So we know in inner-group dialogue, a major focus is on social identity, or the socially constructed ways of making meaning of our experiences. For the youth dialogues, of course, we center on race and ethnicity both as presenting social identities. But when you think about social identities yourself, what do you think of? When I think about social identities, I often have to remember that it's about your identities belonging to a certain social group, and so whether that's race, or ethnicity, or sex, or gender, SCS, it's your group membership and belonging to a certain group and community. With that, it involves thinking about social power to whether or not that community, that group has power in society, or in that community. Yeah. I think for me, what comes first is how the world sees me, or how I am perceived by society, and in that same sense, how do I see myself in comparison to the people around me. When I think about social identity, it's very much about me and then everyone else around me. Excellent. Let's explore some of those things that you all just mentioned. I think there is something about social identity and its social construction, that is one, a part of what's been ascribed or assigned to you in terms of group membership, that you have no control over, right? But then there's also an aspect of it around what's salient for you, or what you embrace about your identity. How do you find yourselves negotiating that? So I think often times when I am entering spaces, I think about my identity as a Muslim woman, and how visible the identity is with me wearing the hijab. So that is often what draws people's attention, and then with that, come ideas and like bias which they might have of me entering spaces. Something I've been like reflecting upon, is how there's this understanding and stereotype that Muslim women are silent and they're very quiet in spaces, and I often find myself trying to challenge that by overcompensating with my speech, and how much I'm talking and like proving to people that I do have a voice and I do want to show up in spaces. But also, remembering with that stereotype that at times it's not me challenging those stereotypes, but just becoming this exception among people in my group and community. Fantastic. I think for me, being a light-skinned Latina, I have the privilege of people not initially assuming my race or ethnicity. So I think in that sense, my Latina identity until I talk to somebody or maybe tell them my name, or tell them where my family's from, my identity is salient for me. It's a part of me until someone finds out, and then it's like, "Okay, now you know." So in that sense, I think I get both the it's my identity and it's the identity that people assign to me. That's fantastic. Thank you both. In that contrast, I think is part of our experience, right? One inheriting the social identities that, we have to learn what other people's notions are about those things. Then also being a participant in constructing our own identity. What does this identity mean for me, and how do I want to have a role in creating that for myself with others, right? Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about, and Shama you mentioned this. There's these narratives which could be summed up as stereotypes, but there's these narratives about our identities. How do you find yourselves reconciling your experience with these narratives that exists outside of yourself? I have a lot of mixed feelings about these narratives because sometimes my own lived experiences and reality is in contradiction to those narratives. So it is difficult to exist as like a walking contradiction having to face all these narratives and stereotypes and images that are being thrown at you, and how much labor goes into trying to just show up as myself in this world, and then there are times when I have mixed feelings when my life actually agrees with certain narratives, and the tension there with not wanting to be a walking stereotype. But actually, there is some truth in my own experiences to those narratives and having to navigate that and also explain to people that these are my own personal experiences, and not to overgeneralize that and claim that these experiences are then the experiences of every person in my social group or community. Right. I think that also touches on the minority of experience of knowing your community's stereotypes, knowing what other people assume of your community, and just having that subconscious feeling of not wanting to fulfill that stereotype. So I find myself struggling with that a lot as well, just like first thing off the top of mind is like Latina birth rates. Young Latina woman, people often think of being pregnant. They don't really see them going to college, it's never like, "Yeah, that young Latina woman's in higher education." That's the stereotype. Just like me growing into a teenager and become a young woman, I felt so much pressure like don't fulfill the stereotype, do not get pregnant. It's just such a struggle. I felt it was a very deep inner struggle for me to be so aware of the stereotype and so willing and determined to not fulfill it. So that's a good point. Yeah. I also feel, as a person with extra and marginalized identities, just having to take up so much mental space in your mind, to challenge these ideas while does tries to look a 10-year class. There's so much labor that you are engaging in, that you are experiencing, that isn't seen, that isn't visible and people don't understand how that's part of the experience of marginalization. It's not always visible openly sad, like slurs or like. Profession. Yeah and sometimes it really does happen emotionally and mentally and psychologically, and on your own. All right. Thank you both. We'll have an opportunity to say more about stereotypes and discriminatory behavior. I'd like to ask you all how being a facilitator, working with young people, working with teenagers who are sometimes thinking about some of these issues for the very first time, what was that experience like and what did you see as your role in helping them come to an understanding about social identity? I think our main focus had to be relating social identities to the rest of American society because I had worked with students from Dearborn, which is an ethnic enclave, which means they don't experience the same racism in a community that's predominantly Arab and Muslim as they would in the rest of the world. So we had to talk about experiences of leaving Dearborn, and what are some experiences of oppression and discrimination that you faced outside of that particular space that shows up in patterns in rest of America. So that was something important that we had to do. Is ground it and the rest of American society and not just a uniquely and Dearborn at times. I think that sounds interesting in the sense that you are a teacher, you're also a student, you're also a support system, you're a lot of things to the students that you're having these race ethnicity conversations with. I think for me, it was finding a balance between all three. I wanted to teach