Introduction

It is only by publicly engaging in acts of identity that an individual’s identity becomes a social object, visible and audible to others and perhaps even to oneself. This viewpoint most clearly finds support in the case of identities that can be adopted relatively easily, such as the stylistic identities of the European American youth in this book. Teenagers may choose to move from preppy to punk, from nerdy to cool, from an alternative style to a hip hop style, by changing where and with whom they hang out, how they dress, and how they talk.

This perspective may initially seem less apt in discussing more enduring forms of identity, like gender or race, for the signifiers of such categories are inscribed on the body in a far more permanent way than clothing or hairstyle. But I have suggested in the foregoing chapters that in this regard the racial category of whiteness is little different from the stylistic categories of preppiness, nerdiness, and so on: both kinds of identities are built through everyday social practices. When European American teenagers in my study used African American youth slang in a mocking or stylized way, or when they spoke of their fear or resentment of their black peers, they were “doing” whiteness – that is, they were acting in ways that in the local ethnographic and interactional context positioned them as white. This is not to say that such practices will be understood as indexical of whiteness in all contexts, nor that a person who “acts white,” or black, or any other racialized category will necessarily be understood by others to be a member of that category. Social actors do not have unconstrained agency to construct their desired identities in a way that others will recognize and acknowledge. The relationality of identity means that identities are not the projects of individuals alone but are constantly co-constructed, supported, negotiated, and challenged by others. Because social categories are protected against induction (Sacks 1995: 336), people who act outside their expected or assigned category may be seen as failed members of that category, as “wannabes” of some other category, or even as “culturally unintelligible” (Butler 1990). This phenomenon is illustrated in the case of European American hip hop fans, whose stylistic choices were interpreted by many of their peers as inappropriately “acting black” given their racial assignment as white, and whose ability to be viewed as authentic participants in hip hop culture was therefore frequently called into question.