You're Not Welcome Here, Ep 10: "My Identity Has Nothing to Do With It"
Why can it be so apparent to us that people’s political behavior or social views are a reflection of their group identity, but they will insist that they’re group identity has no impact on these areas of their life? Or why do we have such a strong sense that we hold the social views we do or behave politically as we do because of who we are as individuals, when we know that people are shaped by their group identities? This episode explores these questions and outlines the relation between individual identity and group identity, arguing that an understanding of this dynamic is crucial for thinking about identity and identity politics.
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Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College, and this is the series that I've been working on in an ongoing fashion.
Called You're Not Welcome Here that looks at identity and identity politics and related issues.
I want to thank all of you for joining me.
I want to thank the CAP Center at UCSB for their support and partnership with us in offering the podcast.
I want to thank all of our contributors and Patreon listeners and others and all of you who support us in so many ways.
All of you who reach out with questions or comments or inquiries.
About the kinds of things that we're doing.
You're the reason we do it and we thank you for it.
And I just can't say that enough as a way to sort of a prelude for getting started here.
Before going further, I also want to let people know how they can contact me.
I do love to hear from everyone.
I announced in a previous episode, I am now working with an email specifically focused to Straight White American Jesus, and you can reach me at danielmillerswag at gmail.com.
I would love to hear from you.
Thank you to everybody who reaches out, and I do my best to respond to all of those.
And I also want to share an updated piece of information that I'm very excited about.
I am now a Trauma Resolution Practitioner with the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery and I'm very, very excited about this.
You can check out CTRR, take a look online, basically working to help people overcome the effects and legacies of religious trauma.
This is work that we're excited about and I think it works and sort of dovetails with the kind of work we do here on the podcast and they've linked their podcast, excuse me, our podcast on their site.
And just for people to know, if you know of individuals who might be interested or find it useful, the end of March this month I will be starting a group, Recovering from Toxic Religious Language, that
If you're somebody and you've heard messages like love the sinner hate the sin and that's been aimed at you and you feel like maybe you're that sinner and you don't feel all that loved or legacies of language of needing to remain sexually pure or facing complex issues in daily life and being told that if you have doubts or questions or concerns you just need to have more faith or that you're not being a true believer These are the things we're going to be talking about.
We're going to be looking at toxic religious language, how it continues to sort of inhabit our minds and our bodies, even after we think we've left it behind, how we remain caught in the legacies of those.
So, information for that group is available on the website, the CTRR website, and I just want to let people know.
If that's not where you're at, that's great, that's cool, but we receive so many emails from folks who are wrestling with these kinds of issues, and so we want to be a resource in whatever way we can.
So, having said that, let's turn to our topic for this week.
And I want to start with a basic observation, and this is it, right?
We can look at individuals And if we know certain, let's just say demographic things about them, or if we put it in the terms of identity, if we know what identities they occupy, if we know things about their race or ethnicity or their income or their gender or their education level or their religious identification, Maybe what part of the country they live in, if they're urban, if they're rural, and on and on, right?
We can add more and more and more layers to this.
But if we understand these kind of demographic features, if we understand these components of their identity, We can, with pretty high degrees of reliability in many cases, predict and have a sense of how they will vote in an election, what candidates they will support, what they will think about the issues going on at a local school board, how they will feel about things like, say, vaccine mandates or mask mandates.
We will know what they feel about People coming across the southern border and just on and on and on and on.
And we know this and this is the domain of the social sciences, right?
This is what the social sciences do.
They study these aspects of groups and identify their behavior.
And it turns out that understanding elements of an individual's identity can often, with pretty high degrees of reliability, allow us to predict their behavior.
Now, is that universal?
No.
If you hear that 81% of white evangelicals in the 2016 presidential election voted for Donald Trump, that means that 18% of white evangelicals, 19% of white evangelicals did not.
Okay.
percent of white evangelicals did not.
Okay, great.
But being able to predict what 81% of people would do is pretty, pretty strong.
It's pretty predictive, right?
So, knowing about identity, knowing the identities that somebody has, knowing the groups with which they identify, allows us to often predict or explain what they do.
Now that's straightforward enough.
You probably have people in your life and you say, well, yeah, of course he thinks that he's X number of years old, or, well, yeah, he thinks that he lives in this part of the country, or, well, no wonder he thinks that he's a conservative white Protestant, and just on and on and on.
But here's the thing, and I would be interested in knowing if people have had this experience, right?
If you actually get into a conversation with somebody, and let's say you're talking about politics, or you're talking with somebody about some policy before the local school board, or you're having discussions like my town is right now about whether or not to keep mask mandates in place or to do away with them, And you actually get in a discussion and let's say it gets heated and you say to them, well of course you feel that way, you're a blank, right?
You're a Republican, you're a Christian, you're a millennial, you're a person of color, you're white, whatever.
What you can be confronted with is somebody who will usually resent that kind of claim.
In other words, they'll get upset and they will say, my identity has nothing to do with this.
I think this because this is what I think or I've done the research or I've looked into it or I think this is the best thing or I've debated and discussed with lots of other people and sort of on and on and on and on.
In other words, people will insist that no matter how much The groups that we identify them with, that we can see they belong to, allow us to predict their behavior.
They will insist that the group identity has nothing to do with it.
That they are simply exercising their own radical individuality in the kinds of decisions that they make, the beliefs that they hold, and so forth.
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