Yesterday morning, our local radio station featured an interview with two Chinese-South Africans and one of the first questions the interviewer (who really loves identity politics) asked was, "How do you identify yourselves? As Chinese? As South Africans? As Chinese-South Africans?"
The question irked me. Big time. It attempted to box them into an easy corner, but I was happy when I heard their nuanced and expansive answers to his question.
There's so much more to how we identify ourselves than our obvious ethnicity or the clues our accents give others about where we might have lived.
Identifying with a particular group doesn't come naturally to me
I was born in England, lived there for nearly 6 years, then landed in Canada's Quebec province where the greeting was "I don't speak English," (which I quickly learned not to point out as ironic), and subsequently lived in the Montreal area for nearly 30 years before moving to South Africa in 1997. My accent is something Henry Higgins might be able to decipher, but most people just look at me quizzically and hope they're not stepping in it when they ask me if I'm American. For the record, Canadians like to pretend that we're mortally offended when people ask us that, but it's all a self-deprecating game we play. Sorry. But I digress.
Then there's my French accent
When I speak French, my accent varies wildly depending on who I'm speaking with. Some people have asked if I'm Belgian, while people in France have said the equivalent of "Oh, your little Quebec accent is so cute!" No francophone Africans have accused me of having an accent remotely like theirs.
Belonging to a group
In high school, I deliberately avoided being part of a single group. Luckily, our high school was so diverse and overall tolerant of diversity it was easy to drift in and out of groups, so we never really devolved into "cliquism". Maybe that's one of the benefits of going to a middle class public school - instead of showing off material things like fancy cars, we had to show off artistic skills (not me), musical skills (not me), athletic skills (not me, but at least I tried), dancing skills (let's not go there), comedy skills (we had some genuinely funny people) and smarts (I kind of managed that in some subjects, but chemistry nearly killed me).
All of this makes it really hard to identify as a particular group member
If you asked me my national identification, I'd say it's a blend of British/European (yup, that's my view on Brexit), Canadian, African and South African. For years I called Zambia my second home and given where my business is going, I'm probably going to start calling it that again just now (a Southern African way of saying "any time from now"). I'm not going to pick one for the sake of conversational convenience - I really do identify with all of these places as "home" in some way.
Along comes this Deloitte guy talking about the "Future of Work"
I attended a fascinating seminar this morning about the Future of Work and will probably share snippets of it once I've processed the learnings a bit.
The part of his presentation which hit me between the eyes was his description of Gen Z work preferences.
- flexible work arrangements
- comfortable with/prefer the gig economy
- keen on social impact
- highly technologically connected
- comfortable to share personal digital information such as FitBit data with companies (remember, the Deity knows everything about me and still loves me, or at least still takes my money every month)
O.M.G.
I identify as a Gen Z.
I'll admit, I probably have more experience than most Gen Z's, given I'm, er, several decades older than them, but thanks to today's talk I'm going to take a much closer look at the bottom part of that iceberg and see what other Gen Z tendencies I might be harbouring.
Cue dramatic music....
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