Making sense of my stories lies at the intersection of the stories you bring tothis reading. In that moment we are in an intertextual conversation, creating ahyperlinked identity of you and me.
I have heard the saying, 'you perceive the world based on your own experience'. Your writing brings more context and a deeper explanation to this. It inspires me, as the reader, to recognize my own story and hold space for the many other stories.
o it is with our questions, such as “Where are you from?”as illustrated by writer Taiye Selasi in her TED talk “Don’t Ask Me WhereI’m from, Ask Where Am I a Local.”
I am going to check out her TED talk!
Thus my social location is not my identity. My stories define my relation-ship to my social location. Stories are social activities of making meaning.My identity is fluid, forming and reforming in my stories as they relate tothe contexts and relationships I engage in, both constituting them and beingreconstituted in turn. My identity is plural and emergent not only from theintersection of these evolving stories but also based on how I perform themagainst the backdrop of the historical and social narratives. I have come to callthis hyperlinked identity
This paragraph is empowering! I imagine this process took a lot of self-reflection and strength. There is a lure to defining your social location as a leading part of your identity. In there can lay shame, or a big ego. To reject this idea of having to define yourself is incredible. As you wrote, your "identity is fluid, forming, and reforming."
Whiteness. Similarly, my students from the Caribbean Islands at Mercy Col-lege, where I teach, describe how openly the lighter skin tones are privilegedover the dark skin tones. I see this not only as a legacy of colonization but alsoas a form of present-day colonization.
Thank you for mentioning this. Colorism is prevalent in my culture too; I am beginning to understand how deeply woven the roots of colonization is throughout the world.