Chapter One THE IDENTITY TOOLBOX No identity is stable in today's wild, recombinant mix of culture, blood, and ideas. Things fall apart; they make themselves anew. Every race carries within it the seeds of its own destruction. --ERIC LIU The diversity feeds on itself, driving itself forward. --STUART KAUFFMAN Protean patterns best reveal themselves over the course of entire lives. --ROBERT JAY LIFTON ROOTS NOURISH. They define a person's life. Roots are an anchor: deep, firm, fundamental, established, the everlasting source of pride, strength, meaning and identity. They embody family, ethnic or cultural origins that explain a person's emotional attachment to a place or community. Roots are sunk. The deeper, the better. They represent tradition, the past, forebears, ancestors, wisdom, beginnings. Who would lack roots? Rootlessness is bad. The rootless are unstable, artificial, fake, impermanent, transient, unproductive, restless, itinerant. They have no tribe, no family beyond their own. They lack a place, a space, a race of one's own. Doesn't everybody have roots? Who would cut them on purpose? Isn't that suicide? Can they grow back? If people don't like their roots, can they get new ones? can they grow more roots without threatening their old ones? People obsess over their roots even as they bristle at paying the price for them. Roots are expensive. They exclude. Roots can limit the pool of marriage partners, dictate one's religious faith and where one lives, and how one earns a living. Roots can determine who to stay away from, what not to do or say or think. As a result, many people can't live on roots alone. And the world won't let them anyhow. Once, nations or ethnic groups provided almost everyone's main form of collective identification. National and ethnic affiliation, though only one source of identity, trumped all the others. Being French meant more than being a doctor. Being Korean overshadowed being raised in a small town in Japan. Being black in Boston meant more than being friendly. Being Mexican took precedence over being born in California. This is rapidly changing. Nations and ethnic groups no longer impose a common identity on all their people. Now identity depends more on what they've studied; where they've traveled; with whom they are friends; what they do for a living; whom they marry; and perhaps even what music they enjoy, restaurants they eat in, style of dancing they prefer or books they read. The global spread of technology, trade, mobility and culture are revolutionizing individual identity. No statistics exist to document this shift, but that itself tells an interesting story. People don't measure what they don't classify. Many governments do not even track the ethnic affiliations held by citizens in its borders; some don't even count the different racial groups. A country as large as Britain, for instance, until the year 2000 never counted the number of Irish people, or their descendants, living in Britain, even though the Irish-British are believed to number in the millions. Germany has no hyphenated category, so that the child of a German father and a Turkish mother must be either-or, not both. Until the year 2000 census, the United States classified people according to four main racial groups, essentially ignoring those who saw themselves as mixed race. Statistically, hybridity doesn't exist. This is logical. If people don't ask the right questions, they won't get the right answers. Statistics mislead, and they are plenty misleading in the case of ethnic and racial mixing. Confusion over statistics, however, can't hide the truth: A fixed sense of belonging, based on shared conceptions of national traits, is clearly dying. The world may not be borderless, but a lot more alien stuff is getting through. Once, people's attachments were defined by their parents: the language they spoke, the food they ate, how they expressed emotion (or didn't), the clothes they wore and their habits of mind. Now people increasingly construct themselves, piecing their identity together from diverse experiences, relying on not only their own kind but also their knowledge of the wider world, their tastes and inclinations and their belief in what works for them. Out of this mongrel process arises the global me. The fluidity of affiliations is surprising, since people are urged every day to preserve their roots and honor their heritage. They are told: "Be true to yourself! Proudly display your roots!" These exhortations grow more shrill even as it appears likely that a person can fit the whole panorama of human society--or at least a healthy slice of it--under their sombrero. Like Barry Cox, they can be British in the morning and Chinese in the evening. German on Wednesday, Puerto Rican on Friday and maybe American in between. Are these people chameleons? Are they starving their roots? Won't they fail to cement new ties and yet lose old identities, ending up as a "nowhere man," a homogenized McPerson? These questions are reasonable, but they confuse the process of forging new ties with the loss of the failure to establish a consistent underlying identity. People want more attachments, not fewer. Their goal is ethnic-pride plus, national-pride plus; in short, hybridity. They want freedom to augment their sense of self, not diminish it. They don't want to be limited by their bloodlines. They see their attachments not as inert but as dynamic and defined by overlapping loyalties and idiosyncratic self-definitions. They no longer receive their identities; they take them and remake them. And they passionately connect with not just one ethnic or national culture but many. When people have mixed ethnic or national commitments, they can still have stable identities. Many people, having made over their ethnic profile from a menu of options, become positively dedicated to this menu. And having forged various commitments does not mean they will keep on adding more and more, only that they consider a life defined by a single, inherited identity inconceivable. So how does one build a hybrid self, where multiple affiliations don't spin out endlessly and where a stable identity emerges from the welter of possibilities? Meet a woman named Chiori Santiago. She's fortyish, a mother of two, active in her community, a teacher, a writer and anything but typical. She's a power-hybrid who has spent a lifetime acquiring a taste for gumbo. She didn't have to find hybridity; it found her. Now she's learned how to show off her mongrel