From: https://tildes.net/~talk/18sh/is_there_a_name_for_the_this_is_not_who_i_am_defense
“this is not who I am”
I can’t, for the life of me, grasp why or how someone with even a modicum of intellectual honesty can believe such a thing and much less say it seriously.
And I think I understand pretty well why people might be inclined to express this sentiment. Okay. So, my mom’s mom doesn’t think of herself a racist, and she had evidence to prove it. For years, she taught first graders at an, as she puts it, “inner-city” public school (code for “majority black”), taking a pay cut to work there instead of at private Catholic schools despite being herself a very devout Catholic. In her mind, she sacrificed so much for black kids, so she couldn’t possibly be racist. But she has also told me that black people are incapable of swimming because their bones are too heavy, and that they’re genetically predisposed to crime. My grandmother is a cartoonish racist. But that doesn’t align with her perception of self. And this isn’t unique to my grandma.
We all have flaws, thoughts, beliefs that do not align with our own values; with our notions of what’s right and wrong, with our conception of self. That’s the human condition. No one likes to think that they have a violent temper, an addictive personality; that they are racist or dishonest or unkind. I don’t like to admit that I hold people to absurd standards that I myself could never meet, and then distance myself from others when they inevitably fail to live up to my expectations. And not everyone is even that self-critical; most of our flaws can remain comfortably unexamined and unacknowledged for a long time. But uh-oh, you (a liberal white woman who spent your life teaching black first graders) just snapped at a checkout girl and called her the n-word, and now it’s on TikTok, and you didn’t even know what a TikTok was before today but now you can’t stop scrolling the thousands of angry comments calling you a racist. And, you think, they don’t know you, don’t know what you’ve sacrificed or how much you care, and you were just having a bad day, what you said isn’t representative of you. It’s not who you are.
The thing is, when your core beliefs about yourself are contradicted by much of the available evidence, it can be genuinely destabilizing. You can enter a state of “amygdala hijack,” where you start thinking with your instinctual fear responses instead of your rational brain. If your belief that you aren’t a racist is incorrect, what other parts of your self-conception are wrong? Easier, then, to retreat to cliché: “This isn’t who I am. I’m not a bad person. I was just having a bad day.” And of course this mindset is wrong, and unhelpful, and precludes growth, but it’s also safe and comforting. I find it hard not to empathize, in a way.
It’s the same instinct that drives the appeal to character, the same underlying self-defense. It’s easier to deflect criticism of yourself, be it internal or external, and embrace a mindset that doesn’t demand change. Is it unhealthy? Sure. But I get it.