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We Create Our Identities Through the Metaphors We Consume
McArthur Fellow Tressie McMillan Cottom is unpacking the ways we speak about success
Everyone in this country was not “born equal.” We do not all have equal opportunity as is lauded in our society or experience equal opposition on our journeys through life.
But, as newly named McArthur Fellow Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, where you end up can be a pretty far leap from where you may have started.
“I keep wondering, how did I end up here when we started there? For all I know about how cruel mobility metaphors are for promising opportunity where there is so much oppression, I cannot deny that I am here. Here is a mighty long way from where my people started from.”
Now that she is “here,” she’s putting in work to unlearn and undo the labels we place on ourselves and others that determine our value through what we achieve. She is unpacking the metaphors we as a society use for life and success that have become so engrained in our society, we might not even notice how oppressive they can be.
“I am fascinated with the lies we write about who we are as a society,” she writes. “My work tackles a lot of the lesser known metaphors, the ones that have become mundane. In a society, being mundane is a very powerful position. We call it taken-for-grantedness or hegemony, if you like. At the root of the concept is that the most powerful social role for an idea or a group of interests is to be unassuming, beneath comment or notice.”
Read her full thoughts in the story below.
