Liel Leibovitz at The Moth from The Avalon Hollywood

The Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.

In this story, as told by Liel Leibovitz, we hear about a boy growing up who finds out that his father is really a bank robber. It’s not something that most of us can relate to. But there is a larger story about the stereotype of what it means to be a man, and Liel’s journey to deciding what that would be for himself and his son.

We’ve all had relationships with our parents during our younger years, and for those who decide to raise a family of their own, there is that ever present past alongside the desire to make our own child raising decisions. Think about your own experiences, then as you listen to Liel’s story, and review the manuscript, identify the story blocks that you could develop to craft a story of your own.

Transcript

I grew up in Israel in the 1980s, and my father’s mission in life was to make sure that his only son – me – grew up to be a real man. And so, as soon as I turned four, every Saturday he would take me shooting, which was funny because my arm was exactly the size of a Smith & Wesson .45. Two or three years later, when I was six or seven, my father would take advantage of Israel’s surprisingly relaxed car rental insurance policies and he would rent a car to take me on driving lessons, which were terrifying because even sitting in his lap I didn’t reach the wheel.

And every two or three weeks, there was a special treat. We would stop the rental car by the side of the road and my father would make me go out and change tires, whether the car needed it or not, because in his mind knowing how to change a tire was the epitome of manhood.

I really hated changing tires, and I really hated spending these Saturday afternoons with him, but he didn’t care, because he was inducting me to the International Brotherhood of Macho Men. Every chance he got, he would take me to the movies to see his heroes – men like Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris or Burt Reynolds. I didn’t mind these guys too much, but they were not my idols.

My real idol was a real live person named the Motorcycle Bandit. He appeared on the scene shortly after my twelfth birthday, robbing bank after bank after bank all over Israel. He was in and out of the bank in under forty seconds, never leaving behind any clues to his real name or identity, and he just drove people insane.

He got so popular that Israel’s most famous comedy sketch show – sort of the local version of Saturday Night Live – devoted an entire episode to the bandit, speculating in one bit that he probably never robbed a bank in Jerusalem because he didn’t particularly care for that
city. So you can imagine what happened the next day, when, in an apparent tribute to his favorite television show, the Motorcycle Bandit robbed his one and only Jerusalem bank.

People went insane. Women who worked at banks would write their names and phone numbers on little notes so that if the sexy heartthrob robber happened to hit them up, maybe when he got off work he would find their number and give them a call.

But the people who loved the bandit most were us teenage boys. For us he was a complete hero, and on Purim, which is more or less the Jewish equivalent of Halloween, we all dressed up like him – in a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet and a big shiny gun.

So about a year and a half later, I’m thirteen and a half, I’m walking home from the eighth grade, and no one’s home, so I sort of mosey over to the kitchen to make myself a snack. I hear a knock on the door, but it’s not a tap-tap-tap. It’s a boom-boom-boom. I open the door, and there are three police officers standing there. They’re not looking at me, and none of them are saying anything.

Finally, about half a minute later, one of them looks up and says, “Son, we arrested your father a while ago with a motorcycle helmet and a leather jacket and a big shiny gun.”

And I remember my first thought was, NO WAY! You think, you think MY DAD, with a beer belly and the receding hairline and the terrible jokes, you think THAT GUY is the Motorcycle Bandit? But in the hours and the days and the weeks that passed, I learned that he was.
The real story, as I soon came to learn, began about two years earlier when my father, who was thirty-five at the time and the son of one of Israel’s wealthiest families, was summoned by his father to have “the talk.” Now, if you’ve watched a couple episodes of Dallas or Dynasty or Knot’s Landing, you know “the talk.” It’s when the rich guy calls his wayward playboy son over and says, “Son, it’s time for you to grow up and be a man, take responsibility for your life and get a job.”

My father didn’t like that at all. So he stormed out of my grandfather’s office, and he hopped on his motorcycle – because, of course – and he drove to the beach, and he’s sitting there watching the sun set over the Mediterranean, and he’s thinking about his life. My father grew up in the sixties, so he believed in sayings like “do what you love” or “follow your heart.” So he decided to follow his heart, and his heart led him to robbing banks.

Now, as it turns out, he was good at it; he was great at it; he was an inventor, an innovator. He was the Elon Musk of the stickup job. And later I learned how he did it, and how he did it was incredible. He would rob a bank in under forty seconds, he would run out, jump on his motorcycle, drive around a corner, up a ramp he had custom-built, and into a van, where he would pause, and like some mad philosopher king, he would ponder this seminal, existential question of bank robbing, which is, “Where’s the last place you would ever look for a bank robber?”

