Author’s Note
This essay emerged from an unexpected encounter during an otherwise ordinary family walk through Cambridge Common. Although the exchange lasted but a few seconds, it prompted me to revisit questions that have occupied my thinking since my undergraduate and graduate studies in sociology: how human beings construct categories of identity, how those categories acquire social authority, and how easily we mistake our assumptions about others for knowledge of who they are.
My intention in sharing this experience is not to condemn the woman whose words prompted the reflection, nor to suggest that cultural identity and the histories associated with it are unimportant. Rather, it is to examine the distinction between our shared biological humanity, the diversity of cultural experiences through which we express ourselves, and the social constructs that sometimes transform those differences into boundaries of belonging.
Ultimately, this essay is an invitation to consider whether the categories we inherit and perpetuate serve the development of human potential or unnecessarily constrain it. As with much of my work, the question extends beyond how we understand our fellow humans to how consciously we participate in creating the societies we inhabit.
—Baruti KMT-Sisouvong, PhD
It was an otherwise ordinary Friday afternoon in Cambridge. Mina and I had taken our four children for one of our usual walks as we often do, enjoying the opportunity to move through the city together before returning home for dinner and our usual evening activities. As we made our way around Cambridge Common, Chloë, Emerson, and Tennyson participated in one of their familiar routines, running ahead to designated landmarks while Mina and I followed with Malcolm, our youngest, seated in his stroller. Over time, we have developed a simple arrangement that allows the older children to enjoy the freedom and exhilaration of running while remaining within clearly understood boundaries. I identify a destination, indicate the side of the pathway they should remain on, and give the command. They race toward the appointed location, wait for us to approach, and prepare for their next opportunity to run. On this particular afternoon and in this specific instance, the instructions were much the same as they have been on countless other occasions: “To the trash receptacle. Stay to the right. Go!”
There is a certain rhythm to these exchanges that has become part of our family’s experience of walking together through the years from the time Emerson was able to join Chloë for the experience. What might appear to an observer as an unusually precise set of instructions is, for us, simply an established way of coordinating the movement of three energetic children through a public space. The arrangement provides sufficient structure to maintain their safety while allowing them considerable freedom to explore the immediate environment. It also reflects something of my own disposition toward organisation and clarity, although I rarely give the matter much thought while we are engaged in the activity. The children understand the instructions, I understand their enthusiasm, and the arrangement works remarkably well for everyone involved.
As we approached one of the benches along the Common, a gentleman seated beside a woman waved toward Malcolm. I acknowledged his friendly gesture with a nod while continuing to push the stroller and direct the older children toward their next destination. It was the sort of passing interaction that occurs countless times in public spaces; a momentary recognition between strangers whose paths happen to intersect. There was nothing particularly remarkable about the exchange, and I would likely have forgotten it within moments had it not been for what followed.
“Oh! He’s a wigger.”
The words came from the woman seated beside the gentleman. Before I had much opportunity to consider what she had said, she added, with unmistakable deliberateness, “Yeah. I said what I said.” Her second statement made clear that she intended her remark to be heard by us and that she was prepared to stand by whatever judgement she believed she had rendered. She was not merely offering a private observation to her companion. She had chosen to direct a derogatory characterisation toward me, and her follow-up appeared intended to ensure that I understood as much. For my part, I continued walking, although the unexpected nature of the remark immediately registered. Turning toward Mina, I observed that experiences such as this were among the reasons I had long ago accepted that not everyone who shares one’s culture will necessarily support or affirm another member of that culture. Mina commented she had not heard the woman speak and as such had not caught the words themselves. We continued our walk with the children, whose attention remained firmly fixed upon the next destination and the opportunity to run toward it. There is something beautiful about the innocence of children and the capacity to be shielded, at least for a time, from the less than kind comments from fellow humans. However, for me, as we continued walking, I began to reflect on the woman’s comment. What interested me about the encounter was not that someone had chosen to express an unflattering opinion. People form judgements about one another constantly, frequently on the basis of incomplete information, and there is little reason to imagine that I should be exempt from that tendency. Rather, I was surprised by the particular expression the woman had chosen and the apparent confidence with which she had employed it. In all my years, I could not recall anyone having directed that term toward me. Never. My response was therefore less one of offence than of curiosity about the assumptions that might have informed her assessment. We had exchanged no meaningful conversation, and she knew virtually nothing about me beyond what she could observe during the few seconds in which our paths intersected. Nevertheless, she appeared sufficiently confident in her interpretation to announce it and then reinforce it in a candid manner.