selves with wisdom and grace. Chiori lives in Berkeley, California. She's attractive, stylish, well-spoken, genial but highly opinionated. She speaks English and Spanish fluently, and writes well in both. Her lifestyle pegs her as neo-hippie California earth-person, but physically she's hard to place. Her looks are familiar, but not the whole package. Her dark hair and thick eyebrows make her seem Latina. Her brownish skin suggests Mexico or maybe Asia somewhere. She is large-boned, which maybe means Anglo. Yet she's so swarthy that Iraq wouldn't be a wild guess. But then she's got freckles, which could mean she's Irish. The mystery is only partly explained by her parents. Her mother, Yoshiko, was born in 1926 and grew up in Los Angeles, a member of an active Japanese-American family whose roots in Japan can be traced back more than a thousand years. One of Yoshiko's brothers was the American correspondent for a big Tokyo newspaper during World War II. Of the family, he alone escaped internment. After the war, he served as founding editor of the Pacific Citizen , the newspaper of a leading Japanese-American advocacy group. Another brother founded a magazine that he later sold to Hugh Hefner of Playboy fame. A third brother, Shinkichi, joined the U.S. Army from his internment camp and fought in the liberation of Europe. He returned to the United States briefly, then moved to Europe where he became a well-known sculptor. Chiori's father was born in Oregon, the descendant of settlers who arrived in the Northwest in the nineteenth century. An all-purpose WASP, Chester Fuller Roberts Jr. is six feet, two inches tall with blue eyes and black, curly hair. He was a journalist who worked first for a Seattle newspaper and then for Stars & Stripes in Tokyo during the American occupation after the war. He met Yoshiko in the newsroom. A bilingual speaker, she was an editor and Chester's boss. After working late together too many nights in a row, Yoshiko and Chester began dating, fell in love and married. It was the late 1940s, and Yoshiko was in no rush to return to the West Coast of America. Too many bad memories. When she and Chester finally left Japan, it was for Chicago, where he completed a master's degree at the University of Chicago. The couple moved to San Francisco when the Asia Foundation hired Chester as a researcher. When Chiori was four, the foundation sent her father to Singapore, where her brother was born, and then to Karachi, Pakistan. Chiori's earliest memories are of Pakistan. A servant followed her around all day, and she lived in a compound large enough to house the help in a separate building. She learned Urdu, the local patter, and attended a British-run private school, where she learned to curtsy and take tea and speak the Queen's English. For whatever reason, Karachi was Chester's last stop with the Asia Foundation. In 1959, he was faced with returning to the United States. He and Yoshiko chose Berkeley because they thought that an interracial couple would have a better chance fitting in there. Chiori's transition was rocky. Though nearly eight years old, she was placed in a kindergarten class and treated as an immigrant, "It was America, 1959," Chiori says. In the anti-immigrant 1950s, "Anyone from a foreign country must be stupid." She wasn't. She read all the books in the classroom in her first five days and then sat at her desk, terrified, with nothing to do. "Here my classmates were playing with blocks," she recalls. "I'm thinking Americans are so stupid." And of course, there were no servants. Actually, her parents had fallen on hard times. Her dad wasn't working, and her mom got a job in a factory. For some months, she even brought work home with her. Piecework. Chiori recalls gluing cheap toys together with her younger brother. Under the circumstances, Chiori's nostalgia for Pakistan made sense. "I kept expecting that this was temporary. That another year or two we'd go back to Pakistan and everything would be fine. But we were stuck here." She laughs when she says this. Indeed, her recollections are punctuated with smiles and chuckles. She bears no trace of bitterness. Toughness, yes, but no anger. It was during her father's period of idleness that she got to know him. Her father had a daughter from a previous marriage and the two children with Yoshiko, of course, but this was the first time he'd spent time with a child. "It was great for me because my dad was home," Chiori says. "This is significant because a big part of my identity is as a white male. I very much liked and identified with my father." She still sees herself in him: organized, rational, even her mannerisms suggest him. "That's why I get so enraged about racism because I feel as a white male I should get better treatment. So what if I don't look like a white guy?" Or even a guy. It was clear to her, from a young age, that few took her for white. Maybe a year after arriving in Berkeley, she was walking to the library when an old lady began speaking Spanish to her. "I knew it was Spanish but not what she was saying. So I was staring at her, shaking my head and she started cursing me out, hysterical. Still in Spanish. I could tell she was angry I wasn't responding to her. I thought I better learn Spanish." Another time, when her father was working, she went with him to his office. She was trailing him, running to keep up, but he went through the door of the building and the doorman shut it fast. She tried to convince him to let her in, but he wouldn't. By then, her father had doubled back from the elevator. "Open the door, that's my daughter," he said. "Well the doorman's jaw dropped. He was polite, but I could tell he was shocked. He couldn't imagine that this little brown girl was his daughter. I always expected the doorman to open the door for me like they did for my dad. Because I am his daughter." It was the outside world that frustrated Chiori. "No matter where we went, no one could figure out what race we were," she says. "Most people thought we were Mexican American. The black and Latino kids would hang out with us. The white kids maybe. And the Asian kids, forget about it." Her mother's people shunned her. "The Japanese were very into purity," she says. "They didn't like mixing. I was a half-breed to them." She recalls scary moments outside a Buddhist temple, where she attended a weekly class on Japanese heritage and language. "Every week we'd have to run for our lives from kids who wanted to beat us up," she says. In high