by Carmenita Higginbotham

Identity positions can raise difficult questions that often cannot be answered easily or comfortably in the classroom. Thankfully, the journey of finding out who you are, or of assigning one or many identities to yourself, is a constructive activity that can make students aware of how they group people and make judgments from those categorizations. As I categorize myself over and over, I realize others are doing it too, students, teachers, everyone.

If someone were to ask me today “Who are you?” or “How do you define yourself?” I would have about ten different responses. Sometimes I consider the current stage of my life and other times I give more weight to the state of my career or even my mood on a particular day. When someone asks me how I define myself or what my identity is, I realize that although I define myself a particular way, it is still my outward appearance that determines how other people read me. And like most people, my understanding of my identity is contingent on how others perceive me. So while I may be a teacher or a mother, a Midwesterner or an American, I am identified more readily by physical characteristics and, in particular, my race.

The difficulty with teaching issues of identity is rooted in the complexity of the term. The criteria for determining identity are both varied and fixed, and attempting to “nail down” terms for understanding identity, particularly racial identity, for students serves as one of my greatest challenges. The concepts of “race” as a social construction based on physical appearance and “ethnicity” as a categorization based on a common national heritage or community are routinely conflated in our popular culture.

Relying on contemporary points of references from newspapers or television programs is a great way for students to clarify their terms in a real world setting. It also invites a range of questions about the United States and its history of race relations. Why, for example, have many argued that race was a biological fact? What cultural, social and political roles might this have served, say, in the 18th century? Or during the Civil War? Or during the Civil Rights Movement?

Another challenge is that people frequently redefine or reconstruct themselves as they age or gain new experiences. How they see themselves as teenagers is often different than how they see themselves later in life, and the power of their identification can determine where they live, where they socialize, and how they vote. I am always sensitive to the fact that any discussion of one’s identity is an extremely personal enterprise. At the same time, I am aware that identity positions challenge our sense of a collective past. They affect how events are remembered and retold and, in turn, affect our history as a people and as a nation.

The PBS program African American Lives 2, airing on February 6 & 13, traces the journey of prominent African Americans who seek to understand their heritage and their identities, both racial and cultural. Students can embark on a similar quest through the stories of their own lives. Constructing an autobiography is an effective way for students to begin to explore how they define themselves and, in a related matter, how they define other people. Students can generate word lists, collect images or even select pieces of music as well as write essays to designate and express who they are in creative ways. Students may also be directed to assign an identity to themselves that they never previously considered. This encourages a broader understanding of how identity formation is a layered process, how multifaceted it is and how people are not defined solely by broad yet culturally significant categories such as class, gender or race.

African American Lives 2 coincides with Black History Month, which presents a wonderful opportunity to place these individuals’ searches for their history within a broader context of African Americans and their collective struggle over their identity. In the twentieth century, W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and its discussion of “double-consciousness” or what it means to be both black and American is a key for discussing social struggles about identity. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley is another book in which shifts in identity positions define the African American experience.

The New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance of the 1920’s and the Black Arts and Black Power Movements of the 1960’s also can be framed as cultural responses to identity formation. The Harlem Renaissance, a largely cultural and arts-dominated movement, invites an examination of poetry and literature alongside paintings and music. The writer Langston Hughes offers some of the most diverse material of the period, which ranges from poetry like “America,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” and “The Weary Blues,” to cultural commentary as found in the essay, “The Negro and the Racial Mountain” (The Nation, 22 June 1926), to autobiography with The Big Sea (1940). Jamaican-born Claude McKay, another prominent author of the period, captures black urban street life in his powerful novel Home to Harlem (1928). Critics both admired and reviled his text, in which McKay weaves together issues of racial identity, political ideology, and the urban experience. Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and later works such as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) also include evocative statements on what it means to balance a set of identities that are often difficult to reconcile.

During the Black Arts and Black Power Movements nearly forty years later, the more politically and socially progressive tone of its members shapes the controversial writings of Amiri Baraka, aka LeRoi Jones, including “The Revolutionary Theater” (Liberator, July, 1965), and the poetry collection Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement (1970), by Nikki Giovanni. Comparing the art of painters Aaron Douglas, Archibald Motley, Jr., or Jacob Lawrence with the sculpture of Elizabeth Catlett, or the multi-media work of Betye Saar and Romare Bearden emphasizes how important the visual realm was and remains to African American artists engaged with issues of identity. Books such as Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, edited by Richard Powell, and Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists by Lisa E. Farrington provide a wealth of visual and textual material about black representation in the twentieth century. Students can compare and contrast the symbols these artists use to denote their racial identity and consider how these representations have shifted over time, or they might research expressions of identity found in contemporary art or popular culture.

A number of museums and cultural institutions will feature art by black artists or engaged with African American themes throughout the month of February. This includes The National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and their photography exhibition “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” through March 2, 2008. Accessible in an online version the show examines the ways in which notable African American figures such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Winton Marsalis redefined what it means to be American. Portraiture, like autobiography, taps into a personal type of representation and often reveals as much about the sitter as it does about those who are interpreting it. Students can compare how their expressions of identity, whether in an essay, a song or even a selection of images, relate to these photographs.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has launched an online exhibition that celebrates one of the nineteenth century’s most prominent African American artists. “Henry O. Tanner: A Mystical Painter” details the career of Henry Ossawa Tanner, a painter who studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at a time when very few African Americans attended art school. Tanner went on to receive international recognition for his work, and his legacy eventually extended beyond his own art production. He served as a mentor for numerous Harlem Renaissance artists, and his example had a profound impact on the status of African American art.

The Library of Congress offers an engaging and comprehensive website, The African American Mosaic, that charts the history and movement of blacks from Africa to the United States. This extensive resource features maps, prints, photographs, personal correspondence and other documents drawn from the vast resources of the Library that provide a broader and more complex understanding of how various black identities were formed.

I find the dilemma of identity fascinating and frustrating and exciting, and I hope you will consider ways to explore its complexities with all of your students, not just those of African American descent. I would love to hear about how you engage with students around issues of identity. Please feel free to share your thoughts and comments.