As we continued around the Common, I found myself considering what she might have seen or heard. Perhaps it was my manner of speaking, particularly the vocabulary I had used while directing Chloë, Emerson, and Tennyson. Perhaps the Harvard baseball cap I was wearing had contributed to her impression. Mina and I were both dressed in black athleisure, and our children, whose heritage reflects our African American and Laotian family backgrounds, were moving about us in the ordinary manner of children enjoying an afternoon outdoors. It occurred to me that the woman might have noticed our family’s composition and interpreted it through assumptions about cross-cultural relationships. Any one of these details, or some combination thereof, might have contributed to her judgement. Yet I also recognised that there was no reliable way to determine which, if any, had actually influenced her. The only thing I knew with absolute certainty was what she had said and that she intended me to hear it.
Admittedly, the expression itself was particularly curious. Historically, the term wigger has generally been used as a derogatory reference to a white person perceived as adopting aspects of Black American culture, especially forms of speech, dress, or behaviour associated with particular Black communities. Its application to me, a Black man, therefore seemed unusual, although I understood the underlying implication through a broader collection of expressions that have circulated within racial and cultural communities for generations. Within Black American culture, the term Oreo has sometimes been used to describe a Black person who is supposedly Black on the outside but white on the inside. A comparable metaphor appears in some Asian communities through the term banana, which similarly invokes an outward racial appearance and an allegedly different internal cultural orientation. These expressions differ in their particular histories and contexts, but they share an assumption that racial identity should correspond to recognisable patterns of behaviour, speech, and cultural affiliation.
Before considering the expectations embedded within these expressions, however, it is worth examining the more fundamental classification upon which they depend. My years studying sociology at both the undergraduate and graduate levels impressed upon me the importance of distinguishing human biological variation from the social meanings we attach to it. We commonly speak of different “races” as though humanity were divided into naturally bounded kinds of people. Yet all living humans belong to one species, Homo sapiens, and the familiar racial divisions do not correspond to discrete biological subdivisions. Human populations exhibit patterns of ancestry and inherited variation, but those patterns overlap, change across geography, and resist the fixed boundaries that racial classifications suggest. To speak of the human race can therefore be a meaningful affirmation of our common humanity, although species is the more precise biological term. What we have called separate races are, in large measure, social constructs through which selected physical differences have been made to carry meanings far beyond the differences themselves.
This distinction does not render our visible diversity any less remarkable. Human beings vary in pigmentation, hair texture, facial features, stature, and numerous other characteristics, and these differences have emerged through long histories of ancestry, migration, environmental interaction, and evolutionary change. Skin colour provides a particularly illuminating example because its variation is so readily visible and has been made to bear such disproportionate social significance. The distribution of pigmentation among human populations has been shaped in part by differences in ultraviolet radiation across geographic regions, with melanin offering protection under conditions of intense exposure and lighter pigmentation evolving in several populations under different selective pressures, including those associated with vitamin D production. These broad patterns do not explain every individual or population, nor did human evolution follow a single linear progression from one appearance to another. Migration, genetic drift, dietary conditions, and the intermingling of populations have all contributed to a history far more intricate, and dare I say beautiful, than the categories we commonly employ suggest.
Admittedly, I find this relationship between living organisms and their environments especially compelling when considered through the broader questions of consciousness and manifestation that have occupied much of my scholarly enquiry. Human physiology does not exist apart from the Phenomenal World but participates in an ongoing relationship with its conditions. Across generations, inherited variation and evolutionary processes have enabled populations to persist and change in response to the environments they inhabit. In my philosophical vocabulary, I understand the remarkable organisation and responsiveness of living systems as expressions of an intelligence inherent in nature. That interpretation should not be confused with a claim that evolution proceeds through conscious foresight or that organisms intentionally choose the traits their descendants will inherit. Biology describes the processes through genetic variation, natural selection, genetic drift, and gene flow; my reflection concerns the larger significance of the ordered, adaptive capacities those processes reveal. What moves me is that the visible differences we have so often used to separate humanity can also be understood as expressions of a common living inheritance interacting with the diversity of the world.
