You're Not Welcome Here, Ep. 9: "Don't Tell Me Who I Am."
What do we mean when we talk about “recognition”? What is it to recognize someone in their identity? What is it to recognize ourselves in a particular way? What happens when someone doesn’t recognize me in the way I identify myself? What happens when I don’t recognize someone others in the way they recognize themselves? This episode explores the complex dynamics of recognition and the significance of identity and recognition for understanding our current cultural politics.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus and the series You're Not Welcome Here, which explores issues of identity, identity politics, how these relate to culture, my My name is Dan Miller.
I am Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College and one of the co-hosts of Straight White American Jesus and the host of this series.
Straight White American Jesus and this series are hosted in partnership with the Kapp Center at UCSB, and so as always I want to thank them for their support and their help in allowing us to do this.
As we continue this series, we've been talking about a number of things related to identity and identity politics and what identity is and how identity politics works.
And I've argued that identity is a fundamental sort of irreducible element of political and social life.
And I'm going to continue in this theme today, this vein, but I want to begin with a story.
And it's a story about me as an older brother, kind of picking on my little brother a little bit, and I'm sure he'll love this.
But once upon a time, I like to wind my brother up, as lots of siblings do, and I know sometimes what can do that.
I got him real wound up by calling him a yuppie, and he took great exception to this.
We have to understand a little bit about him, right?
He's a big, burly guy.
Some of you listening will know who he is, what he's like.
He's super handy around the house.
He's outdoorsy.
He is not what we might think of as a foodie or a hipster or any of those kinds of things.
He's not even an urban type, right?
The young urban professional.
He's not an urban type.
He's much more at home in a small town or a mid-sized town or something like that.
And so he got really, really upset when I called him this, and I knew he would, and he's not really yuppie, but I was just kind of just trying to wind him up, like I said.
But why would I call him this?
Well, he's also well-educated.
He's a medical doctor.
At the time, he was living within commuting distance of a very kind of hip, cool, major city.
And not just commuting distance, but, you know, you'd have to commute by ferry.
And like, what is more yuppie-ish than having to take a ferry to work?
And that sort of thing.
And he got really, really upset about this and pushed back and told me what I was and all these other things.
And we had a good time with that.
It was just me giving him some good-natured ribbing.
Why do I tell this story?
I tell this story because it's silly and it's trivial, but it highlights the dynamics of recognition.
And this is a word that I've used a number of times in this series, but we haven't really dug into it.
We haven't really defined it.
We all use this term of recognition as if we have a sense of what it means.
As if its meaning is obvious, but in fact, what I want to suggest is that recognition is a really complex concept.
We tend to think of it, if we think about it in terms of identity, we say we recognize somebody as fill-in-the-blank identity, that recognition is just a matter of seeing, right?
We just sort of observe the social and we see who or what people are and we quote-unquote recognize them accordingly.
But recognition is about much more than just simply seeing or observing the social.
Recognition is an active process that shapes us and it shapes the social world in which we find ourselves.
And there are lots of dimensions to this.
The dimension of how we recognize ourselves, our self-recognition.
I'm going to talk about that a little bit today, but we're going to focus more on that in the next couple sessions in this series.
But recognition has to do with how do I recognize myself?
How do we see ourselves?
But also, how are we recognized by others?
How do others see us?
And maybe just as importantly, how do we recognize others?
How do we see them?
Who do we understand them to be?
And related to this, we have to remember a point that I've made a lot of times by now.
The idea that recognition, when we say we recognize somebody as, that it's fundamentally about how we categorize people and how we organize the social.
That is, we organize the social by more or less fitting people under certain labels or putting them into certain boxes or containers, if you like, right?
If you categorize something.
That's what we do.
We fundamentally categorize people, and by doing this, we organize the social.
We make sense of the social, of who's who, and who I am, and how I relate to them, and how they relate to each other, and where we all fit.
So recognition is about how others categorize us.
How do they place us within the social?
Where do they see us fitting?
It's about how we categorize them.
Who do we think they are?
Where do we see them fitting?
Where in society do we think they belong?
And it's also about, and this is the really, really key idea that we're going to tease out for the next few episodes here.
It's about the degree to which we do or don't recognize ourselves as others categorize us.
In other words, they attribute a certain recognition to us.
They identify us in a certain way.
Do we identify ourselves in the same way?
Do we recognize ourselves in their identification of us?
And vice versa, when we categorize other people, we identify them in a particular way, do they recognize themselves in that way?
Do they see themselves the way that we see them?
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