I'm currently reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life by Erving Goffman. It's one of the most foundational works in sociological social psychology and is absolutely critical to the study of identity...and working through it today has been a ridiculous struggle. The first chapter is all about social performances, identity management, the ability to represent and misrepresent oneself at will. Shortly after a paragraph on why impostors are so psychologically damaging, he's discussing lying now, and when it is and is not acceptable. I hold myself to a moral standard that does not allow me to quote him at length, for this reading is taking me back to feelings I abandoned a few days ago, and I only discuss my own mistakes at length, but just...this is my life, in black and white, laid out by a scientist in my field. I feel like I'm being punk'd. But at least all my feelings are validated, regardless of how conflicting they are. It makes it difficult to read sometimes, but it also is...relaxing in a way. This happens often enough to be studied by professionals. This is a part of the normal course of life. No one here did anything unusually wrong. Life isn't ganging up on me, it's just...life. Shit happens, even especially when we don't mean for it to.
In Goffman's popular words amongst my intellectual circle, "Paradoxically, the more closely the impostor's performance approximates to the real thing, the more intensely we may be threatened, for a competent performance by someone who proves to be an impostor my weaken in our minds the moral connection between legitimate authorization to play a part and the capacity to play it."
In the immortal words of Dr. Gregory House, "People lie."
In the less immortal words of big brother Eric on Boy Meets World, "Life's tough, get a helmet."
TV presented me with something interesting today. That doesn't usually happen, and it certainly doesn't usually happen on two back-to-back entirely unrelated television shows. So I was waiting for House to come on, right? And I was watching Wheel of Fortune to bide my time (I'm a BEAST at Wheel). And a black woman beat her opponents by a landslide in the end, including trips to both Hawaii and Alaska (woot woot!), and when Pat asked her who was in the audience with her today, she said her mom. The camera pans over to where her mom is sitting, so she can wave, and Pat sounds...confused for a moment until he realizes that her mom is the white woman waving at the camera, and says, "Oh, there she is!" sounding totally and completely surprised. And I can't even yell at him for being surprised, because I totally was too.
Then House came on. We could tell by the previews for this week's episode that something interesting was going on between the two patients this week: one a middle-aged white drill sergeant and the other a black teenager who's been in and out of trouble and foster care. My friend guessed they were secretly gay lovers, and I had been willing to go along with that, because it's just the kind of plot twist House would go for, but *spoiler alert* it turns out they're actually father and son, in a totally unexpected Luke-I-am-your-father moment (Yes, it is possible to recognize Star Wars tropes without ever having actually seen Star Wars.)
And so twice in one night makes it more than a coincidence in my book. It makes it reminiscent of a social phenomenon. It makes me think of the "Mixed Race Movement" and my friends S and J who refuse to identify themselves as one race or the other. They are my black friends whom I cannot call non-white, and they often make me question whether I can call myself the same. It reminds me of how, a few weeks ago, my friend JW said that he can't tell when black people are Blasians; they just look black to him. I thought it was funny because I can pick the Asian features out almost instantly, because I'm so familiar with what the absence of them looks like. But no Blasian person could ever pass for just Asian. If TV says white mom plus black dad = socially black, and TV says black mom plus white dad = socially black, and society when scrutinizing Obama's presidential campaign said white mom plus African dad = not black enough, then what is blackness and where are the lines drawn?
Racial mixing is really interesting to me, especially in conjunction with a mixing of the socioeconomic classes. A strange creative part of me wants to turn The Little Mermaid into The Little Mulatta and still have her hoard her secret life away from her parents, sing "Part of that World", and leave the world she grew up in for something new and different (read: to her, clearly better). Oh, the things it would mean.
*That may be the title of a book or an article about mixed-race individuals, but I couldn't find it on Google so decided to use it. No copyright infringement intended.
