Mar 2, 2009

Things I Wrote Instead of My Lincoln Paper – Part 2

Why was it not necessary for me to "struggle with" or to "find" my identity as a young white man in America? Why was I never compelled to "discover what it meant to be" the son of married, white, middle-class, suburbanite parents?
Is this role, by virtue of its ubiquity or (real or artificial) 'normalcy,' already defined for me by society?
Or did I, in fact, find or develop an identity (or was I born with one?), but so organically that I failed to take note of the occurrence?
If that be the case, why should (for example) a black man of separated, mixed-race parentage have so much harder a time of it? Is, perhaps, the finding of an identity — or the curiosity about it — the real artifice, expected of non-'normal' youth by that great force of "society?"