Living without identity

Two incidents recently have reminded me that though I'm in a huge pool of white, male Christians, there is a lack of identity that goes with these parts of who I am. I often represent as friend, father, husband, and principal long before I think about my whiteness or my Christian identity. There is a sense that our culture in many ways supports these other identities, and only through personal efforts are the others a true part of my identity.

How did I get to this point?

I was watching the movie Taking Chance. It is a great movie, and there is a scene in the movie where Kevin Bacon is looking at a set of dogtags from a fallen soldier, and the dogtags have the name, rank, serial number, and claimed religion of the soldier. This took me by surprise. I didn't realize that our soldiers wore their religious identity around their necks. As I thought about this, I concluded that this information was listed mostly to provide Jewish and Muslim soldiers with their specific religious needs if killed, captured or incapacitated. I was wondering if the term Christian was on the dogtags for any reason. Did it mean anything to the Army that they had a Christian identity?

The second part of this comes of the data that I examine daily in my role as a middle school principal. We spent a lot of time looking at important acheivement data, and we spent a huge amount of this time looking at subgroup and minority achievement. I can say with certainty that in the ten years that I have served as assistant principal, there has maybe been 5 times that we have ever talked about white achievement scores. There is a saying in business and education that if you don't measure it, it doesn't matter. I don't know if I believe this phrase, but it does limit our ability to think about whiteness and what having identifying as white means.

We should all have pride in who we are, not in an arrogant limiting way, but in a way that allows us to be strengthened by our identity. I struggle at times to have pride in being a white, Christian male. I wonder if I am alone in this....

-Dr. Robert Dillon