And the answer is – and now is the point in the story where any of you contemplating this line of work may want to pay attention – the answer is that the last place you would ever look for a bank robber is the bank.

So my father would take off his jacket and his helmet and tuck the gun back into his pants, and walk out of the van calmly, around the corner, and back into the bank, which at that point was a crime scene sprawling with police officers. One of these police officers would inevitably run up to my father and say, “You can’t be here, sir, this is a crime scene!”
And my father would look at him with this dopey look and say, “Oh, can I please just make a quick deposit? My wife will kill me if I don’t”, and the police officer would say something like, “Sure, but be quick about it,” and my father would walk up to the bank teller and deposit the same exact cash he had robbed three minutes earlier. This being the 1980s and computers were still kind of new, he made the cash virtually untraceable.

It was a work of genius. He was so good at it, and he became so popular, that eventually he got cocky. He robbed one bank a day, and then two, and then two banks in two different cities. One time he was riding in a cab on his way to the airport when the urge struck. He told the cabdriver, “Would you mind stopping? I promise I’ll only be a minute.” It was literally true, he was only a minute. He robbed the bank, hopped back into the cab, drove to the airport, and flew off for an all-expenses-paid vacation in New York.

But you know how this story ends. Eventually he was caught. And after he was arrested, life got really weird, in no small part because Israel, as you may have heard, being a small state surrounded by enemies, has its own ideas about prison. And one of them is that prisoners get one weekend out of the month off to go home on vacation. The logic being that since the country only has one really secure airport, if you want to go ahead and try to escape through Gaza or Syria, you know, be our guest!

So every fourth Friday, I would go to the prison to pick my father up, and we would go out and have ourselves a weekend on the town. People would come up to him and high-five him and pat him on the back and say things like “Bandit, we love you, you’re cool.” But to me he wasn’t cool. And he wasn’t even the bandit. He was my dad, who had just done something so incredibly stupid that it landed him with a twenty-year prison sentence.

But even weirder than that one weekend a month together, were the three weekends a month apart. Because here I was, and it was Saturday, and there’s no shooting practice, there’s no driving lesson, no changing tires, no Burt Reynolds, and I didn’t know what to do.

So one afternoon I got dressed, which, by the way, was also an ordeal, because when the police searched our house, they took not only all of my father’s belongings but, because we were more or less the same size, also all of mine. So I put on one of the few outfits I had – which was this really ratty, disgusting purple sweat suit with the Batman logo up front, which I assume the police thought no self-respecting bank robber would ever wear.

I walked out and started walking around town, literally looking for a sign. And then I saw it. It was a sign above a theater advertising an all-male Japanese modern-dance show. And I thought about it for maybe five seconds, and then I did something that I’m pretty sure my father would disown me for: I bought a ticket, and I went in.

And I loved it. Here onstage were these amazing, elegant, graceful men, and guess what? They weren’t punching each other in the face, they were not riding Harley-Davidsons, they were dancing. And yet they were so secure in their bodies and their masculinities, and I thought to myself, “If that’s another way of being a man, what other ways are there?”

And thus began a two-decade-long process of trial and error – of trying to figure out what kind of man I wanted to be. And look, some of the things I learned didn’t surprise me at all. I love bourbon, and I’m the kind of guy who would watch as much sports as you would let
him in a given day.

But some other things were really surprising. Like some French poets moved me to tears. And even though bourbon was great, you know what else tastes really good? Rosé wine. And even though I’m really, really good at changing tires, if I get a flat now, I’m calling AAA. I didn’t share any of these insights with my father, because for one thing he’s not really the kind of guy who’s into insights. But, for another, by the time he got out of prison, I was already a man in full – it was too late for him to shape who I became in any meaningful way.

He still comes to visit from time to time, in New York, where I live with my family. And on one of these recent visits, he and I are sitting in my living room, not talking, as men do, not talk. And my son comes prancing into the room – my three-year-old boy. Now, that boy looks exactly like me. Just as I look exactly like my father.

And if there’s one thing in the world that boy loves, it’s his older sister. And if there’s one thing in the world that his older sister loves, it’s Disney princesses. And in prances the child dressed like Princess Anna from Frozen. I look at my son, and I look at my father looking at my son – who, by the way, looked amazing in this light green taffeta with a black velvet bodice and some lovely lacing – and I know that my father is judging me.