school, Chiori discovered hybridity. "I decided I can't change anybody's attitudes," she recalls. "They're going to think what they'll think. So I'm just going to blow their minds." Her mother advised her simply to tell people that she was "Eurasian," but she never did. She started telling people she was Peruvian or Hawaiian. Once, she even said Eskimo. The more she experimented, the more she realized that "people were looking to figure out what race I am so that then you're going to know how to deal with me." This insight wasn't always a happy one. Chiori was an excellent student and expected to apply for admission to the University of California at Berkeley, the state's flagship public university. She was in advanced classes and had the grades to gain entry, but inexplicably her high school guidance counselor, convinced she was the child of Mexican immigrants, urged her to select an easier school. It was 1969. "He looked at my face and said Mexicans don't have what it takes," she says. "He said if you work very hard I can get you a job cleaning floors at the children's hospital." By then, Chiori actually did think of herself as Hispanic. Many of her friends were minorities. And her mother now lived with a black man whose singular feature was being an albino. He was ivory-colored and had blue eyes. "We learned from him that color and race don't go together," Chiori says. "Talk about mixed. He's living in the house. So I'm living with a `white' black man." She knew her counselor had no idea who she was, but still his remarks stung. "I did feel hurt because I thought of myself as Mexican. I thought, Is he right? Maybe he knows something?" In the end, she decided he didn't. She attended Cal and graduated. But a hard lesson stuck with her. "We are judged by how we appear and nothing's going to change that." Still, what matters most is how Chiori views herself, and her self-conception is varied, slippery, and imprecise. She's been married twice, both times to men of Puerto Rican parents. The first time her first husband visited her apartment, he asked nonchalantly where "all her Japanese stuff is." Chiori told him dryly, "I'm not that Japanese." Yet her husband had a practical point. It was the mid-1970s and ethnic pride had zoomed in the United States. Not just blacks but everybody seemed to be lining up with his or her ethnic group. "I didn't line up with anybody," Chiori says. "I wanted to line up with everybody. But people didn't like that." She couldn't hold out. As she learned more about the mixed heritage of Puerto Rico, she decided it at least mirrored her own mixed background. Now she began checking the Puerto Rican box on forms. She has a son from her first husband and a son from her second. As the times changed in the United States, the outlines of her public selves softened. Especially in the 1990s, when mixed-race people began calling for more recognition and a blurring of ethnoracial lines, she began more frequently displaying her Anglo-Asian roots. Her hybridity brings wisdom to polarized situations. She is no self-righteous wannabe, hiding from an identity she won't defend. "White people don't have a monopoly on racism," she says. "Asians are, black people are. You've got to understand that first before you can go beyond it. So let's just cop to it. I'm racist. I do my own judging. Let's just say so. Then we can talk." ROOT CAUSES Chiori Santiago and Barry Cox aren't exceptions. They are the future. They are able to succeed, not only because they are driven to do so but also because six sweeping forces are promoting ethnic, national and racial mixing on an unprecedented scale. People are responding to these six forces by creatively constructing multiethnic identities, or portable roots. Intermarriages Intermarriages are rising across races and ethnic groups. In the United States, marriages across the standard ethnoracial spectrum (black/white/Asian/Hispanic) have increased dramatically. Since 1970, they have more than quadrupled. Viewed across generations, the shift is more dramatic. Of third-generation immigrants, nearly two-thirds of all Hispanics and 41 percent of all Asians marry across group lines. And although black-white intermarriages are occurring at a far lower rate, they are still at record highs. Intermarriages don't occur only between people living in the United States, of course. Americans increasingly find their mates abroad. "We're not just living in the Global Village, we're playing the Global Dating Game," exults one advocate of international marriages. From 1979 to 1994, 2.3 million Americans married a foreigner and settled in the United States. Annually, about 200,000 international marriages involving Americans are consummated (American men marrying foreign women make up two-thirds of the total). For those who can't or won't search on their own, international matchmakers offer to help. More than 200 international matchmaking organizations operated in the United States alone in 1998. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) estimates that they bring together about 4,000 to 6,000 couples yearly who marry and petition for immigration of the female spouse to the United States. Most of the women come from the Philippines or from the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, the INS believes. Some Americans condemn marriage across ethnic and racial boundaries, of course. But interestingly these boundaries shift over time. "What were once `mixed marriages' involving Irish, Jewish, Polish and other `European-American' ethnic groups are no longer so regarded, whereas marriages across the standard color lines continue to invite this label." And yet despite the label, marriages across color lines are rising and gaining more acceptance with Americans. The United States isn't alone in posting rising intermarriages. Virtually every industrialized nation, from Singapore to Sweden, is seeing steady growth in marriage across ethnic and racial groups. In cosmopolitan havens, such as Berlin and Singapore, one in every four matches involves a foreigner and a native. In the most diverse U.S. cities, like New York, rates of intermarriage are even higher. Category Breakdown The second trend highlighting the decline of fixed identities is the growing dissatisfaction with the standard ethnoracial categories. The conventional white/black/Asian/Hispanic grid is too narrow to satisfy Americans any longer, and no less so to describe their highly varied ethnic and racial characteristics. (Europeans