Rights movement and identities

“My job is to make them get curious about where they came from and their identities. We have a lot of things to be proud of. The problem is that we do not know much about ourselves.”These few lines in the documentary <What Happened, Miss Simone> brought out a new theme of identity that I am really interested in. That is, helping minorities form their own identities may be vital to rights movements. 

In Nina Simone’s case, as a black female musician living in 1960s, she changed her identity from a classical pianist into a civil rights activist. Devoting herself into civil rights movements, she aimed at “expose the sickness” of the whole society’s biased understanding of black people. One significant work she done is to help black people form their identities. Through her songs like To Be Young, Gifted And Black, she encouraged them to be proud of their race and to be confident of themselves. Though Nina gave up halfway, her work was still quite effective and influential.

Apart from civil rights movement, many kinds of equal rights movements need to solve the problems of identities, too. In my opinion, Chinese women’s rights movements is under an embarrassing condition nowadays. Though feminists worked hard to call for governments’ help to protect women’s rights, those women who are treated extremely unequally do not realize the inequality due to their wrong self understanding of being inferior to male. So maybe it’s more important for feminists to help those women form identities first than call for political or financial support. 

-Fiona Lin

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