“It’s surprising how many persons go through life without ever recognizing that their feelings toward other people are largely determined by their feelings toward themselves, and if you’re not comfortable within yourself, you can’t be comfortable with others.”
-Sydney J. Harris.

Identity
Pronunciation: I-’den-t&-tE, &-, -’de-n&-
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural -ties
Etymology: Middle French identité, from Late Latin identitat-, identitas, probably from Latin identidem repeatedly, contraction of idem et idem, literally, same and same
1 a : sameness of essential or generic character in different instances b : sameness in all that constitutes the objective reality of a thing : ONENESS
2 a : the distinguishing character or personality of an individual : INDIVIDUALITY b : the relation established by psychological identification
3 : the condition of being the same with something described or asserted
4 : an equation that is satisfied for all values of the symbols
5 : IDENTITY ELEMENT

I’ve been thinking alot about self…not in reference to me, but me as a black american. Most specifically in cultural terms. I have always said that I don’t feel as though America itself has a culture. The things we believe and feel are determined and affected by so many sources it’s not funny, the most prevelant being tax bracket. The thing is most people can trace their family back to a point of origin and identify beliefs and customs. Except for black americans. The profoundness of this may be lost when you don’t really consider it. We can say we originated from Africa, but that’s not saying much. I don’t hear Latino’s saying I’m from…South America. They can identify countries and cities and even little towns. As lost in the sauce as most Americans are, there is something that their parents or grandparents can point to and say, “This is where you come from, these are your people.” Most of what we use to identify or point to is not culture, but a degree of discrimination. We look to when we were treated inhuman and the gradual shades of mock respect that we gained up into the P.C. era. We can indentify with being allowed to proceed as a human being vs. when we couldn’t. Even if it’s not that harsh we identify more with being able to join with the dominant culture and not a knowledge of our own. I can imagine how many issues we face stem directly from this, especially issues amongst ourselves. If I say I’m a geek I can explain that. If I say I’m Hip-Hop I can explain that. If someone says I’m metro-sexual I say shut up but I can still explain it. When I identify myself as Black…there’s not much explanation I can give beyond what you can see. Hell I have an ancestry that includes, Mexicans, Jews and Native-Americans and I can tell more about all of them than I could the one that is most obvious. I know alot of people identify our struggle based on what happened here, but I say that’s only the first part. There was a time when slaves knew about their “people” and could point to a culture they were slowly stripped of, I don’t know that any significant amount of people have held on to that knowledge and recognzie any aspects of those cultures though.

What am I saying?

Te nosce ( Know thyself - latin)

But I could tell you more about the Romans than I could a certain part of me.