show even less fidelity to this grid.) Hispanics, for instance, are now widely viewed as neither a race nor an ethnicity but "a disparate collection" of perhaps as many as seventy different nationalities "descended from Europeans, African slaves and American Indians." Asians are an even more polyglot category. Culturally, the differences between Cambodians and Koreans, South Indians and Tibetans, Filipinos and Malaysians are breathtaking. So are their physical differences. Some Hispanics claim whiteness and others don't; South Indians are similarly selective, or perhaps confused. Even blacks are debating the viability of racial categories, with some critics calling the uniform black-white divide "blatantly" inadequate. A 1995 poll found that a third of all African Americans rejected the concept of a single race for blacks. All this questioning has given people the opportunity to redefine themselves, even in contradiction to racial and ethnic labels they thought were permanent. The freedom of self-definition extends to race. To be sure, the black-white divide is perhaps the single greatest barrier between people. In the United States, intermarriages involving blacks occur much less frequently than those between other groups, while people with even some African heritage are generally labeled as black. But there is a growing appreciation, among blacks and whites, that "racial identities are social inventions" and thus can be reinvented, says Peter Morrison, a demographer at Rand Corporation. A small but growing number of people of color are choosing to call themselves "mixed race" instead of black. Perhaps the most notable example is Tiger Woods, the American golfer whose father is African American and mother is from Thailand. "Rather than fit into a mold, people want to distinguish themselves, so they're more likely to point out their multiracial background," says Jorge del Pinal, an analyst with the U.S. Census Bureau. The emphasis on mongrel roots challenges African-American identity, especially since many blacks have ancestors who were white, Latino or Native American. Historically, the common obstacle of racism fueled black solidarity. While discrimination remains, "we are more and more able to define ourselves rather than succumb to the pressure of how others have defined us," says Toi Derricotte, a poet in New Orleans who has written eloquently about the arbitrariness of racial boundaries. So light-skinned that she can "pass" for white, Derricotte grew up feeling culturally black but increasingly sees "shades" of nonwhiteness. "Everybody is trying to nail down everyone's identity in terms of race," she adds. "I'm saying let there be a space for people not to know, and for people to dwell in that place and for that to be all right." This questioning of once rock-solid racial categories underscores the way traditional categories are breaking down and why growing numbers of people feel compelled to redefine themselves in the light of the realities of hybridity. Many Strangers Familiarity need not breed contempt. By the time a child in Los Angeles leaves school, he's met so many people from different backgrounds that diversity seems natural to him. The ubiquity of foreigners in the United States partly explains why many Americans seem both parochial and international at the same time: They may feel they don't need to show much interest in certain foreign countries when some of the best, brightest and hardest-working people from those countries live around the block. On the minus side, intimacy with immigrant communities--Cubans in Miami, Filipinos in San Francisco, Dominicans in New York, Tunisians in Minneapolis--gives Americans a false sense of knowledge about the countries of origin and the wider world. But at the same time, this contact educates them about differences, giving rise to a new kind of cultural literacy. Ubiquity is one key to achieving this literacy. In most big U.S. cities, there are so many foreigners, and so many well-educated ones, that positive relationships between natives and newcomers are more likely. This is why small numbers of immigrants paradoxically make it harder for dominant natives to cope with diversity. Natives, after all, typically face one of two situations: They live in a country where everyone else acts like them (or is supposed to act like them), in some obvious ways (such as in the language they speak or their religion). Or they are part of a distinct group that contends for power with another distinct group. Such polar situations are common throughout rich nations: Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; French speakers and Flemish speakers in Belgium; French speakers and English speakers in Canada; Finns and Swedes in Finland; French, Germans and Italians in Switzerland. When in a single country there are two or three distinct groups, each with a sizable share of the population, resistance to diverse newcomers is far stiffer than in a country where ethnicity, race and religion are highly fragmented so that no single group dominates. What's surprising, though, is that countries with distinct and fixed groups are prone to conflict more than are countries that are highly fragmented. The evidence for this is rather strong. Paul Collier, the chief development economist at the World Bank, draws on this evidence to advance the intriguing thesis that diversity in a country inversely correlates with peace and harmony. In other words, the less diversity, the greater chances of violent social conflict. The more diversity, the more likely that differences will be resolved peacefully. This conclusion seems so counterintuitive that it warrants some elaboration. In studying the economic causes of civil wars and the breakdown of order in developing nations, Collier examined scores of countries over the period from 1960 to 1995. He found that what he calls "ethnic and religious fractionalization"--or, simply, significant numbers of people from a large number of groups--"significantly reduces the risk of conflict." Holding other factors constant, he argues that "highly fractionalized societies are safer than homogenous societies." Because of the more diverse population, he concludes, it is "much harder," for any group in such a society to mount a violent challenge against other groups. In short, a country where conflicts can't be portrayed as "us against them'--because there are too many "thems"--is likely to be more peaceful and prosperous than a country where two or