Who are we? We are interested observers, witnesses to human behavior. We each have our story of what it's been like to be human.
One story goes like this...
Born into the Pacific Northwest in the 70s, I was a child of an immigrant Hungarian father and a Pennsylvania Scotch-Irish mother. The city was a mixing pot of Salish natives, Nordic settlers, Chinese, Japanese and Afro-American migrants, Oakies fleeing the Dust Bowl and refugees from Southeast Asia.
The 70s was a dire time for Seattle. Population had been falling from 1960. Houses stood empty and downtown was boarded up. "Will the last person leaving SEATTLE -- Turn out the lights" was posted along Pacific Highway going out of Seattle. But the city survived. The population decline slowed with an influx of young counter-culture Americans, Californians and Vietnam War refugees. The 90s saw the tech boom and the music scene take off with a surge in techies and groupies coming from around the country and the world.
By that time, my story had turned. A real estate venture took the family to a small town in Ohio. Set in the foothills of Appalachia, two family groups made up most of the residents, clans if you will. The scattered remainder were cast-outs of the Amish, Appalachian refugees, one Black household and one Chinese household. Acceptance of outsiders was not given easily and tolerance was a bad joke. In this setting my family fell asunder, casting me eventually to Texas, from Telecom Valley in Dallas to Hill Country around Austin.
Dallas was largely business oriented, suburban groups drawn from around the country. Young and old urban professionals and their families grew the city from a relatively small core to a sprawling giant like many major American cities after the 50s. They mixed and matched continuously until many identified as American or Texan before any other group. Fitting in to peer groups was easier, as almost everyone was from somewhere else.
Austin was a university town surrounded in the hills by towns populated by German settlers. Some of those towns published German language newspapers from the 1840s until banned during World War Two. The Hill Country was also a bastion of liberalism in traditionally conservative Texas. There was an Austin law passed in the mid 1800s allowing women to go topless on hot summer days as long as it didn't create a public disturbance. An interesting combination of young and old groups, conservative and progressive.
So where does this all lead me? Subsequent years saw me living in Seattle, Atlanta and Australia, moving within corporations, seeing people from many different groups join together under a banner of common occupation across national boundaries. Somewhere along the way, I started to see that every individual is formed by their groups, but they are also bigger than any one group.
We are bound by the groups we are born into, never erasing the links even if we try to deny them. Throughout our lives we join and leave groups, picking and choosing parts of our identity. In the minds of others we are placed in groups, pigeonholed whether we like it or not.
If groups are such a formative part of being human, perhaps it is time to reveal our stereotypes and learn something about ourselves.