Further thoughts on race and identity

At my seminar over a week ago, we did an activity in which we drew a pie chart (or ‘cake chart’ in Serbian since pies here are not round) of our identities: mother, activist, woman, etc. It was really interesting to me to see what the other attendees wrote. Nearly everyone had a family identity: daughter, sister, wife, mother. Everyone had a gender identity. There were smokers and drinkers and athletes and readers.

The way people described their locational/ethnic identities were really interesting. There were no Serbs or Serbians. There was a number of Yugoslavs – which really only works for people over 40, people who lived a large portion of their life in Yugoslavia. There were a lot of people without a location-based identity. And then there were the Mediterraneans. I have never heard of such an identity and found it fascinating that people would claim Spain to Syria to Morocco as their home. But these were all people from Montenegro who grew up near the sea. As the rest of the world changed, the sea remains constant. The name of the sea won’t change no matter how many times state’s borders are redrawn. Interesting.

I was one of three people who put ‘white’ as one of their identities. One of the women asked us about why we included white as on of our identities. Does that mean that we are racist? I tried to explain the institutional racism of the United States as best as I could, and how I believe that it is important to recognize the privileges that have accrued to me because of my race, even if I have done nothing to seek them out.

Another woman who listed ‘white’ as one of her identities, T, started quoting bell hooks on white privilege and talked about how she felt guilty for being white. She said her guilt is paralyzing sometimes. I spend a long time talking to her about how bell hooks wasn’t writing for her, she wasn’t challenging white, financially precarious activists in Serbia, but the American white upper middle class. I spoke about this later with another activist friend and she told me that such situations aren’t uncommon here, that Serbian feminism has problems with importing western writers and failing to see that they write for a very specific context.

For more thoughts on race and Serbia, click here. This is fast becoming a feedback loop.