them about social identities and what they were experiencing as young Latinx people, especially in this time and age, and how that was affecting them not only personally but on the bigger level. I think at the same time that I wanted to show them all of this, my heartstrings pulled for them because these are not just students that I'm coming in and talking to, these are members of my personal community, of my personal identity. I think that is the purpose of some of these dialogues. To have somebody from your community come and talk to you about these things because it's not the same, if it's somebody else. So I think just finding that balance between supporting the youth, teaching the youth, and letting the youth teach you. Because at the end of the day they teach you so much. Yeah. To go off of that, something I really wanted to emphasize as a near-peer facilitator and educator, is how difficult it can be to talk about your stories and personal experiences with a passion and marginalization. But how can we transform that into an experience that can be empowering? For me that was really reminding my participants that your experiences are source of knowledge that everyone can learn from and it really motivated them to keep being vulnerable, to keep sharing with the rest of the group and wanting to build relationships in community with each other. A lot of that comes from personal storytelling. Great. Fantastic. One other thing I wanted to spend a little time exploring, I think Shimi brought this up, the idea of social power and how that interplays with social identity. So while we might think of social identity as on a continuum or being fluid, dynamic, non-binary, what we know is, in society because of social power oftentimes it operates in the binary. What we call social positionality, right. The more powerful and the less powerful. How did you help the students begin to understand their social identities in relationship to their social positionality? I think an activity that was really good for that, what we did was the. Privilege walk? Privilege walk, Yes. Okay. So the privilege walk where my group, the Latinx group, and the South Asian group community were essentially both communities of color. But towards the end when they all saw that they held so many different privileges and there were people way ahead, social power speaking, and people that were way behind, I think it blew mind to see that, "wow we're both communities of color but I have so many more privileges and just power than you." So for me, that was something that I think really got the idea to them that even as people of color, even as communities of color, they can still hold different social power. Yeah, and part of my role as a facilitator is not only facilitating the conversation, but addressing group dynamics that show up in the space. I'm reminding people that this space isn't isolated from the rest of the world, that power imbalances and power dynamics show up in our spaces as well, and not for me showed up in gender dynamics that was coming up with my urban area group, where all the men were taking up the space and sharing and having a conversation and the women were quiet. There were times when a woman would start to speak up, and then a man would cut her off trying to talk about his experiences. For me it was like, hey! Did anyone else in the group see that and why do you think this happens in this space? Talking about and having a conversation about how our social identities also show up in this space and also show up with how we interact with each other, and there is power there that we need to acknowledge and try to become more aware of as we move forward with the conversation. Sounds like a lot. Yes. So you mentioned a couple of intersecting identities. What other sort of identities did you find yourself addressing in the dialogues? Something that I had to keep in mind is these students for high school students, and high school is a space where there is a lot of toxic masculinity and a lot of homophobia and heterosexism and a lot of that would come up in the form of jokes and laughing. One of my participants in my dialogue was a by identifying man, and so I had noticed some of my participants laughing at him. So for me, it took me taking them outside those space and talking to them about it so that they become more aware of what they're saying, because I don't think they were actually critical or aware or conscious of the fact that what they were doing was harmful, and reproducing harm in our dialogue space. To them, it's "Oh, it's just a joke, I don't know why people would take that seriously," but jokes are part of the system of perpetuating stereotypes and normalizing differences that are harmful. So we had a conversation about our own internalized homophobia, and how that can harm other friends and community members. How do we talk about that and acknowledge it, and try to forgive each other and in that process so that we can keep having a brave, safe dialogue with each other. I think in my experience with SYD and my cohort, it was my Latinx students realizing their first-generation identity. That was new to them and I attributed to them being from Southwest Detroit, a very populated city, a very Latinx populated part of the city. So I remember one day in the retreat, we were just having a general dialogue conversation with both the South Asian community in the Latinx community and some experiences of their parents started coming up. So their parents migration to United States and very quickly got emotional. It was almost immediately that they started talking about their first generation experience for the first time, that things just got emotional. So at that point when my co-facilitator and I realized what was happening, and that we were surfacing a new identity that the other community may or may not understand, that may or may not hold themselves, we separated the group. Then it became a conversation with my Latinx group, what are we feeling? Just helping them explore this new identity that I guess they hadn't a realized and they never had a chance to vent out about or have that space to just talk about what's constantly on their mind though it's never said about that. So for me, that was an interesting identity that I felt really came out in the program and without the program I'm not sure how they would've explored and talked about the other way. Wow. That was a textbook intervention. To call a caucus group when you saw that there were issues of intersecting identity. Not race and ethnicity which is the topic for the dialogue, but something else was presenting itself that wasn't important to explore, and to do that exploration in a safer space, where they can speak within group, that's outstanding. So whether you're dealing with the dynamics or you're dealing with new awareness around social identity, all of these intersections of identity come into play whether it's religion or sexuality or sexual expression or gender or sex or any other number of other identities, class and culture. All of these identities can affect the dialogue.
