Thoughts About A Commercial Identity

The section of Identity People Like Me related with what we communicated about in our previous lecture.  Each student is an individual even if they follow the depiction of a stereotype, and we should not be surprised that they are more like us than we think they are.  This made me think of how frustrated that adult got with her otherness and how children might feel.  Being othered would cause me to want to fit in and change myself in order to be seen as a similarity and not an other.  Perhaps I would adopt a new identity so that I may be more acceptable rather than waiting for others to accept me for who I am.  This would affect my relationship with my parents and in turn affect me. 

I also thought about the people that separate people into others and similars.  This could be me, I am not totally sure.  In fact it could be everyone to some extent!  What stood out to me is that Parisa said that they were nice enough and had good intentions in what they had said to her.  I think this is why Parisa did not say anything even though it made her frustrated.  People can understand what others mean even if it does not come out right.  They also understand how they feel.  The people at the international conventions liked and respected Parisa, but it is not enough to respect a person for who they are.  You have to have a respect for where they come from as well, because it is true that Iranian women can be independent and smart, which makes their country great.  Ethnocentrism destroys the respect for diversity in a country. 

Identity as a Personal Project describes first, how we can completely change our identity with practice and imitation and second, how commerce affects our choice of identity.  It is important to realize that the arts are a huge indication of your identity.  Fashion, décor, culinary, dance, music, theatre, and everything that goes into those art forms are things that we choose to judge and are judged by.  If you like Hello Kitty you are Asian, if you dance/listen to bachata you are Hispanic and if you eat bratwurst you’re German.  I like all of these things, because hello kitty is cute, bachata is fun, and brats are delicious.  Do these things make me a multicultural person that has abandoned good old American roots?  They do not because first of all, they are all stereotypes (not all Asian’s like Hello Kitty, and I am not even sure if bratwurst was really created in Germany).  Second of all, they are commercialized in the United States and therefore as much apart of the United States as they are where they became popular.  There is no feasible way that ethnocentrism could exist because of the different preferences and opinions.  We all take ideas to make our life better and ever changing, and the technology that we have now proves that this is what people want.  Pintrest, for example, is a network of pictures of ideas that my roommates and I are CRAZY about.  It makes us try things that we have not tried, and do things that we have never done.  People should never restrict themselves to one way of thinking and doing.  The big question still is whether people change their identity because of the commercial influences.  Like I kind of mentioned before, I am suspicious of a true, clear-cut, unified agreement on the “American identity.”  The United States is not a country of black and white people.  Everyone is grey.  Even though I am a democrat I like some things that republicans believe in, and even though I say I hate country music I still like certain songs.  You should like what you like for a reason whether it is popular in your town or among your age group, or even if you just like the way it looks.  These things do not change your morals and personality.  Things have a very low influence of who we are despite what people perceive. 

My dad works at the Chicago Botanic Garden and one day he needed to hire a paid intern to aid him with his restoration project.  There was only one that was qualified enough to receive the position, this young man showed up to the interview on a motor cycle with ripped jeans and dirty t-shirt.  My dad was skeptical to hire him but did anyways because he needed someone right away.  To this day, nearly 15 years later, he has never had a better intern or coworker.  This is an example of the old saying; you can’t judge a book by its cover, even if you have had a bad experience with a book that looked just like that, or if that book had the same setting as another the contents are different.