The implications for the social construct of racial hierarchy are considerable. Variations in pigmentation and phenotype do not establish separate degrees of humanity, nor do they justify rankings of intelligence, dignity, moral character, or human worth. Such rankings arise when societies assign hierarchical meanings to selected features and then treat the resulting classifications as though they were discoveries about nature rather than products of human history. The biological reality is variation within a shared species; the social reality is that human beings have constructed institutions, identities, privileges, and exclusions around portions of that variation. The two realities must be distinguished without pretending that the social consequences disappear once the distinction is understood. Racism has shaped material circumstances, opportunities, and lived experience across generations, and its effects cannot be undone simply by affirming that humanity is one.
Indeed, the recognition of our common biological inheritance should deepen rather than diminish our responsibility to confront those consequences. Black American history, Laotian history, and the histories of other peoples are not rendered interchangeable by the fact that we belong to one species. Cultural traditions and collective memories arise from particular experiences, and their significance deserves to be understood on its own terms. What our common humanity challenges is not the legitimacy of these histories but the presumption that they establish separate biological kinds of people or dictate fixed limits upon the individuals who inherit them. Once this distinction is recognised, the accusation that someone is insufficiently Black because of a word, an education, a spouse, or an article of clothing appears in a different light. It is no longer a question of whether the individual has departed from some natural essence of race, but of how a historically constructed expectation came to be treated as an authority over that person’s life.
What makes these expressions especially revealing is the way they transform outward appearance into an expectation about inward identity. Through socially constructed racial categories, the individual is understood to belong to a particular group, but that belonging is subsequently made conditional upon demonstrating characteristics and forms of expression that the observer has deemed acceptable. When the person’s vocabulary, interests, relationships, or manner of conducting themselves depart from those expectations, the departure becomes evidence of supposed inauthenticity. The accusation presupposes that there is a sufficiently stable and recognisable way of being Black, Asian, or a member of another cultural community that deviations can be identified and judged by those who consider themselves more representative of the group.
Yet cultural identity has never been quite so uniform. Even among people who share a common cultural identity, the range of historical experiences, family traditions, geographic origins, educational backgrounds, socioeconomic circumstances, and individual dispositions can be extraordinary. The African diaspora alone encompasses communities whose histories and cultural expressions have developed across continents and centuries, often under profoundly different social and political conditions. Within the United States, Black American life has likewise never been reducible to a single manner of speaking, dressing, worshipping, thinking, or organising one’s family. Regional differences, generational changes, patterns of migration, and the accumulated experiences of individual households have produced a diversity that resists any attempt to establish one expression as the definitive measure of authenticity.
This diversity does not mean that culture is without coherence or that every distinction is meaningless. Communities develop recognisable practices, shared memories, linguistic conventions, and collective understandings that provide continuity across generations. These inheritances can be deeply meaningful, especially for populations whose histories have involved displacement, exclusion, or systematic attempts to suppress their cultural expression. The preservation of language, tradition, and collective memory can therefore represent an important form of cultural stewardship. The difficulty emerges when the preservation of a shared inheritance becomes confused with the enforcement of uniformity among those who inherit it. A tradition may provide a foundation for belonging without requiring every member of the community to reproduce precisely the same expression of that tradition.
My suspicion that the woman’s remark might have been prompted by my manner of speaking brought this distinction into sharper focus. I have long found it curious that particular forms of English are sometimes treated as though they belong naturally to one socially defined racial group rather than another. The accusation of “talking white,” for example, presupposes that certain patterns of pronunciation, vocabulary, or grammatical expression belong more properly to white people, even when those patterns are employed by Black individuals whose cultural experiences are otherwise deeply rooted in Black communities. Such an assumption is especially peculiar when one considers the historical development of English itself, a language shaped by centuries of conquest, migration, cultural exchange, and adaptation. Its contemporary varieties reflect the contributions of countless populations, none of which can reasonably claim exclusive ownership of its expressive possibilities.
The distinction between Standard American English and African American English is instructive in this regard. African American English is not an unsuccessful attempt to reproduce a supposedly superior linguistic standard, but a systematic variety with its own historical development, grammatical conventions, and expressive capacities. Its legitimacy does not depend upon conformity to Standard American English, just as the legitimacy of Standard American English does not depend upon the racial identity of those who employ it. The social prestige associated with standardised forms of English reflects historical relationships among education, institutions, economic opportunity, and political authority rather than any inherent intellectual superiority. To recognise these relationships is not to deny the value of standardised communication, but to distinguish the social advantages attached to particular linguistic conventions from the capacities of the people who speak them.
