Week 10 Open Letter Question

Dear Class,

On this journey of reading narratives and challenging notions of identity, one essential question still lingers in my mind. I don't exactly know how to simply ask this question, it finds itself to be multifaceted in the same sense of all other topics of discussion so far. It is related to the question I asked on the first day of class: How can one escape the perceptions of someone else's reality? Thinking back to how we discussed how people are misidentified, how people pass, and this all relates to the treatment of a given person; who has the final say on identifying people? Indeed a complex question, I want to open this back up for discussion to see if we can get to the root of this issue. It was mentioned that some identities seem to be shaped from whiteness or striving towards whiteness as it currently stands as the "societal standard." Are all identities, from the standpoint of racial imagination, shaped from the notion of how they differ and interact with whiteness?

Interesting points of the course I would like to consider in brainstorming possible discussions of this question come from the topics of passing, interactions during the great migration, and the importance of whiteness and mixed-race identities in Jesmyn Ward's novel. Critically thinking about the course title, "Racial Identity in the American Imagination" what exactly are the identities we are imagining and what factor do they have in our lives? Are these thoughts haunting some as they do in Jesmyn's Ward's novel or are we simply living with these unconscious thoughts that shape our everyday interactions with identities?

CJ Turner

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