"Have you considered that, if you identify as white and read only the work of white authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?"

A question asked at NPR — in "Your Bookshelf May Be Part Of The Problem," by Juan Vidal. Vidal begins a sentence with "As a Latino," so I'm reading that to mean that he identifies as Latino.

Myself, I identify as an American who was young in the 1960s, and back then, the word "identify" had a colloquial meaning that I haven't seen in a long time. We would talk about "identifying" with an idea or a situation. It made sense back then to say "I can identify." It meant you could immediately feel yourself to be inside of another person's situation.

It was related to the way we used to talk — and maybe still do talk — about "identifying" with a  character in a novel of a book. Some people would judge a book by whether you could "identify" with the central character. I remember a conversation I had with someone back around 1970, when I read a lot of novels. I was critical of that idea that what matters is whether you can "identify" with a character. I said "I never identify with a character." My interlocutor said, "I always do."

Should I marry that person, or is that a bad idea? That's water under the bridge, but do you identify with him or with me?

I'm sure many of you are thinking something along the lines of: You two just had different ideas of what it means to "identify." Althouse had some super-strong idea. To her, it meant that you get caught up in an intense delusion that you are the person in the narrative. To the interlocutor, it meant something more like understanding how things must have felt to the character in the book and having the capacity to imagine yourself in that position and to visualize how you would feel.

If it was a competition about who is the better reader, who won? Is it better to see the person in the book as a mysterious other with an entire subjective world inside that will be revealed to you? Or is it better to see that character as always essentially you, showing you that we are all the same?

By pure chance, last night, I watched the "Twilight Zone" episode, "People Are Alike All Over" (1960):

You're looking at a species of flimsy little two-legged animal with extremely small heads, whose name is Man. Warren Marcusson, age thirty-five. Samuel A. Conrad, age thirty-one. They're taking a highway into space, Man unshackling himself and sending his tiny, groping fingers up into the unknown. Their destination is Mars, and in just a moment we'll land there with them.

Marcusson tells Conrad that he's sure people are alike all over, but Marcusson dies in the crash landing on Mars. Conrad is greeted by creatures who look and seem exactly like human beings — white people, by the way. They take him to a house that they've built to look exactly like the house in his mind — the house they saw in his mind. He thinks it's lovely until he realizes all the doors are locked and there is no window. Then a wall opens up, he sees he's behind bars, there's a crowd of Martians gawking at him, and there's a sign that says "Earth Creature in his native habitat." Conrad cries out, "Marcusson! Marcusson, you were right! You were right. People are alike.... people are alike everywhere!"

Have you considered that, if you identify as human and read only the work of human authors, you are in some ways listening to an extension of your own voice on repeat?