (Illing).  What he means by this is everyone will categorize people into what they think, or what they know you are; It’s second nature to do this.

Both of these articles provide necessary information to answer the three most important questions. Once we can understand ourselves and other people, then do we really get to understand someone’s true identity. Reading these articles were helpful to understand how we answer the questions and how we think about ourselves and other people around us. It shows us why then matter and how other people can be affected by what our identities are.