The Difference Between Us's.

Today's discussion in my American Literature class revolved around Vince Cheng's Inauthentic and Dave Chappelle's "Racial Draft," but it ended back at a discussion we had about a woman who half-identified "mormon."

The class has invested little time in scholarly precision, and is more interested in the free association/exploration of ideas.

That being said, being Mormon, I find it impossible to be "half" Mormon. Not because we don't have parents from different faiths, but because adherence to a religion is a clear step taken by any individual, regardless of heritage. I self-define Mormon, but I did not grow up with the same "mormon" cultural norms other mormons might have had. I wear ties. On Sundays. I don't wear a CTR ring, or eat green jello (not that I wouldn't enjoy it, but that it's not very filling, and I'm always very hungry).

And yet, people still identify "mormon" culturally. What is "mormon" culture? I find the whole idea frustrating and ill-defined. So I have decided that I no longer identify "mormon" and they can argue about my religion as if I weren't in the room at all. My classmates interpret all cultural/social/ethnic divides as identical, and therefore cannot possibly understand the difference between "race" and "religion." They just bounce around, not thinking about it in any concrete terms, or answering the real questions (or asking them). When I teach, we will pin it down. We will sit in silence until somebody comes up with a working hypothesis, and then we can test it on different examples, and see if it works. That's what science fiction is for: it's to try on social hypotheses in different contexts. It's about rational thought, and not liberal homogeneity.

I like the class; It serves its purposes. It's purposes do not include social reasoning with any kind of scholarly nuance or precision.

I want tenure, too.