DISCUSSANT REPORT #3
THE HETEROGENEITY OF IDENTITIES & URBANISM
BY ARIA SANYA
Declaration of Integrity:
I, Aria Sanya affirm that my writing is original and that I did not use artificial intelligence of any kind, plagiarism, nor the help of ghostwriters to generate any sort of content for this report. I understand that the consequences of doing so are severe and also embarrassing.
In “Urbanism as a Way of Life”, Louis Wirth (1938) builds upon the idea of cities as a place where strangers coexist, suggesting that because people cannot fully understand each others’ personalities, relationships between people are “segmentalized”; people assume different identities within a dense urban environment. According to Wirth, the urban personality is cold and transactional. But to what extent do our identities really divide us? As we learned in our lecture this week, race is not real; rather, it is an artificially created phenomenon used to categorize people based on their physical characteristics. However, racism and systemic oppression towards people of marginalized identities is real. Can any one person truly speak for a certain group of people based on a shared generational struggle? Or are these just arbitrary categories that ignore decades of reconciliation, changes in the social hierarchy, and individuality?
In “Go Ahead, Speak for Yourself”, Kwame Anthony Appiah (2018) criticizes the notion that having a specific identity gives someone special authority to speak as a representative of all members of an identity group. He refers to this as the “as a” concept—for example, I could say, as an Indian American woman, I am not in favor of cultural homogeneity (as imposed by western empires during the colonial era). I could argue that my opinion has special weight because I am part of an identity group that has struggled through colonialism and is still struggling through its contemporary effects. However, Appiah argues that “identities interact in complex ways…having an identity doesn’t, by itself, authorize you to speak on behalf of everyone of that identity”. Not all Indians, Indian Americans, Indian women, agree with my opinions; this can be exemplified by Narendra Modi’s incumbency in India. Modi, India’s prime minister, is a right-wing Hindu nationalist focused on establishing Hindu hegemony within India at the expense of the vast diversity of religions in the country. India is the world’s largest democracy and Modi has held power since 2014. In the United States, Indian Americans are “the most represented minority in the Trump Administration”—an institution that seems to be suppressing people more than ever. Thus, Appiah would argue that fundamentally, my identity cannot make me a spokesperson for the group that shares it.
Appiah’s main argument is that identity groups are not monoliths. Daniel HoSang (2025) interviews people of color who have shifted from the Democratic to the Republican Party in an article titled “Obama won record numbers of nonwhite voters. This is how the Democrats lost them.” Orlando Owens, a Milwaukee voter, remarks, “I joined the Democratic Party because I’m Black” (qtd. In HoSang). However, he found that the Democratic Party left his needs unaddressed. While the majority of people of color in the USA are Democrats, there is a growing number of them who are shifting their affinities towards the right. This exemplifies the dialectical thinking we discussed in lecture: perhaps we need to find true understanding through grappling with opposite ideas.
Hannah Allan and Razzan Nakhlawi (2021) detail a similar phenomenon in their article, “Black, Brown and extremist: Across the far-right spectrum, people of color play a more visible role”. Many people of color are part of extremist, right-wing groups that often house racist ideologies—though they find it “especially galling to be called racist by white social justice protestors” (Allan & Nakhlawi). Emmanuel, Puerto Rican, argues, “they’re the actual racists…I don’t need you to speak for me. I can speak for myself” (qtd. In Allan & Nakhlawi). This echoes Appiah’s earlier ideas of the importance of speaking for your own experiences, rather than for groups you are affiliated with. Many people of color in these spaces, such as Emmanuel, do not even consider their race to be an important aspect of their identity because “they hadn’t personally experienced prejudice” (Allan & Nakhlawi).
Mark Pitcavage, an extremist researcher, posits, “For some people, it’s about a loss of identity…they choose one world and deny the other” (qtd. In Allan & Nakhlawi). This brings us back to Wirth’s (1938) ideas of cities as places of rapid identity creation and fragmentation, of “segmented selves”.
Brandon Rapolla—a brown-skinned man who has carved a space in far-right groups—claims that “people on the far right are automatically labeled as racist… [which is] a weapon used by elitists in order to keep their power” (qtd. In Allan & Nakhlawi, 2021). This is related to Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s (2022) ideas of “elite capture”. Unlike Appiah, Táíwò is not necessarily critiquing identity politics themselves, but rather the co-option and appropriation of them by the elite. He outlines how contemporary racist policing dynamics that spurred global movements such as the Black Lives Matter and #EndSARS protests are rooted in the colonial processes of wealth and power that exploit the racialized “global South” to create advantages for the global North (Táíwò, pp. 3-4). Táíwò argues that at every instance of protest, the ruling elite turned to symbolic establishments (such as murals in Washington DC) rather than invoking actual, systemic reform (p. 4). On either side of the identity politics spectrum, it can be argued that ignorance by the ruling class enables this concept of “elite capture”.
Identities are complex and can serve to draw us closer across a shared historical struggle and common contemporary goals but can also create divisions as shown by the heterogeneity of identities within different social and political realms. From our class, we have learned that cities are the centers of protest, solidarity movements, politics, and social relations—marrying the controversy of identity politics.