You Can Choose to Accept or Reject Any Racial, Cultural, Religious, or Social Identity that You are Born Into.
I was born the son of a white Jewish mother and a brown Muslim father, so I was essentially given a choice, choose to be Jewish and white, or choose to be Muslim and a person of color. And I chose: neither. I chose to be an Objectivist and a Libertarian and LGBTQ, and to embrace those cultures, those works of literature, that music, instead of either of the two cultures I was born into. And perhaps it was easier for me, because, as someone who could have belonged to both, I fully belonged to neither, but I firmly believe that anyone can do this. People just blindly accept the culture they are born into, because their family is that and their community is that and everyone they know is that and they told that is what they are and they have no choice about it, and they accept, and obey, when, in reality, they had a choice, only they never knew that they had a choice, and they never figured that out on their own, so they never made a conscious choice, they just accepted what everyone had handed them to begin with. As Rush sang, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
And then the counterargument against me is, a white person can choose to embrace Black culture, but a Black person is not allowed to embrace white culture, because the white racists won’t let them, they will decline to recognize them as one of their own. But culture is more than just being hired for a job or being welcomed by your neighbors on one street. Other people do not control what books you read, what music you listen to, what religion or church or temple or services you attend, what plays you see, what TV shows and movies you watch, what type of clothes you wear, what type of social events you attend. Those things are freely chosen. But they define your culture, and your identity, often in ways that denote social, economic, religious and racial identity.
All of those things are chosen. And the beliefs, and values, and culture, from those things, then, is chosen. And other people can’t control that. That sort of control would require total 100% government state censorship, and, yes, some nations have that, but we in the USA do not yet have that, we have freedom, and, because you have freedom, which you inherited from the Founders through the American Revolution, you have the freedom to choose. You can use that freedom, or decline that freedom, but the freedom still exists, regardless of what you do and whether you choose to believe that you are free or not.
Throughout history, there were people from foreign nations, who came to America, because they felt they really belonged in America, and they were really Americans, not members of those foreign cultures, and, likewise, there have been people who did not want to be Americans, and who left. As for national culture, so, too, for ethnic culture, religious culture, social culture: you can stay, or leave, and anyone can, if they find a way to get out, or to get in. A person is born with a set of physical traits and attributes, like DNA, but most of the attributes that form the set of attributes which we call identity, are not inherited attributes, instead, they are the meanings that people assign to those attributes.
For example, being brown-skinned is, in itself, meaningless, it only means something because of the meanings that have accumulated over centuries of history, which meaning everyone assigns to that inherited attribute, so people just assume that the meaning is inherited, but no, it isn't, and that physical attribute could have had any meaning that people had chosen to assign to it. What I inherited, being the son of a white parent and a brown parent, can have many meanings assigned to it: mongrel, Mulatto, mixed race, biracial, and a person could assign good or bad or neutral as a value to it.
People do not choose their inherited attributes, but they do choose the meaning that they assign to those attributes, and they choose whether they accept, or reject and decline, the meaning that other people have assigned to their set of inherited attributes. It is well established that being a man or a woman is a meaning that is assigned to bodies, it is not, in itself, inherited or defined at birth, although the physical genitals that you are born owning are assigned at birth and are inherited. I argue that this is true, too, of racial identity, and cultural identity, and of any identity. And then some people will call you a traitor if you try to leave your culture because you choose a different one, but it is your privilege, as someone who has freedom, to be free to choose.
