What Shapes Individual Identity There many things in life shape identity but some of the biggests factors that shape identity are race, wealth, gender and the experiences you go through. How is an individual sense of identity formed? Through race, wealth gender and experiences their are countless ways identity is formed.
First, race. Race plays a huge role in everyday life. For example in the Ted talk “We Need To Talk About Injustice” Bryan Stevenson says “For african americans in this country, in this country, that was a era defined by terror. In many communities, people had to worry about lynched. They had to worry about being bombed. It was was the threat of terror that shaped their lives.” This quote by Bryan Stevenson explicitly says what kinds of things African Americans had to go through in the past. Their identity was shaped in many ways by the terror and fear they had to go through on a daily basis and this terror was because of the racial differences blacks and whites. In other words the hatred the whites
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Gender has countless implicit rules stating how males and females should act, dress and live their lives. This is especially true in the story How to Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee in this story the narrator Scout is young female growing up in a small town. Scout is affected by the implicit gender rules in many way because she doesn't dress or act like typical girls. This is because her father does not necessarily care how she dresses. This creates tension for Scout though later on in the story for example when Mrs. Dubose tells Scout on page 135 “what are you doing in those overalls? You should be in a dress and camisole, young lady!” This scares Scout as a young girl and she struggles with the thought that girls need to dress a certain way and this plays an important role in her individual identity especially since she is so young and she may feel that she needs to change the ways she dresses to follow the implicit gender