What Makes Us Who We Are

The final part of the book discusses about how we define, represent and expose our identities. The chapters in this part give examples about the words most commonly used by people of certain racial groups and the proportion of self reporting LGBT residents in connection to certain states. 

Rudder used an algorithm to find out what words most commonly used by people of certain racial groups to describe themselves on OKCupid. He learned that there are a few general trends. Whites differentiate themselves by the color of their eyes and hair, Asians by country of origin, and Latinos by their music. In addition to the words most commonly used, Rudder also looked at words that are least likely to be used by certain racial groups but used by most by everyone else. Rudder calls these words the “anthitheses” of a racial group. He thinks that these differences in commonly used words show that each racial group carries its own culture that is not completely understandable to someone outside the group. In a study conducted by Lori Kendall, the participants who participated in the online forum discussed more directly about race than when they are in the classroom (Kendall, 1998). This observation shows that differences between racial identities are much clearer online, just like what we see in OKCupid.   

Another issue discussed about identity is the balance between self-preservation and self-expression for people who are not straight. Through available public data, there is considerable variation of the self reported proportion of gays in the population between different states.  Conducting a specific analysis, Rudder obtains help from a researcher at Google to estimate the amount of people that are gay. Using Google Trends to look at certain Google search keywords related to adult clips, Google researchers found that 5% of the searches lead to depictions of gay men. Moreover, they also found that this 1 in 20 ratio is consistent between states across the United States. Rudder believes that this indicates the proportion of the population that is gay in one state is pretty similar compared to another. He then compared the data with the stance towards gay marriage in each state. Rudder concluded that the more tolerant a state is towards homosexuality (indicated by the legality of gay marriage) the higher the self reported population of gays.