On Identity: Race, Individuality, Donald Trump, and Flesh-Eating Bacteria

This summer, Donald Trump (who, just in case you needed additional proof that American politics is merely a farcical tableau vivant rather than a functional institution, has decided to actually run for president) voiced his opinion on immigration the only way he seems to know: through racism. He stated, “The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems…When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best…They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems to us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people." Not only is this an absurd generalization devoid of statistical evidence, it’s a testament to Trump’s belief in the inherent superiority of those who are like him (wealthy, fortunate, and white) over those who immigrate to the U.S. (who may be any number of things other than drug addicts, rapists, and criminals). And while Trump is one of the more verbal holders of this opinion, he is by no means the only one. Has there ever been a time in all of human civilization when our societal infrastructure hasn’t depended on the presence of a power gradient?

Perhaps it is a curse of the human condition, this need to emphasize what makes us different from one another. Or perhaps it’s just easier to try to understand our environment in terms of the “other”, native and foreign, friend and enemy. After all, our own bodies segregate cells and proteins into self and non-self on a molecular level in order to defend itself; this is the foundation of immunity and the reason why we don’t succumb to overwhelming infections. Unfortunately, human beings are too crude to understand that, while this molecular war against outsiders is adaptive and necessary, the macroscopic insistence on enmity among individuals is both counterproductive and intellectually lazy. I wonder if Trump knows that race is merely a social construct (I’m guessing that he doesn’t), or that his assertion that some Mexicans are maybe “good people” is dependent on an arbitrary definition of good and evil. One might imagine how such nuances could have escaped Trump.

Long have I struggled with things like race, patriotism, and organized religion—any classification system that is based on nonspecific features other than character, ideas, and choices. I was fortunate enough to have grown up in an environment in which I scarcely thought about my ethnicity and the fact that it rendered me a part of a “minority” group; certainly, if I had been raised in a community fraught with racial tension, I might have felt differently. It wasn’t until I moved to North Carolina that I remembered that I have brown skin (on the inside, I feel exactly like Queen Elizabeth the First), as I found myself fielding frequent and mostly benign “what are you?” questions. I have no problem with my ethnicity, I simply don’t think much about it. I never felt marginalized by the mostly white Barbie dolls I played with as a child because they didn’t look anything like me, nor did I ever daydream about marrying a dashing brown prince. My self-actualization was cultivated on a foundation of my passions, my talents, and the people and things that I’ve loved--not on the color of my skin, the country I was born in, or the God my parents taught me to worship.

It is odd to me that we all cherish our individuality so closely, yet have this natural propensity to fall in line with regard to race and religion, which seem to be the enemy of individualism. How is it that people feel so comfortable with defining their entire identity by something as insignificant as the rate of melanin degradation in their skin cells? I understand that people don’t necessarily conceptualize race strictly in terms of skin color, that culture, history, and traditions factor in as well. This makes sense to me. Culture is sturdy, durable, and substantial; I can comprehend how culture dictates identity very well. But culture and race are two very different things. Culture and religion are two very different things, in fact. I have tried to understand why this distinction is so often ignored, and have yet to come across a satisfactory answer.   

Being a surgeon only emphasizes the irrelevance of these arbitrary distinctions that we designate amongst ourselves. On the inside, everyone looks more or less the same. I can’t tell the different between a white person’s pancreas and a black person’s pancreas. Your left gastric artery is located in more or less the same place, whether you’re a Muslim or a Christian. The blood flow to your heart depends less on your skin color than it does on your dietary and lifestyle choices. The inside of the human body is unfazed by thing like citizenship, tax brackets, and church attendance. I’ve seen necrotizing fasciitis (what’s colloquially known as the flesh-eating bacteria) kill African Americans, Chinese Americans, and Caucasians in less than twelve hours—rich or poor, religious or atheist, legal or illegal, death came for them all.

We as a civilization have made race more important than it is, and we have chosen to wage war in the name of religion and territory. What would we be without those things? How would we make sense of one another? I too am guilty of my own non-hateful prejudice; assumptions are pervasive in medicine and very few are able to look at the young, Black, heavily tattooed male smelling strongly of weed in the trauma bay with a gunshot wound to the chest and not think “gang member”.  Are we all hateful for making these assumptions, or have we been so heavily influenced by the importance that society has placed on race as an indicator of character that we are powerless to resist even the most subtle of prejudices?