But you know what? I don’t care. Because at that moment I realize, strangely, that by going to jail when he did, he didn’t just free me up from the burden of this macho nonsense, he also freed up my son to grow up as a happy boy who can pretend to be whoever he wants to be, even – or especially – a pretty, pretty princess.

And I can’t tell you how grateful I am that instead of going through life mindlessly as two tough guys, my son and I are free to become real men.

[Note: all comments are my opinions, not those of the speaker, or The Moth or anyone else on the planet. In my view, every story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these posts is to inspire storytellers to become better storylisteners and to think about how their stories can become more impactful.]

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Aleeza Kazmi at The Moth from The Beacon School in New York City

The Moth has been hosting storytelling events for 20+ years, and the thousands of storytellers who have graced their stages are proof that every story is unique, and that the best stories come from our personal experiences.

I’ve always felt that storytelling should be a required course in high school, as it’s fundamental to how we formulate our thoughts and how we’ll express ourselves throughout our lives. I was delighted to discover this story by Aleeza Kazmi when she was still a student. (she’s a professional storyteller now)

Children of color often deal with issues related to identity when they’re growing up, and in this story, Aleeza recalls such an incident from when she was just six years old. Beyond her particular circumstances, it’s a narrative which speaks to the courage we sometimes need in order to express the fact that we are proud of who we are.

Transcript

So I’m six years old and I’m in the first grade and I’m sitting at a table with my three best friends and we’re all really similar. We all wear the same clothes from the children’s place that our mom’s by us, and we play on the monkey bars during recess and we play house underneath the playground at St. Catherine’s Park, which was behind our elementary school. All of our names start with A, there is Anna, Amanda, Ashia, and Aleeza. We’re working on self portraits, and this is sort of an icebreaker project of the first grade. My teacher, Ms. Harrington, presented it as a way to get to know each other’s faces. These were gonna be hung up on the wall, and I was really excited because we were on our third day of self portraits and we were going to color them in finally.

I was super excited about this because my mom had bought me a coloring book over the summer and I learned how to color inside the lines. I learned all these, yeah, really excited about that, and I learned all these really cool techniques for how to draw properly. I was basically young Picasso and I was ready to show off my skills to my friends. I knew this was an extremely special project because Ms. Harrington had brought out oil pastels. Every table got one box, and every box had one of each color. I love oil pastels because I used there really soft, and so I used to take them and pinch them between my fingers and feel them melt into my skin almost. Because there’s one of each color in every box you had to be patient and wait for your color to not be used, and the color I wanted was being used.

I was ready to color in my face, and all of my friends had colored in their face peach, and since we were all the same girl, I figured I would use peach as well. So finally, peach was available, and I color in my face and I’m going slowly and I’m watching the oil pastel melt into the paper and I color inside the lines. It’s beautiful, and I look down and this self portrait, this girl I had just drawn, is exactly how I see myself. It’s like I’m looking into a mirror, and I’m proud, and I feel Ms. Harrington, my teacher, looking over my shoulder, and I get really excited because Ms. Harrington loved it when people drew well. And I was like, she’s gonna say to me that she’s gonna hang it above her desk, so that when people came in, they knew that I drew this amazing portrait.

I was getting ready for her to compliment me, and instead she looks down and she says, “Aleeza, that’s not your color.” And I’m confused by this cuz I don’t understand how colors can belong to people. So I start panicking and I’m like, Was I not supposed to use oil pastels? You know, did I do something wrong? What did I do wrong? I couldn’t figure it out, and I couldn’t find a way to ask her.

She didn’t explain further, she just grabbed the oil pastel box and started looking through it. Didn’t find the color she was looking for. So she went to the crayon bin. Now, every elementary school had this infamous crayon bin where little bits and pieces of broken of crayon that were unwrapped and disgusting and mixed together over years and years and years and never went away.

And I never used crayons. I always used markers or color pencils or something. But Ms. Harrington went to the crayon bin, and she’s rummaging through it, and she pulls out this crayon, and it’s this nub of a brown crayon that’s unwrapped and gross. Ms. Jill Harrington hands it to me and she says, “Lisa, this is your color.”