The problem becomes more complicated when the historical prestige of Standard American English is interpreted as evidence that the language itself belongs to whiteness. In such circumstances, a Black person who employs formal vocabulary or speaks in a manner associated with academic and professional environments may be accused of departing from their cultural identity. Yet this conclusion inadvertently accepts the very racial allocation of intellectual and linguistic authority that one might otherwise wish to challenge. It treats certain forms of expression as naturally belonging to one population and regards their use by another as an act of imitation or cultural departure. Rather than questioning the historical circumstances through which linguistic prestige became unevenly distributed, the accusation risks transforming those circumstances into an enduring expectation about how members of different racial communities ought to speak.
There is a certain irony in using English to disparage another person’s use of English, particularly when the criticism rests upon assumptions about which forms of the language are culturally appropriate. The person making the accusation is not speaking from outside the language but from within one of its many living expressions. Their own vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammatical conventions are products of historical and social development, just as those of the person they are criticising. The distinction between the two may be meaningful in particular contexts, but it does not establish that one speaker possesses greater authority to determine the other’s cultural legitimacy. Language provides a means through which identity can be expressed, but it cannot reasonably serve as an exhaustive measure of that identity.
If the woman at Cambridge Common had indeed responded to my use of the phrase trash receptacle, the situation would have been almost comical in its simplicity. What I understood as an ordinary instruction to my children might have been interpreted as evidence of an educational or cultural orientation that she associated with whiteness. Another parent might have said trash can, garbage can, or simply pointed toward the object without naming it. None of these alternatives would establish anything definitive about the parent’s racial identity or cultural commitments. They would merely represent different ways of communicating the same practical instruction. Yet the possibility that such a minor linguistic distinction could become the basis for a judgement of cultural authenticity reveals how easily familiar patterns of speech can be mistaken for essential characteristics of the people who employ them.
The Harvard cap introduced another possible source of interpretation. Harvard occupies a distinctive position within the American cultural imagination, functioning not merely as the name of a university but as a symbol associated with educational attainment, institutional prestige, intellectual authority, and socioeconomic advantage. Wearing a cap bearing its name does not establish that one attended the institution, shares its values, or occupies any particular social position. As for my wife and I, we had the privilege of serving as Non-Resident Tutors at Winthrop House (2016-2019) as well as holding additional connections with the university, Nevertheless, symbols acquire meanings that extend beyond the intentions of those who display them, and observers may interpret them through associations developed over years of cultural exposure. If the woman noticed the cap, she may have incorporated those associations into her assessment of me. Admittedly, whether she did so remains unknown, but the possibility illustrates how readily an article of clothing can become a proxy for an entire imagined biography.
Our family’s appearance presented yet another possibility, one that carried its own historical and cultural implications. Mina is Laotian, and our children inherit cultural histories that extend across different communities and traditions. Our marriage has brought those histories into relationship through the ordinary experiences of building a household, rearing children, and navigating the responsibilities of family life. We do not experience this arrangement as a departure from our respective identities, nor do we understand the existence of our children as requiring either of us to relinquish the cultural inheritance from which we emerged. Rather, our family represents a continuing relationship between histories that remain meaningful precisely because they can coexist without being reduced to a competition for legitimacy.
Nevertheless, relationships crossing socially recognised racial and cultural boundaries have often become sites upon which assumptions about group loyalty and cultural authenticity are projected. Here, I am reminded of the book Tripping on the Color Line: Black-White Multiracial Families In a Racially Divided World, by Heather Dalmage (2000) for which I penned a review for Amazon during my time studying Sociology at the graduate level. And while my family is both African American and Laotian, nevertheless, a person who forms a relationship outside the community with which they have been racially identified may be interpreted by some as rejecting that community, even when the relationship involves no such rejection whatsoever. The identity of one’s spouse becomes a supposed indication of one’s attitude toward one’s own ancestry, as though affection for another human being necessarily diminishes one’s connection to the people and traditions that have shaped one’s life. This reasoning confuses the expansion of human relationships with the abandonment of cultural origins, imposing a false opposition between the capacity to love across inherited distinctions and the capacity to remain meaningfully connected to one’s own heritage.
My marriage to Mina has not made me less Black, just as her marriage to me has not made her less Laotian. Nor does my being married to her prevent me from experiencing interesting moments when I am conducting daily affairs without my family. And the children we are rearing together do not represent a dilution of either inheritance, but the emergence of individual lives shaped by the meeting of multiple histories. As they mature, they will develop their own understandings of what those histories mean, how they wish to participate in them, and how their experiences may differ from those of either parent. They will encounter assumptions about their identities that we cannot fully anticipate, and they may discover that others expect them to choose among cultural affiliations that they themselves experience as complementary. Our responsibility is not to determine in advance the precise form their identities must take, but to provide them with sufficient knowledge, confidence, and freedom to understand their inheritances while developing into the individuals they are becoming.
