For the first eighteen years of my life, the only concept of being different I had was from my own discovery of my sexual identity. I knew I was different from a fairly young age but did not have the words to label myself as gay until middle school. Labels are stereotypes; they may be rooted in some aspects of truth yet are sweeping generalizations. In my own mind, I called myself gay. While I did not admit it publicly until later in high school, others called me gay too. I would deny it, but internalizing my identity forced me dwell on it. I did not understand what diversity meant within the context of identity, but my gay identity was the only form of diversity I understood. My laser-focused internalization on my identity prevented me from recognizing other forms of diversity around me.
My involvement during my undergraduate years exposed me to people very different than myself. My identity as gay faded into the background and was much less salient because I was not the only one in my social circle who was out. Rather quickly, I realized something fairly obvious to those who are not in the majority: the color of my skin. When filling out demographics section of my college applications, I never had a second thought about checking the box that said “White” or “Caucasian”; the color of my skin had been irrelevant for my entire life, but the emergence of whiteness as a component of diversity had major implications of how I understood myself within the context of my environment. In the early 2010’s when I was an undergraduate, society was not thinking about diversity in the way we are today, so I still did not have the language to describe the social constructions of power, privilege, and nuance of identity.
Conversely, my graduate years were formative for a more thorough understanding of identity. From the moment I stepped onto campus, I discovered the expectation that identity be central to work, study, and socialization. During staff training, workshops about identity were much more personal and intentional, and I learned through shared experiences the language I can use to describe my own identities. Our faculty designed courses in a way that challenged us to examine our own identity within various contexts, and then apply what we learned about identity and context to various case studies and assignments.
One of the most influential tools for exploring my own identity was Jones and McEwen’s (2007) Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity. Dr. Jones was our professor for Psychosocial Identity Development of College Students and I was inspired by her work, especially because studying identity through the lens of the MMDI was so formative to my understanding of myself and of others. While taking College Student Environments, I studied Renn and Arnold’s (2003) application of Bronfenbrenner’s human ecology model to a postsecondary environment. While the model itself illustrates how identity and context are tightly interwoven, the individual components of the model allowed me to study various environments more deeply, and then learn from my contexts about how identities intersect.
It was not until I was a working professional that I felt I was able to see how identity and environment intersect and inform each other for both individuals and societies. Applying theoretical frameworks to actual students made their identities come to life; I finally felt the student affairs imposter syndrome fade away and emerged the confidence and self-efficacy to make a difference in the lives of students and their own understanding of identity and environment. Throughout this process, I was still learning about my own identity, which we would commonly say is fluid based upon context. Just as the relationship of our intersecting identities influences our core informed by our contexts, our environments change based on our identities within various contexts. This pivotal recognition helped me to understand the spectrum of marginality of my individual identities based on the contexts in which I found myself.
Now that I am more advanced in my career, I am also more advanced in my ability to leverage my own identities to advocate on behalf of historically underserved students and professionals. Most of my knowledge is a product of my experience working at open-access institutions. My niche, currently, is in community colleges, which often serve students with the highest need: students from low socio-economic backgrounds with high Pell-eligibility, adult learners, students from underserved communities, and students from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. The intersections of these identities manifest within students uniquely at each campus location; whether it be in downtown Cleveland adjacent to low-income housing, or the east- and west-side suburbs in more affluent communities, the demographic makeup of the student population is similar, but their experiences vary wildly.
In retrospect, my lived experiences have shaped my identity today. While I strive to be authentic, I recognize that different identities show up in different contexts at different times. I am conscious of the variances of environment as a means of assessing my safety. Students, no doubt, are forced to conduct the same assessments with every environment they enter. As a higher education professional, I work daily to ensure that every single student with whom I interact feels safe in my presence and trust my ability to be an ally. I acknowledge the privilege that I bring into every space, but I also do everything I can to learn from my students so that I can fully support them every step of their educational experiences.
References:
Abes, E. S., Jones, S. R., & McEwen, M. K. (2007). Reconceptualizing the Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity: The role of meaning-making capacity in the construction of multiple identities. Journal of College Student Development 48(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1353/csd.2007.0000
Renn, K. A., & Arnold, K. D. (2003). Reconceptualizing research on college student peer culture. Journal of Higher Education 74(3), 261-291. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3648273
Andy Sokolich 