I still don’t understand it because how can colors belong to people? But I can’t figure out a way to ask her, and so I take it and she tells me to color in my face, and so I do. But crayon and oil pastel don’t mix together and they’re not friends and they don’t wanna be on the same page together. So I’m pushing in this crayon and I’m going in all different directions and trying to make it mix with the peach, but it’s not doing it.

I’m coloring outside of the lines now and I’ve colored into my eye and my lips and now’s red on my chin. I’m panting, and Anna, Ashia and Amanda are all staring at me and I’m embarrassed. When I’m done, I look down and I’m this grotesque monster that can’t decide if it wants to be peach or brown. I wanna scream at Ms. Jill Harrington, “Please do not hang this up, I’ll do it again. I’ll do it your way this time.”

But she grabs my self portrait before I’m able to say anything, and she puts it into the pile with all of my even tone, beautiful peach friends, and it’s hung up on the wall. I go home that night and I ask my mom, “Why am I not allowed to be peach?” And she explains it to me as well as a mother can to a six year old who’s going through an identity crisis.

You know, I’m not peach and your dad isn’t peach. She does her best, but I still don’t understand it, and I don’t wanna ask her cuz I don’t wanna sound stupid, cuz everyone else seems to understand this concept of color, but I cannot wrap my head around it. So I put this idea on a shelf and I don’t think about it again until the sixth grade when I’m in a new school, and we’re all asking each other questions like, “Where did you go to elementary school and what’s your favorite book?” Just trying to get to know each other a little bit, and this one boy comes up to me and he asks me, “What race are you?” Which might be a complex question. Some people, they can’t look at me and know what race I am.

I didn’t know what race I was because I never really thought about it, so I’m trying to look for an answer. I think back to this Jill Harrington and that brown nubby crayon, and I tell him, “I’m brown.” And he looks at me, and he’s so confused, and he says, “What do you mean you’re brown? Brown isn’t a race.”

I find the words finally and they come up, and this little six year old me inside is screaming, and then now I’m screaming and I’m saying, “Who are you to tell me what I am? If I say I’m brown, then I’m brown and deal with it.”

So this boy never spoke to me again, which is fine, because I finally found the words and was able to stand up for myself.

Watch Aleeza’s video, make some notes about what impressed you, then read the manuscript and watch again. You’ll see and hear it differently the 2nd time around. You will also notice a bit of editing. To avoid the talk from reading as a run-on sentence, the word ‘and’ was removed in several places.

[Note: all comments are my opinions, not those of the speaker, or The Moth, or anyone else on the planet. In my view, every story is unique, as is every interpretation of that story. The sole purpose of these posts is to inspire storytellers to become better storylisteners and to think about how their stories can become more impactful.]

Learn more about the coaching process or
contact me to discuss your storytelling goals!

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A Decades Long Struggle for Justice as told on The Memory Palace

The Memory Palace continues to be one of my favorite storytelling podcasts with its unique way of bringing forth historical landscapes of people, places and events that traverse the arc of time, deftly infused with an insightful sense of relevance that speaks to current affairs.

With the struggle for racial equality front and center we have an opportunity to take a step back and revisit other struggles which continue to compromise millions of lives. Within the time frame of 8 ½ minutes Nate DiMeo compresses decades of oppression against the LGBTQ community, painting with both broad and fine strokes alike, calling out moments that crushed the dreams of countless lives. Yet love, relentlessly, pushed back the waves of oppression.

On the surface this story may seem dissimilar from the current storyline playing out in city streets, but that one phrase, “to be who they were”, binds these two struggles at the wrist. It’s difficult for me to fully comprehend, to grasp beyond the intellectual, to feel the emotions at a cellular level, to walk the streets and feel compelled, as a matter of survival, to be someone else in order to safely navigate society. 

Beyond the topic laid poetically bare, pay close attention to how Nate weaves the history of one physical place and the souls who passed through its front doors to the national narrative, now his pacing gives us space to assimilate each word and phrase.

A White Horse on The Memory Palace Podcast

Transcript

This is the Memory Palace, I’m Nate DiMeo

The White Horse Inn on Telegraph in Oakland opened in 1933, or thereabouts. No one’s been able to nail down the date. Historians have tried, as have some of its various owners it seems over the years, but if you’re not an academic, or if you don’t have a personal financial stake in solidifying its claim as the oldest gay bar in the United States to operate continuously in one location.