three groups are constantly jockeying for power, waiting to seize an advantage. Heterogeneity, then, strengthens, not weakens, social cohesion. Now, this reading of the experience of developing countries ought to provide a wake-up call to the many Europeans and Americans who presume that by sharply restricting the pool of aliens they allow into their countries that they are at the same time reducing the likelihood of social tensions. Just the opposite. Absorption actually becomes harder; the logic of us versus them seems more appealing; the chances for social explosion grow. Small numbers of newcomers are easily marginalized. Large numbers may seem more threatening at first but become easier to assimilate (or hybridize) in the long run. It's a matter of numbers: Past a certain threshold of diversity, a nation can achieve the diversification of diversity, and reap the consequent boon of greater social cohesion. This process can be seen clearly through individual immigrant groups. When the size of an immigrant group reaches a critical mass--when its community is large enough that its internal diversity can emerge--members of this community begin to see themselves in new ways. Think about the dynamics of, say, Salvadorans in San Francisco, California. If there were relatively few Salvadorans in San Francisco, they would tend to reinforce their similarities, defensively turning inward; and at the same time, they might become invisible, disappearing into the larger Latino community. However, an entirely different scenario unfolds when there are larger numbers of Salvadorans in San Francisco. A larger group is less likely to be monolithic than a smaller one; it is more likely both to come to terms with the dominant culture of the society and to retain the edge of its distinct subculture. Individual freedom will be more on display as Salvadorans are more likely to affirm the differences among themselves, accentuating regional and local identities that may hold more meaning in their home country. Secure in their ties to other group members, this larger Salvadoran community will be freer to explore new American identities too. The value of achieving the diversification of diversity--or a threshold size for a number of minority communities--is clear. Rather than seek to perpetuate ethnic enclaves, these larger communities consistently express the wish to adopt most, if not all, of the core values and characteristics of the dominant group in the nation. This desire for acceptance makes sense because with size comes political clout and with political clout comes a stake in the values, the culture, the system, of the dominant society. It is only when the dominant group seeks to keep immigrant communities small--and cut off from their homeland through tight limits on further immigration--that the benefits of diversity are sharply reduced. Invention of Tradition People are more aware than ever that their supposedly primordial ethnic or national identities are actually often of recent origin, constructed to meet the requirements of ethnic solidarity or nation building. If they were constructed in the first place, they can be reconstructed to better suit changed circumstances. Recent scholarship documents that racial, ethnic and national traits are made, not an ancient inheritance. In the 1980s, historians, sociologists, anthropologists and artists rebelled against the habit of treating traits--skin color, ethnicity, nationality, even gender--as irreducible. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm popularized the term "invented traditions" to refer to the array of practices and beliefs--presumed ancient and durable, yet actually of recent birth--that set groups apart. National languages, for instance, far from being "mother" tongues, were usually only standardized after the birth of a nation. Other scholars asserted that the ties between the people of a nation were constructed, making them "imagined communities," in the words of Benedict Anderson, a historian at Cornell University. Having been invented, nations could thus be "reinvented" in response to shifts in population, values or leaders. This approach applied to other sources of identity too. Ethnicities went the way of nations as academics showed that they also arose chiefly from social forces rather than inheritance. "Ethnic groups are typically imagined as if they were natural, real, external, stable and static units," when in fact, writes Werner Sollors, "ethnicity is not so much an ancient and deep-seated force surviving from the historical past, but rather ... an acquired modern sense of belonging." While ethnic tensions were no less real because they were based on an invention, a cultural construction, scholars routinely undercut the moral claims that often went along with associated campaigns to insulate ethnic categories from change. In a typical paper, two scholars demolished the idea of a "primordial" ethnicity, dismissing the concept as "bankrupt." They concluded: "If primordial is to mean `from the beginning," a priori, ineffable, and coercive--which it must if it is to be genuinely primordial--then the evidence suggests conclusively that the term is only inappropriately assigned to most of the ethnic phenomena of our day." Even "whiteness" can be viewed as a construction, reflecting choices about how to classify people rather than describing an underlying reality of skin color. Underscoring this new awareness, one scholar described the manner in which Irish immigrants to America came to be accepted as part of the white fraternity after initially being compared unfavorably with blacks. Surveying this literature, David Hollinger summarized the new understanding as "racism is real, but races are not." Global Village Even if you don't go anywhere or meet any foreigners, you can draw on an array of "alien" styles and traits. And if you're in a strange place, rather than being cut off from your roots, you can carry them with you--thus making it easier for you to retain your roots while you add to your affiliations. This frees you to feel that you can take on new identities without jeopardizing your old ones and thus emboldens you to do so with less hesitation. A quarter century after Marshall McLuhan popularized the idea of a single media net, ensnaring all the world's people, the species remains far from interconnected. Half of the world's population has never used a telephone. That's three billion people who not only don't have an e-mail account or a Web