This responsibility has become increasingly meaningful to me because children do not enter the world with the elaborate social classifications through which adults have learned to interpret one another. They gradually acquire those classifications through language, observation, education, and repeated participation in the communities around them. Some of what they learn will help them understand their histories and navigate the realities, be they good or less-than-good, of social life. Other assumptions may unnecessarily restrict their understanding of themselves or others. Parenting therefore involves more than transmitting cultural knowledge; it also requires helping children distinguish between the value of an inheritance and the limitations of particular interpretations of that inheritance. We can, however, teach them to appreciate the histories from which they emerge without requiring them to accept every expectation that others attach to those histories.
The encounter at Cambridge Common also reminded me that questions of cultural authenticity cannot be separated from the historical circumstances through which communities have struggled to define themselves. For Black Americans, the right to self-definition has been especially consequential because racial classification has long been employed to restrict opportunities, determine social position, and establish, often incorrect, assumptions about intellectual and human capacities. The struggle against these restrictions has involved more than demands for formal equality. It has also required challenging the authority of others to determine the limits of Black humanity and the range of possibilities available to Black individuals. To insist upon the freedom to define oneself is, in part, to reject the proposition that another person’s expectations should establish the boundaries of one’s development.
Yet there is a tension that can emerge when communities that have resisted externally imposed definitions begin to enforce restrictive expectations internally. The circumstances are not equivalent, and it would be misleading to suggest that interpersonal accusations of cultural inauthenticity possess the same historical power as institutions that have systematically organized, and at times violently enforced, racial exclusion. Nevertheless, a related logic can appear when individuals are judged according to whether their speech, relationships, education, or personal interests conform to a prescribed understanding of collective identity. In such moments, the community’s legitimate desire to preserve its cultural inheritance can become entangled with an impulse to regulate the individuality of those who belong to it. And that act of regulation, may be a source of tension for some engaging in what Dalmage refers to as “border patrolling.” I suspect the woman felt a way by observing me and my family merely being a family. Admittedly, this tension deserves careful consideration because concerns about cultural authenticity do not always originate in hostility toward individual development. Communities may have legitimate reasons to question the commercial exploitation of their traditions, the misrepresentation of their histories, or the appropriation of cultural practices without acknowledgement of the people who developed them. They may also be sensitive to forms of assimilation that have historically required marginalised individuals to distance themselves from their communities in order to gain access to social or economic opportunities. These concerns arise from real experiences and cannot be dismissed simply because some accusations of inauthenticity are poorly founded. The challenge is to distinguish between examining the social consequences of cultural displacement and presuming that an individual who speaks, dresses, marries, or thinks differently has necessarily abandoned their community.
The distinction becomes particularly important when education and intellectual development enter the discussion. If the acquisition of knowledge, the expansion of vocabulary, or participation in academic institutions is interpreted as movement away from Blackness, then some within the community run the risk of accepting an unnecessarily restrictive account of its own intellectual possibilities. Such reasoning would imply that certain forms of knowledge or expression belong more properly to others and that participation in them constitutes a departure from one’s origins. Yet intellectual curiosity, disciplined enquiry, philosophical reflection, and the pursuit of understanding are human capacities whose development cannot reasonably be confined to a racial category. Their expression may vary across historical and cultural contexts, but their existence is not the exclusive property of any single population.
At the same time, defending the cultural legitimacy of “educated” Black individuals should not require elevating formal education above other forms of knowledge. Academic credentials do not confer a monopoly upon wisdom, just as the absence of such credentials does not diminish a person’s humanity or the value of their lived experience. The objective should not be to establish a new hierarchy in which one expression of Black identity is celebrated at the expense of another. Rather, it should be to recognise that the community encompasses a wide spectrum of individuals whose contributions emerge through different forms of knowledge, experience, and engagement with the world. A culture that can accommodate this diversity need not regard intellectual development as a threat to continuity, nor should it require intellectual accomplishment as proof of worth.