It doesn’t really matter when the White Horse first opened its doors, just that it was soon enough, for a man to walk in on just the right night in 1936 or 46 or 54, and see the most beautiful man he’d ever seen in his life, and just be done for.

Soon enough for another man, who had heard of this place, heard of places like it, whispered about, or mocked by the fellows in the assembly line, or in the office, or in his usual joint across town, heard the cracks about pansies and perverts and queers, and feared what they might mean.

Feared why the words seemed to cut right through, sit strange in his belly, and tightened his throat, but who fought through that fear to make his way there to the White Horse. Who may have circled the block all butterflies, before working up the courage to park. Who may have walked right past it, rather than be seen walking in by some stranger. Or maybe he pulled his collar up, and tipped his fedora low, and pushed through the door as fast as he could.

And who may have learned that night, in that bar, where men talked to men by the fireplace in the back, where women flirted with women in the light of the jukebox, men held hands by the pool table like it was nothing, like it wasn’t everything, knew that night for sure, that this was the place he belonged, that this might be the only place he belonged.

Like it was for other women and men. Those who were identified correctly as such at birth, and those who weren’t, people who needed their lives to change, to make sense, to be less lonely, to be less scary, to be more fun, to be safe.

In the forties and fifties, and later, men and women, friends from the neighborhood at the bus, and church, friends who knew the truth about each other, would walk arm and arm up Telegraph Road to the White Horse, would play at being people they were not, and then walk through the door, into that windowless room, and become who they were.

They’d go their separate ways, he to a boyfriend, and she to a girlfriend, and they’d spend a few hours in a place where so much of what they’d been taught all their lives about what life was supposed to be, but who they had to be to be happy, or responsible, or good, or saved, just fell apart, just put the lie to the whole thing.

Laws of the universe themselves, just torn up and tossed like confetti to swirl in the bar light, and flit in the laughter and the dance songs, a light on the eyelashes of some pretty man, or float on the surface of martini glass.

And then they’d say good night to their boyfriend and girlfriend, to the people there who understood, who helped them understand, and they’d link arms and go back out into the world.

Have no illusions about the world. The world did not want that man and that woman to be who they were. Gay sex was a felony. Cross-dressing was a crime. People risked imprisonment, forced sterilization, institutionalization, lobotomization, for acting on who they were.

If the cops, armed with laws that let them raid bars if they suspected women were dancing with women, or men were holding hands, or speaking in high-pitched voices in some cities. If the cops came and threw you into the patty wagon, if not threw you up against a wall, your name would wind up in the paper along with your address. You could be fired, kicked out of your apartment, lose your car loan, get beat up, or worse, by people in your own home, or by people who now knew where your home was.

The laws would change. Attitudes would change, sometimes for the better, and sometimes not. The war seemed to change everything for awhile, especially there in the Bay area. All these soldiers and sailors and nurses flooding in, away from home for the first time, discovering who they were for the first time, discovering whole worlds in windowless rooms like the White Horse.

In the sixties a straight couple bought the bar, and they were so worried about raids, it seems, and some speculate so skeeved out by their own clientele, that they instated a strict no touching policy.

No more slow dances, no kissing, no nothing. It was like that for years. And still people came to the White Horse because it was their place. But then the late sixties came, and the hippies came, and the radicals came. Berkeley was just down the road. The black Panthers was around patrol right there in Oakland, and gay men and lesbians, and transgender started staking more radical claims, started living more radical lives, and the White Horse embraced gay liberation.

And by then it was just one of the many gay bars in the area where people could find each other, could find out who they were and who they want it to be, where they figured out what was possible to ask from this life, where they asked for it together, as they’d done in the White Horse since 1933, or thereabouts.

The White Horse Inn was open the night in 1966 when transgender women fought back against police harassment at Compton’s Cafeteria across the Bay in San Francisco.

It was still open two years later when the Stonewall Inn was raided across the country, and people protested for three days, and never really stopped.

It was open on the night in 1973 when an arsonist set fire to a gay bar in New Orleans, locked the door, and killed 32 people. The White Horse was there for people who used it to mourn.

It was open for people who wanted to celebrate 1962, when Illinois became the first state to decriminalize homosexuality, and 13 years later when California joined it, and 28 years later when the Supreme court forced 14 States to do the same.

It was opened in 1977 when San Francisco elected Harvey milk to its board of city supervisors, and in 78 when he was assassinated.

It was opened in 1979 when 75,000 people marched in Washington for their civil rights.

