Note from the publisher.

Several years ago I had an organizing staff study the ways in which gender identities were manipulated to reinforce racial and class hierarchies. When I posed the question, "If we were to organize people into a best-scenario identity, what would that identity include?", I was confronted with shocked resistance. Organizing people into an identity is something the rightwing does, not our side, I was told.

With all due respect, that was the wrong position. If we don't organize people to embrace identities that enable a fight for liberation, we are lost to the other side's image of us. This issue is full of stories of people who are organizing themselves and their folks into a new identity. In New York, activists are using conflicts between South Asian immigrants and the INS to assert an alternative to the "good immigrant" and "model minority" identities that so many Asian immigrants have been unable to resist. They add to the newly emerging, rowdy upstart South Asian identity that has been formed by South Asian taxi drivers and police brutality activists, an important addition to racial justice movements. Andy Smith reports on the efforts of domestic violence fighters to create a Native American feminist identity; Sasha Polakow-Suransky notes how hard it is to create a new anti-racist South African identity through history curriculum; Ryan Pintado-Vertner and Jeff Chang ask how dangerous is it to ignore popular identity among young people, both for corporations and progressives?

The truth is, none of us comes into ourselves in a vacuum. We are all influenced, either by the Gap billboard or by the anti-sweatshop organizer. Which do you prefer?