Today the Court fashions a dagger out of ’40-years of facts’ dating back to the Civil Rights Movement and hands it to a dysfunctional Congress thereby affording the House of Representatives the power of inaction to kill the Voting Rights Act. This tactic of poisoning the well of progress to quench thirsts of freedom, justice and equality goes as far back as the legacy of current efforts to limit and to curtail the exercise of the franchise. Following the lead of the Court many States and locals are now revising their Jim Crow tactics to nullify the voting power of persons whose lives have been colored by differences of race, sex, gender, sexual orientation, faiths and ethnicities. Not all change is progress, especially when the persons and interests opposed to that change remain in their intent and purpose the same.
What is Identity?
The one that is common sense to most people is the concept of the individual that expresses the individual in terms of an independence from the set of social relations in which each person is embedded. Here, distinct individuals emerge when human beings are defined against society. Featured in this understanding of the individual is some aspect of the individual that has to be preserved and protected from society or social interests. Key to this understanding of the individual is a potential threat that society poses to some aspect of an individual’s existence. This ‘threat assessment‘ is a determining factor in how some groups and persons identify themselves. They recognize and respond to ‘the other’ as a threat.
Difference
Like eRacism ‘The Color of Water’ is not about skin color. It is an autobiographical portrait of a ‘colored’ life. In it McBride the offspring of a Southern black man and a white Jewish woman asks his mother, ‘what color is God?’ His mother tells him that ‘God is the color of water.’ The wisdom of this answer is that it analogizes the substance of difference with an element that makes up sixty percent of every human being without regard for the ways in which we are different. Difference like water is not only an essential component of human being it is a persisting process of accidental and necessary social interactions, colonialism and slavery among them, that defines who we are and are becoming.