BNN: Twix, Man Love, & Reverse Discrimination
I would like to start a new feature on my blog called Been there, Now here, Never imagined. BNN isolates three current identity issues that are happening right now, and places them in either the B, N, or N. In 25 years, I feel like I grew up learning a very specific social code (Been there!), I am now learning an alternative to that code (Now here!), yet I will never experience another kind of code (Never imagined!).
When it comes to identity issues, I’m obsessed. I like to define personal identity by what you write in your Facebook profile or an online dating site. Identity is a big part of my life because I suppressed finding my personal identity for most of my life—hence my Facebook profile is void of anything personal.
On the other hand, there’s an identity that is constructed for you by society. This social construction of identity can be described as your personal social media profile filled out through the eyes of your friend. They could fill out things like, your body type, race, sexual orientation, and even astrological sign—general, superficial things.
It’s this social identity that I notice throughout the news, popular culture, and mainstream media.
Been there: Twix delivers the dumb yet ever so clever dude.
Girl meets boy. Girl talks to boy. Girl overwhelms boy with intelligence. Boy has red beer cup. Boy pulls a comment out of his ass. Girl agrees! Boy asks girl to come back to his place. Girl gets offended. TWIX rewind! Boy tricks girl. Girl says YES! He scores!
Does this stuff still happen in real life? Maybe before the first episode of Law and Order: SVU aired in 1999 would anyone think this was Hilarious. We’ve been there already, Twix, move on with the humor.
Now here: Gay and straight men can be friends.
Douglas Quenqua of The New York Times wrote an article about the ‘flip side of homophobia’. After this season’s top two finalists of American Idol brought the friendship between two men of different sexual orientations into the minds of America, it’s only appropriate to label the situation as the hottest new trend.
Growing up, I never thought the relationships between gay and straight men were ever genuine or even down right possible. I thought, the longer I stayed in the closet, the longer my friendships with my straight guy friends would last. When I came out a few years ago, nothing changed. I’m such a trendsetter.
Never imagined: White people are discriminated against for being White! In Connecticut!
Back in 2003, there were these exams that New Haven, Connecticut firefighters could take to get a promotion. When all these dudes took the tests and the city reviewed the results, they discovered that the only people qualified to receive the promotions were white. Following a federal civil rights law, the city didn’t give anyone the promotion because the city didn’t want a “disparate impact”. The white firefighters appealed and appealed, and today, the US Supreme Court sided with the white firefighters.
There’s a lot of legal dialogue that I can’t really figure out, but basically I never imagined the day when white people would assume the position of victim in the case of racial discrimination. I grew up being a minority and I will always be a minority in America. When the most general and superficial identity marker of a person in the majority—a white man—is now in my shoes, I am just blown away. The Supreme Court had a very difficult issue to resolve, as is stated by the article: “to decide whether there was a continued need for special treatment for minorities, or whether enough progress has been made to make existing laws obsolete, especially in a political atmosphere in which an African-American occupies the White House.”
This BNN blog post is a fun experiment. It gets me thinking about my own identity and its fluidity that comes from aging and cultural shifts in perception. From these situations, I know I can still take advantage of a girl by agreeing with her banter, befriend a straight man with no judgment, and possibly make a white man feel weird about being white in America. Life happens—get used to it!
