The identity of being, knowing, & doing

. . . That’s how I remembered myself. I remembered that people of color from my region of the United States can choose to embrace all aspects of their ancestry, in the food they eat, in the music they listen to, in the stories they tell, while also choosing to war in one armor, that of black Americans, when they fight for racial equality. I remembered that in choosing to identify as black, to write about black characters in my fiction and to assert the humanity of black people in my nonfiction, I’ve remained true to my personal history, to my family history, to my political and moral choices, and to my essential self: a self that understands the world through the prism of being a black American, and stands in solidarity with the people of the African diaspora.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t honor and claim the myriad other aspects of my heritage. I do, in ways serious and silly. I read Philip Larkin and Seamus Heaney and love all things Harry Potter and “Doctor Who.” I study French and Spanish and attempt to translate the simplest poems by Pablo Neruda and Federico García Lorca into English (and fail awfully). I watch obscure French movies with subtitles. I attend powwows and eat fry bread and walk along the outside of the dancing circles with a kind of wistful longing because I want to understand the singing so badly, because I want to stomp the earth in exultation and to belong in that circle, too. But I imagine that my ancestors from Sierra Leone and Britain, from France and the Choctaw settlements on the Mississippi bayou, from Spain and Ghana—all those people whose genetic strands intertwined to produce mine—felt that same longing, even as they found themselves making a new community here at the mouth of the Mississippi. Together, they would make new music, like blues and jazz and Zydeco, and new dances, second lining through the streets. They would make a world that reflected back to them the richness of their heritage, and in doing so discover a new type of belonging. 

Cracking the Code by Jesmyn Ward 

Rather than using ethnicity simply as a census-type classificatory label, I am interested in it here as a phenomenological experience of relatedness to a historically unique and continuous collectivity. Ethnicity is "peopleness" relatedness, i.e., the sense of being part of a particular people, doing the things that this people traditionally does, and, therefore, of knowing (appreciating, sensing, feeling, intuiting) the things this people claims to know when it is true to its particular genius, to its own self, to its unique authenticity of being and doing.  

Fishman (1982, p. 7)