Barry’s identity as you know it

You might be surprised to know that ‘Barry’ is in fact Barack Obama, President of the USA (at the time of writing)!

Does this change the identity that you had constructed of Barry? Perhaps you knew who we were describing already, or perhaps you didn’t know that President Obama has such a rich cultural background.

From considering the information in the spider diagram, you can see that Barack Obama is an individual with a very complex and diverse range of cultural connections, and different elements of his identity can and do mean different things to different people. This will depend on their cultural beliefs and attitudes.

So the point is that everyone can and often does belong to many different groups and feels connections to many different cultures. The extent to which an individual feels this connection is unique to them and makes up their own multifaceted identity. In an important way, then, someone like Barack Obama, with his connections to many different groups, provides living evidence of the limitations of stereotyping.