Different vectors – identity or “self-identity”?

Different vectors – identity or “self-identity”?

Nowadays one of the most popular topics discussed almost everywhere is the different forms of personal identity which co-exist in our society.

Andrew Solomon, a writer and lecturer on politics and psychology, presents his own differentiation of vertical and horizontal identity. According to him, vertical identity traits are biological, passed down through generations and influenced by the parents. When kids express traits that are not shared with their parents, they seek to form their identity outside their immediate family, which Solomon defines as the formation of a “horizontal identity”.

In his research he lumps together such unrelated categories as disability, Down syndrome, crime, homosexuality, mental illness and even drug addiction. This list looks like an old times circus performance with clowns and bearded ladies, Siamese twins, child prodigies and people without limbs. I guess deaf people might feel offended by being compared to criminals or transgenders. Probably the author overextends the analogy.

Parents’ strong desire to see better versions of themselves in their children, Solomon labels as a dangerous byproduct of selfish genes. He tries to explain in his own way what it means to be different from one’s parents’ expectations. He states that vertical identities are respected, horizontal - denied.

There is much to learn about the differences within families. Loving a child can be hard and parents’ feelings are sometimes ambivalent, but that love is no less genuine. Some families have a good fit between parent and child from the start, some don’t have enough understanding and support. When children deviate from parental expectations some families manage to adapt, some of them don’t. There is always an individual way for the families to figure out how to interact with each other.

I see Solomon’s concept of horizontal identity as one-sided and not very deep. For example: we have gotten used to seeing diverse Black communities as the whole but never pay any attention to the horizontal hostility inside those communities towards Black mixed-race people. The Black rejection makes a great impact on their self-perception and ethnic identity despite of the existing collective Black racial identity. Mixed-race people experience rejection and misrecognition because of their mixedness: very often they are the targets of racial inauthenticity accusations.

Andrew Solomon says that people find affinity through their most horizontal traits: they learn their identity by participating in a subculture outside the family. But not every trait forms a basis for community. The stuttering person not necessarily wants to spend time with a group of stuttering people. I doubt Solomon’s statement that a deaf person who is attached to sign language and deaf culture often feels more at home with other deaf people than his own hearing parents.

I suppose that people who are born with differences are not always trying to be more individual but more assimilated with other people. If new technologies enable deaf people to join the hearing world by using cochlear implants that’s not a threat to signing culture. Disability shouldn’t be an identity. In our world of widely marked disability it is starting to make a mere difference, just like a part of normal life - and that’s actually a good thing.