browser; they don't have a dial tone. This situation puts into context the claim that a homogeneous global culture is sweeping the world, steamrolling local cultures in order to satisfy the needs of entertainment empires. Besides, the same electronic media that deliver a single image throughout the world can also provide people with powerful tools to preserve and expand their particular identities and local cultures. The Internet has transformed the way people learn about their roots, making extensive family trees readily available for the first time, and then offering an inexpensive means--in the form of Web pages--for small, dispersed groups to maintain a common set of beliefs and information. Radio stations from all over the world now broadcast over the Web, giving far-flung ethnics a chance to hear their favorite stations live. Many foreign newspapers also publish on the Web or are sent electronically to printing presses in other countries. Satellite broadcasts make television programming borderless. It seems likely, for instance, that emigrants will increasingly consume the media of their native lands without leaving their new homes. Sixty percent of Germany's Turks had satellite television connections in 1998 in order to receive a half dozen Turkish channels. One Turkish newspaper had daily sales in Germany of 110,000 copies. Such practices are likely to spread. From a distance, anyone will be able to root for local politicians, sports teams and entertainment personalities--of another country. With the spread of electronic commerce, they may even shop at their favorite foreign stores by hitting their keyboard. All this, of course, will make their visits to their "home" easier and more satisfying (and they will get home more often because of lower fares--it costs as little as $125 to fly roundtrip from points in Germany to Istanbul). Using the same technology, a Jamaican living in New York can stay current with his home via Jamaican newspapers, radio and television. And when he visits Jamaica, he can keep in touch with New York. Media move both ways. Those who talk about the specter of a monolithic world also fail to recognize the degree to which pop culture--peddled by multinational corporations--upsets traditional identities: from sex roles to what it means to be happy or a decent person. This subversive effect can be seen in the passions of a teenage Dublin girl. Sinead--sixteen, freckle-faced and looking like a tomboy in her track suit--has lived her whole life in Ireland, attends Catholic school, scores well on her exams and aspires to attend a university. She doesn't smoke, drink or cuss, and she certainly doesn't have a boyfriend--which is why the posters on the walls of her bedroom are striking. One is of Will Smith, the African-American actor. The other is of a black British football star. Sinead explains that she finds Will Smith "cool, handsome and funny." Though she neither has any black friends nor has ever even spoken to a black person, she admits that she finds black men "physically attractive," and not just the stars either. She can imagine herself dating a black man, she says. Sinead's parents are well aware of the posters. "She likes these black men because they are handsome, famous, exciting," says her mother, a nurse. "It has nothing to do with them being black." Even if the mother is right, her child's ideal of attractiveness is clearly being shaped by global media. To be sure, the worship of film and sports stars narrows cultural options, but it can broaden them too, by exposing an Irish teenager to a positive image of blacks. Would those who think that actors and athletes are trite role models be happier if the inner lives of Irish girls were still ruled by the Church and government censors? The materials out of which young people construct their identities are expanding. This is the good news. Not all these materials are uplifting, of course, but they may yet give individuals a means to escape restrictive tribes and borders. In the process, people don't lose themselves, but find new attachments. This leads to greater variety than before. Far from a global soul, the result is the diversification of diversity. Science and Technology Innovations are giving people the power to make over their identities, and they are using them. To what extent people can figuratively and literally reinvent themselves through a combination of computer simulation, computer-human merger, biomechanics, bioelectronics and genetic re-engineering is more a matter of speculation than reasoned debate. But one thing is clear already: Genetic engineering also casts a shadow over the future of the individual. Some fear that gene manipulation will permit another Hitler to spawn a breed of blond, blue-eyed pseudo-Aryans. Think again. It is equally possible that this technology will reinforce the mongrelization of humanity. Why not a nation of men who reflect the qualities of Michael Jordan and Carl Sagan or of women who embody the blending of Meryl Streep and Toni Morrison? More immediate a concern than genetic engineering is the prospect of the re-engineering of visible, physical characteristics. Altering facial features, skin color or body type could become routine in the years ahead. Again, rather than buoying the ranks of racialists and purists, re-engineering should boost the case for cosmopolitanism by further shredding ethnoracial categorizations. It will also give people the freedom to look the way they feel. Or to change looks to reflect shifting self-conceptions, or the multiplicity of their affiliations. Maybe Barry Cox wants to look Chinese, if not always, then some days of the week. Walk the streets of any major city and you're apt to see a Chinese woman who has dyed her hair blond, an African American wearing contact lenses that make her eyes green and a white teenager with dreadlocks and Middle Eastern henna tattoos on her hands. The floodgates are opening. WHOSE ROOTS? Not everyone is as successful as Chiori or Barry Cox in building and managing a hybrid life. Self-creation is subject to manipulation and error. Fabricated lives can seem phony. I am not talking about garden-variety dissembling. Everyone lies. Not everyone is a hybrid. There are people who genuinely want a hybrid identity but can't carry it off. They don't put in the time or the effort, the sweat and the pain that make a Chiori Santiago. They are wannabes. They are looking for quick cover for the loss of their roots. They are the