While it appears to be an opinion article about media productions that generated specific trends about confused gender identity, sexuality or race, Wesley Morris’ New York Times article “The Year We Obsessed over Identity” raises complex social concerns and voices personal preconceptions. Morris criticizes the 21st century gender shift that saw the transformation of women in breadwinners, as portrayed in “The Intern” comedy, while also harshly rebuking the transgender phenomenon popularized across media, and the racial shedding that allows whites to turn into blacks.
The tone of the article is very condemnatory, as the author is blaming the social evolution for having blurred the traditional values that clearly differentiated individuals in men versus women, heterosexuals versus homosexuals or black versus white. Morris suggests that a principal responsible for the current state of order that generates serious identity issues, is mass media. However, he also indicates that the confusion about identity and individuality is a political topic, which spurred once Barack Obama was selected the President of United States. The author claims that a black President in the White House challenged the classical perceptions about being black or being white, which further expanding into gender or sexuality arena, creating a mixed identity, wherein one easily transcends from being a transgender to being a “conventional man” (Morris 21).
Morris disapproves of the current social trends of the western societies, wherein women are or tend to be equal with men, earning as much as men or even overpassing them, being more successful. This disapproval is confirmed by the author’s ironical characterization of the movie “The Intern”, who portrays an independent woman as the breadwinner of her family, as “another of Nancy Meyers’s bourgeois pornographies” (Morris 3). The author also disapproves the transgender transformation, arguing that people are becoming like the others, forgetting their real identities. What is surprising, however, is the fact that Morris places both gender equality and transgender identities in the same social trend of confused identity, considering that both phenomena are signs that people forgot who they are.
He shifts his speech towards the race discourse, presenting a brief history of the African Americans in United States and in the American literature, referring to Harper Lee’s Atticus Finch hero from “To Kill a Mockingbird”, a tolerant white man who is the only one to defend a black man wrongly accused to have violated a white woman. He observes that in the sequel novel, “Go Set a Watchman”, the hero transforms his race perceptions, renouncing his tolerance towards blacks for becoming a white supremacist, which mirrors the current U.S. society, transformed into something that it is not. Morris nevertheless states that from all the social groups in America, the blacks are the only ones who did not change, maintaining their instincts and their identity, being capable of distinguishing their true identities from the white people’s perceptions about their identities.
The article subjectively presents some social trends that appeared as a result of social evolution, but also as consequences of an intense media consumerism or politics. Suggesting that Barack Obama is responsible for the current identity confusion or that Atticus shift from tolerant to supremacist reflects the nation’s state are pure metaphors used to sharpen personal frustrations about the social dynamic, which goes in a different direction than Morris had expected. Overall, the article is condemning the changes that made women as strong or stronger than men, but it celebrates the election of a black man at the White House as a sign of progress, Although both women, and blacks are representatives of vulnerable groups, the fact that Morris condemns women’s evolution reflects a traditional, stereotypical thinking pattern.
Works Cited
Morris, Wesley. The Year We Obsessed over Identity. [Online]. Available from < http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/11/magazine/the-year-we-obsessed-over-identity.html?_r=0> . [Accessed 28 May 2016].
