Change begins with understanding and understanding begins by identifying oneself with another person: in a word, empathy.
To be a cook, he declares, is "always to identify oneself with the degraded and the debauched".
I'm basically a grandma these days.' " Identifying oneself as a "grandma" is a growing phenomenon, particularly among twentysomethings who refuse to leave their apartments over the weekend.
It takes quite a nerve to identify oneself with the prophet Muhammad and compare a political reform to Allah's path.
Groups often achieve what individuals can't, and the readiness to identify oneself with a group, to take part in a group effort, and to subordinate one's own immediate interests or desires to it is constitutive of humanity.
As a Fourth Amendment matter, Justice Kennedy said, the demand to identify oneself is a logical corollary to the circumstances of a valid police stop, as described by the court in a 1968 decision, Terry v. Ohio.
(One should read, he said, "not for the infantile purpose of identifying oneself with the characters, and not for the adolescent purpose of learning to live" but rather to "feel a shiver of artistic satisfaction").
A public dissent from denial is a strategic choice to identify oneself with an issue and to shine a spotlight on it, inviting future petitioners to knock on the court's door with similar cases.
"To proclaim oneself a nigger is to identify oneself as real, authentic, uncut, unassimilated, and unassimilable — the opposite, in short, of a Negro, someone whose rejection of nigger is seen as part of an effort to blend into the white mainstream," he writes.
What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret is a key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest: if a priest seriously (not just rhetorically) denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community, he is no longer "one of us".
