Episode Details

Danielle kicks off by asking Rebecca what “collective identity” means to her. 

As a Black American woman she has a sense of herself as a part of a community that is larger than herself. It is a community she can rely on and one that she feels a strong sense of responsibility to the collective as a whole and the people in it. 

Danielle wonders what collective identity mean for the Mexican Americans community, feeling that Latinx or Latin Community is too big. “It’s more specific to country and culture and ethnicity…” in the way our identity id developed and in the way we think about Advent.

Rebecca is mindful as Danielle is speaking around the American or US way of thinking around race and ethnicity. There’s a tendency to put things into boxes, she says the census is a perfect example: there’s no place for you to identify as “Mexican” or “Cuban” or “Puerto Rican”, you have to pick Hispanic. She said she refers to herself as a Black American Woman and for African American, there is the loss from the transatlantic slave trade of the ability to name a particular country or tribe. She’s aware of the differences in their stories and each of their ability to name who they belong to, who’s their tribes. 

Rebecca says “Black American Woman” when she identifies herself because she has been to the continent of Africa more than once. She’s knows that her roots are in African but she is aware that there is something distinctly American about her orientation to the world. She remembers visiting Nigeria and when they began to de-board the plane, her blue-covered American Passport gave her preference to exit the plane first. “It might be the first time in my life I’ve ever had a sense of privilege.” She had the distinct and keen awareness that this was because she was American. In the US she doesn’t feel privileged as a Black person living here. And while she cognitively knows her roots and ancestry are in Africa, she is very aware of the second part of the hyphen (in African-American.)

Danielle mentioned an article that Rebecca sent her saying, “Collective identity refers to the shared definition of a group that derives from its members common interests, experiences and solidities. It is the social movements answer to who we are locating the movement within the field of political actors.” Danielle remarks it is both very specific as well as nuanced. 

For Rebecca, she remembers turning on the news to see that at the death of Philando Castile, right on the heels of Alton Sterling, that there was a shooting of police officers in Dallas by a Black male. She remembers feeling those three events like it was her own family. Even though she never met Philando Castile or Alton Sterling; she’s wasn’t in Dallas… Her sense of belonging in and to this community, seeing something happen to any member of the community, whether they act or are acted upon, she feels the sense of “this affects me” and needing to understand her reaction and responsibility. How do I pass what I know of this to my two teenage children?

Rebecca came of age when Affirmative Action was in it’s heyday, and when the country elected the first African American to the Oval office. There is almost a sense of perhaps we have already reached these moments of overcoming, that perhaps the racial violence as she has known through the Civil Rights Movement is over. But then Treyvon Martin. Then Sandra Brown. Then Michael Brown. And a long list of names. So when it came to Philandro Castile and Alton Sterling, she knew she needed to talk to her kids, because she is raising them in a time when racial violence against them is a very real thing. 

At that time of Philandro, her son was still a kid (8 years old) and she thought “I have more time, he’s just a little kid.” Except Tamir Rice was her son’s age when he lost his life in park as a police officer mistook his nerf gun for a real gun. Rebecca had a sense was that perhaps she didn’t have to ta