Beneath these questions lies a more fundamental problem concerning the relationship between human beings and the categories through which we interpret them. Categories are indispensable to ordinary understanding because they allow us to distinguish among experiences, recognise patterns, and organise information within a world whose complexity would otherwise be difficult to navigate. Social identities likewise provide meaningful frameworks through which individuals understand their histories, relationships, and participation in collective life. The difficulty emerges, however, when a category ceases to function as an instrument of understanding and begins to operate as a substitute for the person being understood. At that point, the framework through which we interpret another human being may become more authoritative than the human being whose experience it was intended to illuminate. Because a person is never exhausted by a social classification, however meaningful that classification may be. Racial identity, cultural heritage, educational attainment, professional affiliation, and familial relationships all contribute to the circumstances through which an individual experiences the world, but none independently captures the entirety of that experience. Even their combination remains incomplete because human identity involves more than an inventory of observable characteristics. It also encompasses memory, consciousness, interpretation, aspiration, relationships, and the continuing process through which individuals develop their understanding of themselves and the ways they opt to navigate both within and through the world. To reduce someone to a category is therefore not merely to risk an inaccurate description, but to overlook the many dimensions of their humanity that may be inaccessible through the assumptions we bring to the encounter.
This distinction resonates with questions I have been exploring through my Seven Layers of Manifestation framework, particularly the relationships among Human Consciousness, the Constructs through which we organise experience, and the Outcomes those constructs help produce. Human beings develop conceptual frameworks that allow them to interpret the Phenomenal World and coordinate their activities within it. Over time, those frameworks can become embedded in institutions, cultural practices, social expectations, and systems of authority. Although the constructs originate within human experience, they can acquire sufficient influence to shape the conditions under which subsequent generations understand themselves and their fellow humans. What begins as a means of organising experience may eventually become a mechanism through which experience is constrained.
The history of racial classification offers a particularly consequential illustration of this process. As the distinction between shared biological humanity and socially imposed racial divisions makes clear, the categories themselves have been historically constructed, contested, and revised. Their social consequences, however, are neither imaginary nor insignificant. They have influenced laws, economic arrangements, institutional practices, cultural traditions, and the lived experiences of individuals across generations. Recognising their constructed character does not negate their historical significance or suggest that people can simply disregard the circumstances those categories have helped produce. Nor should biological unity be used as a reason to overlook the specific inequalities that racialisation has created. It does, however, invite us to distinguish between the realities that social classifications have created and the assumptions about human nature that are sometimes used to justify their continued authority.
When someone concludes that a Black person must speak in a particular manner to remain authentically Black, an expectation about cultural expression has been elevated into a purported truth about identity. When a person’s marriage is interpreted as evidence of cultural disloyalty, a relationship becomes subordinate to an inherited classification. And when education or professional achievement is treated as a departure from one’s origins, individual development is judged against a boundary whose legitimacy may never have been carefully examined. In each of the three instances, the social construct begins to exercise authority over the person, and the person is expected to conform to the category rather than the category being understood as an imperfect means of describing the person. All one need do is examine the annals of American History to fully comprehend the veracity of my position.
This pattern extends well beyond questions of race. Religious communities may question the authenticity of members whose beliefs or practices evolve beyond established conventions. Professional institutions may define legitimacy through credentials or traditions that exclude unconventional forms of knowledge. Political communities may interpret disagreement as betrayal, while families may regard an individual’s changing aspirations as a rejection of the values through which that individual was raised. Although the circumstances and consequences differ, I believe these two situations reveal a recurring difficulty in human social life: the frameworks through which belonging is established can become the very mechanisms through which belonging is conditionally granted or withdrawn.
The challenge, as I understand it, is not to eliminate categories or deny the importance of collective identity, but to remain conscious of their limitations. We require shared concepts to communicate, organise institutions, preserve traditions, and understand the histories through which our lives have developed. Yet we also require sufficient intellectual and moral flexibility to recognise that no category can fully anticipate the possibilities of the individuals who inhabit it. When we forget this distinction, we may begin to defend the boundaries of our classifications more vigorously than we defend the freedom and dignity of the people those classifications describe.
After many years of reflection due to my training in Sociology during both undergrad and the first leg of grad school, I have increasingly come to understand identity as something that is both inherited and continually developed through experience. We enter the world within circumstances we did not choose, receiving languages, traditions, family histories, and social expectations that provide the initial conditions through which we begin to understand ourselves. These mid-sentence inheritances matter because they shape our earliest relationships, inform our assumptions, and provide much of the symbolic material through which we interpret our place in the world. Yet inheritance is not the entirety of identity, and the experiences through which we mature inevitably introduce possibilities that extend beyond the circumstances of our beginnings.
