Op-Ed: David Brooks "The danger of a dominant identity"
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By David Brooks
Over the past few days we’ve seen what happens when you assign someone a single identity. Now many Americans don’t recognize one another or their country. The line I heard most on election night was, “This is not my America.” We will have to construct a new national idea that binds and embraces all our particular identities. The good news, as my Times colleague April Lawson points out, is that there wasn’t mass violence last week. That’s a sign that for all the fear and anger of this season, there’s still mutual attachment among us, something to build on. But there has to be a rejection of single-identity thinking and a continual embrace of the reality that each of us is a mansion with many rooms. [link]
By David Brooks
Over the past few days we’ve seen what happens when you assign someone a single identity. Now many Americans don’t recognize one another or their country. The line I heard most on election night was, “This is not my America.” We will have to construct a new national idea that binds and embraces all our particular identities. The good news, as my Times colleague April Lawson points out, is that there wasn’t mass violence last week. That’s a sign that for all the fear and anger of this season, there’s still mutual attachment among us, something to build on. But there has to be a rejection of single-identity thinking and a continual embrace of the reality that each of us is a mansion with many rooms. [link]
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| Ian Thomas Jansen-Lonnquist for The New York Times |