pseudo-cosmopolitans, the smug, self-satisfied "nowhere man," as Pico Iyer calls those who spend their lives making cell-phone calls from airport lounges to voicemail machines in offices that they never visit. "If all the world is alien to us, all the world is home," Iyer adds, as if declaring an anthem for his friends. This is nonsense. Not even global marketeers brag anymore about the virtues of rootlessness. Iyer, of course, is too smugly ironic to believe that anyone can achieve more than faux roots. Mistaking being part of a frequent-flier plan for real living, he writes, "I have a wardrobe of selves from which to choose." But he finds none compelling. To be sure, there is something admirable about the willingness of Iyer and other jet-setters to take "the whole globe as our playpen." But just what does he bring to the party? As he concedes, rather sadly, "We are masters of the aerial perspective, but touching down becomes more difficult." Why? Because he lacks commitment. "What are the issues that we would die for? What are the passions that we would live for?" Dissent and disagreement, which are the soil out of which true identities spring, offend him. "Conflict itself seems inexplicable to us, simply because partisanship is." Yet taking sides is what identity is about. Barry Cox doesn't just love Cantopop. He loves Cantonese and the people who speak this Chinese dialect. Barry is drawn to his new persona not because it drains him of tension, but because it creates tension between his adopted and inherited identities. Chiori isn't internally conflicted. Like Iyer, Barry and Chiori have a wardrobe of selves, but unlike him they seem as if they belong, acting with a purpose. Barry is the sort of person Iyer would run from in an airport lounge. Chiori would make his stomach turn. Their passion would mystify him, indeed frighten him. As he concedes, his soulless universal man fears only one thing: "passionate people with beliefs." IYER AT LEAST IS HONEST about the hollowness at the core of his stylized hybridity. Others dissemble about their constructed selves, and in their denial do violence to themselves and their traditions. Often, this dissembling is understandable. Cosmopolitanism sometimes arises from the pain of roots, the traumas of affiliation. The case of Madeleine Albright illustrates this. She arrived in the United States at the age of eleven, in 1948, the Catholic daughter of a Czech intellectual. She graduated in 1959 from Wellesley, a bastion of the Establishment, and three days later wed Joseph Albright, a wealthy member of a newspapering dynasty. She converted to Episcopalianism, the faith of the 1950s American elite. She rapidly blended into the elite of New York and later Washington, D.C. In the 1980s, she left a life dominated by family and motherhood for the swirl of Democratic Party politics, eventually being named by President Bill Clinton as the first female secretary of state. Yet Albright's life, in crucial respects, was fabricated. Her father and mother were actually Jews who, following the trauma of Nazi persecution, hid their pasts from their daughter. As late as 1997, when Albright was sixty years old, she claimed not to know that three of her grandparents were killed in Nazi death camps. She also claimed ignorance of her Jewish background, explaining lamely that her Czech father had raised her in ignorance. It was only after a reporter dug up her family history that, she claims, she knew of her ties to Judaism and the Holocaust. Albright's tale is implausible on its face and invites a charge of deracination. That she sought out surviving Jewish relatives from Prague, apparently as early as 1967, suggests that Albright never accepted her father's fictions. In the end, Albright could not escape her past; having chopped off her roots, she lived to see them come charging after her. The lesson is painfully obvious, yet the mistake is nonetheless poignant. The Albright affair points to one danger of hybridity: deracination, the humiliating, even destructive abandonment of roots in favor of acceptance by the dominant group. The other danger of hybridity is more common, if less dramatic: not enough roots to begin with. Examine the situation facing Jessica Snyder. Like lots of seventeen-year-old schoolgirls, she wants to attend college in the United States. She studies hard, gets good grades, runs track, works on a farm over summers. She ought to win admission to many top schools. Only Jessica has a worry. She's never lived in America. What if she doesn't fit in? Jessica's dad is an Ohio-born attorney for General Electric, who has spent nearly two decades living abroad. He is a can-do type who shows an American open-mindedness toward difference. Her mother hails from the Bordeaux region of France. Her parents met in the United States and, after having Jessica and her brother, lived in France, the Netherlands and Belgium. They now live in London. They speak both French and English; so do their children. They visit France more often, but each year travel to Toledo, where Jessica's father grew up. Jessica is a petite blond who dresses casually and is polite but informal. She attends an international high school and appears more American than French, but her friends are mainly from Europe and Latin America, and "when you scratch the surface," her dad says, "she's more French-European." That's her mother's doing. Danielle grew up on a French farm amid fruit and wine, and still visits her home region often. "As much as my kids don't have roots, I do," she says. Partly to compensate, she and her husband recently bought a villa in Bordeaux. "I realize the importance of roots, and I wanted my kids to have a place to go," Danielle says. This isn't backward thinking on her part but the frank recognition that people who are best at acquiring a taste for gumbo--for overlaying new affiliations, for achieving hybridity--are people who have stronger roots to begin with. And, as I will explain in the next chapter, it is the very strength of these original roots that allows new roots to sink deep because the new ones are no threat. So far, Jessica is a creature of her parents' divergent tendencies. She switches on and off, now drawing on her dad and then emulating her mom. If not a substitute for roots, this shows her adaptability. "If you don't learn to adapt, you're always a tourist or a stranger," she says. As for her identity, she exhibits chameleonlike qualities. "When I'm in the United States, I'm American, and I'm