As we encounter new ideas, develop relationships, acquire knowledge, and reconsider assumptions, our understanding of ourselves may become increasingly comprehensive. Some experiences deepen our appreciation of the traditions we inherited, while others invite us to revise beliefs that no longer adequately account for what we have learned. Still others reveal dimensions of our interests and capacities that were not readily apparent within our earliest environments. This process need not be understood as a departure from authenticity. It may instead represent the gradual development of a more coherent relationship among our experiences, values, aspirations, and actions.
Authenticity, from this perspective, cannot be reduced to the preservation of an unchanging outward presentation. It involves the capacity to live in a manner that reflects an increasingly integrated understanding of one’s self, including the cultural inheritances that remain meaningful and the experiences through which one’s individuality continues to emerge. And over time, that emergence may look different at different stages of the journey. Such an understanding does not require abandoning one’s community, but neither does it demand that participation in that community remain confined to a prescribed collection of border-patrolled behaviours. Cultural continuity and individual transformation can coexist when belonging is understood as a relationship rather than a perpetual examination of conformity.
A community capable of accommodating the development of its members may, in fact, possess greater resilience than one that treats variation as a threat. Individuals bring different experiences, forms of knowledge, and capacities into the relationships through which collective life is sustained. When those differences are permitted to contribute to the community, I believe the shared inheritance can become richer without losing its historical foundations. The challenge, however, is to distinguish between preserving what is meaningful and protecting what has merely become familiar, especially when familiar expectations begin to restrict possibilities that the community itself might otherwise benefit from embracing.
This is not an argument that every inherited convention should be discarded or that individual preference must always supersede collective responsibility. Communities depend upon relationships of mutual obligation, and cultural participation necessarily involves some degree of shared understanding. Rather, it is an invitation to examine whether the expectations through which belonging is expressed remain responsive to the complexity of the people who participate in them. A tradition that provides continuity without demanding uniformity can become a foundation for development, whereas a tradition interpreted as an immutable boundary may eventually constrain the very individuals whose lives sustain it.
By the time Mina and I completed our walk around Cambridge Common, the woman and gentleman were no longer seated on the bench. We made our way out of the park and continued home, where the ordinary activities of family life awaited us. The encounter had occupied only a few moments of the afternoon, and the children remained largely unaware of the exchange that had prompted my reflection. Their attention had been directed toward running, exploring, and enjoying the time we were spending together during one of our favourite activities as a family. Nothing about our family had changed because a seemingly unrepentant stranger had chosen to pronounce a judgement about me, and there was no reason to allow that judgement to become the defining experience of an otherwise pleasant afternoon. Nevertheless, the encounter remained interesting because it illustrated how much can be presumed within so little time. The woman did not know my history, my education, my cultural experiences, the circumstances of my marriage, or the values through which Mina and I are rearing our children. She did not know the relationships that have shaped my understanding of Black identity or the experiences through which that understanding has continued to develop and thus feeds into my work. She encountered a fragment of my life and assigned it a label, apparently confident that the fragment provided sufficient information to support her conclusion.
Admittedly, I remain uncertain about the particular assumptions that informed her judgement, and that uncertainty is itself instructive. It would be easy to construct a detailed explanation of her motives from the limited information available, particularly if doing so allowed me to place her within an equally convenient category. Yet such an explanation would risk reproducing the very interpretive error that made the encounter noteworthy. Her words revealed a moment of deliberate disrespect, but they did not reveal the entirety of her life, her history, or the experiences through which she came to understand the world. Recognising the limitations of her judgement therefore requires me to remain attentive to the limitations of my own.
My immediate observation to Mina remains unchanged. Shared cultural identity does not guarantee shared values, mutual understanding, or personal solidarity, and there is little reason to expect that every individual who occupies a similar social category will necessarily recognise or affirm another. Yet I believe the broader lesson is not that cultural belonging is unimportant or that the opinions of others are always without consequence. It is that belonging cannot reasonably depend upon satisfying every expectation held by those who claim membership in the same community. To allow such expectations to determine the legitimacy of one’s identity would be to surrender an extraordinary degree of authority over one’s life to individuals whose understanding may be both incomplete and contradictory.
As I reflect upon the afternoon, even in this moment, I find myself returning to the children running ahead of us through Cambridge Common. Their destinations were clear, their boundaries understood, and their enthusiasm unmistakable. Each time they reached the appointed landmark, they waited for us to approach before preparing for the next opportunity to run. The boundaries we established were not intended to determine the limits of who they might become, but to provide conditions within which their freedom of movement could be exercised safely. They were useful precisely because they served the development and wellbeing of the children rather than requiring the children to exist for the preservation of the boundaries.