My point is, there are forces greater and more powerful than you, I, or Donald Trump could possibly understand that are directing the course of humanity. And there should be zero tolerance for blind hatred and xenophobia. Life is hard enough, what with mass shootings, climate change, nuclear weapons, and flesh-eating bacteria. Is it possible that maybe—just maybe—we are actually all from the same tribe, whether we believe in Jesus, Moses, Allah, Buddha, or the tooth fairy? (I personally believe in unicorns, but that may be beside the point.) On a fundamental, anatomical and structural level, we are no different. And Mr. Trump, for all his billions of dollars and his skyscrapers and his perpetually younger trophy wives, is no better than the Mexican immigrant trying to cross the border to seek a better life for his family. Sooner or later, both will turn to dust, and Trump’s dust won’t sparkle any brighter.

Please Stop Misquoting Marilyn Monroe

I don't enjoy social media. I never have, and I likely never will. Admittedly, I inexplicably continue to partake in social media, a fact which certainly warrants some careful self-examination, but I heartily dislike it, for three very discrete reasons:

1. The desperately misinformed plebes who regurgitate ignorant and hateful remarks about religion, politics, human rights, and current events. I've learned to shake my head and move on, but the temptation to publicly ridicule these simpletons is ever present, waiting to rear its ugly head and inspire a fruitless rant that falls on deaf ears.
2. The predictable, generic, poorly-lit, bouquet-of-red-roses-and-box-of-candy photos that are posted en masse on Valentine's Day. I'm sorry, ladies, but Valentine's Day is an anti-feminist corporate-fueled joke of a holiday that infantilizes grown women and reinforces the childish notion that a man must prove his love for us by buying us things--completely unoriginal things, I might add, that the industry has arbitrarily designated as universal symbols of love. I'll tell you something: everybody's love is entirely original and no one symbol works for everyone. Flowers are pretty and I'm happy for anyone who receives flowers for any reason, but receiving a bouquet of flowers on a phony Hallmark holiday is not definitive proof that somebody loves you (nor should anyone feel compelled to prove that they are loved to a cyber-group of friends and distant acquaintances).
3. The rampant epidemic of Marilyn Monroe misquotes, the most egregious of which appears on many a profile belonging to many a prepubescent/pubescent/college-age/twenty-something young lady:

"I'm selfish, impatient, and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control, and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."

This is a highly disturbing quotation that makes the speaker sound like a petulant circus monkey. "Out of control"? "Hard to handle"? Worse, this statement has the dubious distinction of being simultaneously misandrist and misogynist: it insinuates that men should simply accept bad behavior from women because all they really want out of women is their "best" parts.

(I doubt that I need to explain why this quote is misogynist; the word "handle" alone says it all.)

The ongoing popularity of this rubbish quotation in social media is not that mystifying, if you think about it. It serves as a cutesy justification statement for immature, entitled women who truly believe that being in possession of lady parts renders them exempt from the usual consequences of being an asshole. It also makes women feel sexy and glamorous to try to associate themselves with Marilyn Monroe.

But wait. You guys...you guys...Marilyn Monroe never said this.

There is absolutely no proof that these words came out of Norma Jeane's mouth. Yet somewhere along the tortuous lines of print journalism and social media, this idiotic quotation became attached to Marilyn Monroe. But I assure you, there is nothing to suggest that Monroe said this. For all we know, Jay Leno said it.

What's gotten my knickers in a twist about this whole quote debacle is not even the content of the quote (although it is undeniably asinine), it's the fact that social media requires no proofreading or editing for accuracy; people can put literally anything out there without any need for accountability. You can attribute words to people who never said them, because nobody is doing any fact-checking on your Facebook profile. Whatever you put into cyberspace can be misinterpreted as fact by an unsuspecting follower. Rumors are perpetuated and misinformation is accepted; the lines between fact and falsehoods are progressively blurred. Having your words printed used to be a privilege. Now any irresponsible nincompoop can post an infinite amount of unreliable data through social media, and, unless you have the werewithal to do your own research, you can easily find yourself accepting assertions that are blatantly incorrect.

Poor Norma Jeane had enough trauma in her life. She was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and struggled with mental illness, which culminated in her suicide at the age of 36. While she may very well have described herself as "out of control" and "hard to handle", it still isn't fair to assign words to her that she never said in order for modern-day girls and women to attempt to justify their own bad behavior.

The lesson here is this: try not to perpetuate misinformation. This example is, of course, relatively harmless (a dumb quote is falsely attributed to a deceased movie star), but misinformation can have dire consequences (for example, the attacks on Sikh Americans after 9/11 because social media helped foster a belief amongs ignorant yokels that all turban-wearing individuals are terrorists). So please, be thoughtful about what you post on social media. One of the unfortunate side effects of the digital age is that literally anyone can be a quasi-"journalist", and your words--whether they deserve to or not--matter.