the French girl in France. I am both." Jessica's answer is too pat and obscures the real identity challenges that lie in her future. Will she forge a hybrid identity, drawing on sources now beyond her imagination and experience as well her parental endowments? Or is she too rootless, as her mother fears, so that her best option is to strengthen her ties to a distinct nationality, at least at this stage in her life? In either case, the perils of fabrication are clear, but so are its enticements. "You do have the ability to define your own world," Chiori says. And with that ability comes an evolution: the uncertainty and excitement of watching and waiting to see what unfolds. AUTHENTICITY How can we know our constructed identities are legitimate? How can we avoid the charge of phoniness? The old way of thinking about identity--you are as you were born--doesn't help here. We need a new way of thinking about authenticity, in which people legitimize their affiliations through hard work and sincerity. Albert Camus, the French journalist and philosopher, understood this as well as anyone. In the 1940s, he presented a new vision of identity in which an individual brings authenticity to his constructed self by dint of commitment. The importance of Camus's insight wasn't readily apparent because he tied his reformulation of identity to a frank acceptance of the proposition that life was meaningless. "Whatever meanings there may be, we have put them there," writes Robert Solomon, a historian of philosophy, "but knowing that they are only our projections is sufficient for Camus to conclude that they cannot be real or significant." Camus's response is to find "all values in life ... futile and illusory: it is only life itself that is of ultimate value." Thus a person like Barry Cox earns his legitimacy through a convincing performance, and the objection of whether he is "really" Cantonese vanishes. Camus's rejection of the possibility of meaning need not be shared in order to grasp his justification of authenticity. Born in French Algeria and a member of the French Resistance during World War II, Camus battled his way through life, ultimately dying in a car accident at the age of forty-seven. He accepted a stark existential vision of life as "divested of illusions and lights," where a man "feels an alien, a stranger." He felt that man's rational hopes of justice and satisfaction were met with "the indifference of the universe." This "absurd" condition certainly described the helplessness of Holocaust victims and even those less punished by the pity of war. The absurd was at bottom rational for Camus, who admired man's ceaseless drive to make sense of himself and his environment. Other postwar thinkers also recognized the absurdity of existence, but notably Camus viewed the absurd as grounds for hope. In his 1942 book The Myth of Sisyphus , he asserted that even the immortal Sisyphus, consigned to push his rock endlessly up the hill, must hold fast to hope. "The absurd does not liberate; it binds," he writes. Hope must arise from persistence, even absent results. This hope can only be understood in parallel with Camus's sense of a retooled self. Whereas a rigid self requires a fixed morality in order to ensure a measure of integrity, the flexible self is built on the presumption that a person's values and affiliations will shift over time so that integrity, or authenticity, must be justified in a new way. Ordinary people, not just elites, do this retooling all the time, chiefly through action. For Camus, the self is a series of social roles, which aren't arbitrary but not easily ranked by status either. "A sub-clerk in the post-office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them," Camus writes. This parity translates into a refreshing open-mindedness about the authenticity of mongrel identities. When a Japanese woman immerses herself in French society, how authentic is her Frenchness? Camus might say that the issue isn't the mix but rather the spirit in which she undertakes her effort. More critical than the role she plays is her method. For Camus, the method is persistence--hope in the face of a loss of a rigid identity. There is no restoring a "pure" self merely to achieve meaning and authenticity. Impurity is its own reward. Today many extol the virtues of adaptation in the spirit of Camus. They accept that hybrids are not fakes, but respond genuinely to the high levels of mixing and the breakdown of ethnoracial categories, forces that prod people to craft new senses of belonging in the first place. The real issue is how well a person handles his various ties--how he juggles it all. But the impulse to juggle is psychologically healthy. People draw from a bigger identity menu in such a way as to link "elements and subselves not normally associated with one another," notes psychologist Robert Lifton. "The new combinations may take one in unexpected directions and provide one with equally unexpected capacities." Hybridity is an act of sanity; mongrelization is natural. It is these capacities--speaking a new language; working productively in a diverse team; raising a multicultural child--that give lie to the claim that a hybrid's multiple affiliations are somehow random or arbitrary. People don't wear identities as casually as clothes, but they are free to discard elements or to select new ones. A striving for authenticity separates dilettantism from a legitimate desire to expand one's persona portfolio. In the view of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, this process of self-legitimization always occurs against the backdrop of assorted inherited identities, such as the ones derived from biological parents or from teachers. Even if a person succeeds in forging a multiethnic identity, Taylor thinks this new identity always exists in a dialectic with his original identities; indeed, "always in dialogue with, [and] sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us." Taylor adds: "Even after we outgrow some of these others--our parents, for instance--and they disappear from our lives, the conversation with them continues with us as long as we live." This inner conversation--this persistence that Camus saw as his existential method--binds together the mongrel, lifts hybridity to the level of authenticity and makes it the equal of the primordial, the original, the pure. And, as we shall see, real hybrids will win in the twenty-first century. Copyright (c) 2000 G. Pascal Zachary. All rights reserved.