Perhaps our cultural boundaries deserve a similar examination. At their best, they preserve memory, sustain relationships, and provide a sense of continuity through which individuals can move confidently into the world. They allow us to recognise the histories that have shaped us and to participate meaningfully in communities whose experiences extend beyond our individual lives. Yet when those boundaries become instruments for restricting individuality or determining which expressions of humanity are permissible, they risk undermining the very relationships they were intended to sustain. The question is therefore not whether we should possess identities, communities, or cultural traditions, but whether we can inhabit them without allowing our inherited expectations to diminish the complexity and freedom of those who share them.
For my part, I remain a Black man, a husband, a father, a scholar, and a human being whose life has been shaped by a multitude of experiences that cannot be reduced to any single designation. My marriage, vocabulary, clothing, intellectual pursuits, and familial relationships are not competing claims upon that identity, but dimensions of a life that continues to consciously unfold. Another person may encounter a fragment of that life and interpret it according to assumptions developed through their own experiences. Their interpretation may be sincere, mistaken, hostile, or some combination thereof, but it cannot establish the entirety of who I am or determine the possibilities of who I may yet become.
What occurred at Cambridge Common was a brief encounter between strangers, one of whom believed she had seen enough to render a judgement about the other. What remains with me is not the insult itself, but the larger question it brought into focus. If we are to recognise the dignity of human individuality while preserving the value of collective identity, we must remain willing to distinguish the categories through which we encounter one another from the fuller realities of the people who inhabit them. Our cultural inheritances can provide meaningful foundations for belonging without becoming permanent restrictions upon development. The biological diversity of our species and the cultural diversity of our communities need not be treated as threats to a shared humanity; each can deepen our understanding of the many conditions under which human lives have unfolded. Recognising that we belong to one species does not ask us to abandon the histories that distinguish our experiences, but to reconsider the hierarchies we have built upon those distinctions.
The woman at Cambridge Common encountered one human being and interpreted him through categories that humanity itself had created. We may inherit those categories through which others first encounter us, but we need not surrender to them the authority to determine the fullness of who we are. Nor should we presume that the categories through which we encounter others reveal everything there is to know about them. The freedom to become and the responsibility to recognise that same freedom in others are, perhaps, inseparable dimensions of a more expansive understanding of belonging. Besides after all is said and done, are we not on this “pale blue dot” to evolve both ourselves and the societies we create by making them more perfectly resemble the Universal and Natural Laws that govern the Phenomenal World onto which we have grafted our Human-Derived World while using the pinch of Pure Consciousness that animates our Human Consciousness? I suspect you already know my answer.
Suggested Practice | Beyond the First Impression
During the coming days, pay attention to the assumptions that arise when you encounter someone whose appearance, manner of speaking, clothing, relationships, or behaviour differs from what you ordinarily expect. Rather than immediately accepting the interpretation that comes to mind, pause long enough to recognise the distinction between what you have actually observed and the meaning you have assigned to it.
Consider where that interpretation originated. Was it informed by personal experience, family expectations, cultural conventions, educational influences, or assumptions inherited from the broader society? Then ask yourself what you might discover about the individual if you approached the encounter with curiosity rather than certainty.
Extend the same reflection inward. Consider whether there have been moments when you have modified your expression, concealed an interest, or questioned your own legitimacy because of expectations associated with your cultural background or social identity. Notice whether those expectations continue to influence how freely you allow yourself to develop.
The purpose of this practice is not to deny the significance of cultural identity or abandon the distinctions through which we understand our shared histories. It is to become more conscious of the moment when an observation becomes an assumption, and an assumption becomes a judgement. In doing so, we create the possibility of encountering others, and ourselves, with greater openness to the fullness of our common humanity.
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About the Author
Dr. Baruti KMT-Sisouvong is a consciousness scholar, researcher of human development, and Certified Teacher of Transcendental Meditation® based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work explores the relationships among Pure Consciousness, neuroscience, human development, and social systems, with particular attention to how expanded awareness can inform individual and collective transformation.
He is Founder and Chief Meditation Officer of Transcendental Brain, President of Serat Group Inc., and Founder of Radical Scholar Inc.. Alongside his wife, Mina, he co-directs the Transcendental Meditation programme for Cambridge and Greater Boston. He also hosts the On Transcendence Podcast and founded International Meditation Hour.
Learn more at barutikmtsisouvong.com.