And it was open all throughout the 1980s, when its customers started dying, when its employees started dying. In one year alone, eight bartenders, eight, died of AIDS related illnesses.

And the White Horse had stayed open, as it has been, again and again, when men and women, boys and girls, transgendered people were murdered for who they were.

So many since 1933 or thereabouts, mourned by what people now call the LGBTQ community. The community built year by year, night by night, in windowless rooms like the White Horse.

It was open when Vermont passed its civil unions law, when Massachusetts passed its marriage law, when San Francisco’s mayor issued marriage licenses, and when the California Supreme court annulled those unions. Annulled the marriage of the manager of the White Horse too.

It was open when the California voters rejected gay marriage, and it was open for dancing when the Supreme court threw that vote out.

It was open on a Saturday in June when someone killed 49 people in Orlando, Florida, in a place like the White Horse, where people came to be who they were.

And it was open on Sunday, and it’s open tonight. It will be open tomorrow.

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The Story of Your Identity in the Digital Age

The concept of identity has always been difficult to define, and while the digital age has, to some extent, simplified the issue with its ability to capture, store, and transmit our personal information, it has also introduced an additional level of complexity by forcing us into neat digital boxes, including the box that says, “prefer not to answer.” 

I recently watched Zara Rahman‘s presentation on stage at The Conference in August 2019. Titled The Unintended Impact of Technology, Zara raises several concerns about how technology is being used to define who we are, which I feel is very important, as who we are (or think ourselves to be) shapes the content and style of the personal stories that we share.

Zara is a researcher, writer, speaker, linguist, and the Deputy Director at The Engine Room, an international non-profit organisation supporting civil society to use tech and data more effectively and strategically.

Instead of diving right into the latest technologies or the politics of identity, Zara begins with a personal story that reveals the complex nature of defining her identity, with family roots from Bangladesh, yet being raised in the UK and holding a British passport – culture vs documents – not an uncommon situation considering modern migration patterns.

“The ability to self-identify is what makes us human. The fluidity of changing identities is a core part of how we grow and change as human beings, no matter what our passports may say.”

She explains how the issue is much larger than just a passport by introducing the concept of “identification technologies” that include any type registration system, as well as the use of national identity cards. The notion of our identity being fluid is not new, as humans have been migrating for over 50,000 years, but most of that time was undocumented and no one was tracking where we came from or where we might go. But that’s all changed.

From a travel standpoint, the requirement of identification has been on the rise for decades, and after 9-11 that increase has been most pronounced when traveling by air. On my last international journey various authorities checked my passport five times. I feel fortunate that my ability to travel is largely unrestricted, but other people are not so lucky with travel bans in place based on religion or ethnicity.

Referring to the establishment of nation states, and the subsequent use of the passports, Zara talks about the positive aspects of establishing shared citizenship, and a shared identity. You can see yourself as having a common bond. But once you’re labeled, governments and corporations can use this data to make decisions based on where we were born, within the borders of lines drawn on a map. How many of you chose the country you were born in? Yet you will always carry that with you, even if you become a citizen of another country.

“…a passport is not a document that tells us who we are, but a document that shows what other people think of us.” – Orhan Pamuk

And in some cases, this rigid view of your ethnicity can be fatal, as Zara recounts the events surrounding the Rwandan genocide in 1994, a tragedy amplified by the use of identity cards which accelerated the slaughtering of Tutsis. The Rohingya people are being persecuted by the government of Myanmar (more commonly described as ethnic cleansing) to the point where tens of thousands have been forced to leave the country and are now stateless, with no national identity.

On another front, the field of genomics holds great promise in its ability to peer inside human history and evolution as a way to uncover the nature of diseases, and in doing so, potentially provide cures and treatments for those diseases. But there’s also a troubling downside to the collection of genetic information when it is used to ‘define’ ethnicity, or quantify the ethnic diversity of our genome. I wonder how this will evolve – might this become another way to place people into categories based on their DNA, and could that lead to more discrimination?

As we’re all aware (or should be) once data is captured, it’s there forever. And if that data is shared, which is the norm for non-governmental databases, then it becomes permanent in multiple places. And should that data be in error and need correcting, or should you want to withdraw from a database altogether, there’s no guarantee it’s possible to do so.

How do you identify yourself when telling your story, and how does the world see you after hearing your story? Is your identity a benefit, or is there a downside that you must deal with?

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