> We appear to have gone backwards in the past 5-10 years in my view - no longer can you just be "you", but now it feels like we have to be labelled, categorised, and segregated into different groups.
I’ve been alive for almost half a century, and I notice no such change.
I have noticed lots of people feeling like there is a recent change when they realize the identities that arr important to many people outside their immediate bubble (or even inside, though those are often just silently assumed within in-group dialogue or by dominant groups), often in the late teens or 20s.
> We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds ar
No, we don’t. Some aspects of identity are important to some people. Why some people who notice that then suddenly also feel the fact that certain dimensions of identity are important to other people implies a general obligation, I don't know.
People for whom Black is an important aspect of their identity don’t, as a rule, think it is important for being White to be central to White people's identity. (And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with other dimensions of identity.)
> What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet?
Then...you are just like everyone else, in that regard.
> This idea that people are 100% Ethnic-Category-A/Ethnic-Category-B/Ethnic-Category-C and fit neatly in those slots without any kind of overlap seems willfully ignorant at best, and subversive at worst.
Sure. But many of the people to whom minority identities are most critically important and worthy of attention would be the first people to tell you that; in fact, they have a whole analytical framework around it (intersectionality.)
I’ve been alive for almost half a century, and I notice no such change.
I have noticed lots of people feeling like there is a recent change when they realize the identities that arr important to many people outside their immediate bubble (or even inside, though those are often just silently assumed within in-group dialogue or by dominant groups), often in the late teens or 20s.
> We now have to make a big deal and a big song-and-dance to highlight our differences and define what our ethnic backgrounds ar
No, we don’t. Some aspects of identity are important to some people. Why some people who notice that then suddenly also feel the fact that certain dimensions of identity are important to other people implies a general obligation, I don't know.
People for whom Black is an important aspect of their identity don’t, as a rule, think it is important for being White to be central to White people's identity. (And the same is true, mutatis mutandis, with other dimensions of identity.)
> What if I don't fit into some neat pigeon hole on some spreadsheet?
Then...you are just like everyone else, in that regard.
> This idea that people are 100% Ethnic-Category-A/Ethnic-Category-B/Ethnic-Category-C and fit neatly in those slots without any kind of overlap seems willfully ignorant at best, and subversive at worst.
Sure. But many of the people to whom minority identities are most critically important and worthy of attention would be the first people to tell you that; in fact, they have a whole analytical framework around it (intersectionality.)