I'm not included: Dialogic influences of Identity reclamation throughnaming

I find myself continuing to contemplate yesterday's discussion concerning naming and identity. One of your peers, Dani, mentioned concerns about the exclusivity of naming as community members who are 'Othered' attempt to influence the image of themselves. The example of the BET network got me thinking about how naming of the Self (when struggling through oppression) influences our interactions with others considered dominant within certain social structures. For example, for a long time I've seen friends (male as well as people of color) feel in excluded from feminist conversations due to perceptions of the term 'feminism'. The 'femin' root may seem exclusive to women and the history of the movement and organizations with that name have been predominantly and sometimes exclusively white (Brown, 1989; Chehade, 2001).

When we name or identify or classify, we not only create 'in' groups, but also 'out' groups (Bowker and Stars, 1999; Burke, 1941). When people specifically communicate instances of oppression through how they name their identity, "a lack of white privilege can be experienced as oppression" (Nakamura, 2002, p. 78).

Here is a question that I have come to to (hopefully) further our dialogue: If though our identity reclamation others recognize their privilege/experience oppression, how might that recognition influence dialogue? 

I am not advocating for the invisibility of oppression or silencing identity reclamation (as Burke noted we cannot legislate language)-racial invisibility allows for a privileged group to “take their identity as the norm or stand by which other groups are measured” (Martin, Krizek, Nakayama, & Bradford, 1996) and facilitate privilege through silence. I am just wondering how the labels we choose influence the potential for dialogue.

refs:

Brown, E. B. (1989). Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of Saint Luke. Signs, 14(3), 610-633.

Bowker, G.C., & Stars, S.L. (1999) Sorting things out classification and its consequences. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Burke, K. (1941). The philosophy of literary form (3rd ed.). Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Chehade C (2001) Big little white lies: Our attempt to white-out America. New Brunswick, NJ: Nehmarche Publishing.

Martin, J. N., Krizek, R. L., Nakayama, T. K., & Bradford, L. (1996). Exploring Whiteness: A study of self labels for white Americans. Communication Quarterly, 44(2): pp. 125-144.

Nakamura, L. (2002). Head-hunting on the internet: Identity tourism, avatars, and racial passing in the textual and graphic chat spaces. In L. Nakamura (Ed.), Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (pp. 31-60). New York: Routledge.

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