Durkheim's Structural Functionalism: Why Do You Sound White?

Throughout my high school years, the phrase I most often heard as a mixed-race person attending a relatively prestigious school was, “Why do you sound white?” During that point in my life, I had a really difficult time figuring out how to deal with that question, where the need others had to categorize me was coming from, and why feelings of rejection were stemming from it.
To a symbolic interactionist, this experience of not knowing who I was because others kept telling me I did not fully belong to one category is in line with the theory that we get our meanings from the world around us. Nothing is objective -- every single thing we know is a societal construct. To assign a meaning to anything is a “fundamentally social” process (Ferris and
According to Emile Durkheim’s structural functionalist view, it was because I wanted to avoid anomie. I knew the feeling of not fitting in entirely to a group, and I wanted to experience that as little as possible. Durkheim takes it a step farther as well: his theory says that we need groups to impose norms on our lives, or else “we would want many things we could never have, and the lengths to which we would go in search of our unattainable desires would be boundless” (Ferris and Stein, 2016, pg. 125). He also hypothesizes that without these norms, we would become so unhappy that there’s risk of suicide (which he considers to be a profoundly social act). I believe that my desperation to be fully accepted, no matter what the cost, proves this theory. Even when it was harmful to me, I tried to alter who I was to be who I was “supposed to be”. Of course, that was a complete failure. My worst times of anxiety and depression were in high school, and even though I wanted to fit in, I couldn’t make myself less intelligent or take the melanin out of my skin. In this case, it was almost like the norms from too many groups were creating this sense of distance, and that led to the alienation Durkheim references, but for an entirely different
Looking back, I have realized that I tended to overthink and to put some of my own unnecessary insecurities on what I was hearing and seeing from other people -- Mead calls these “communicative acts”(Ferris and Stein, 2016, pg. 27). I tended to take everything I perceived people as thinking about me to heart. This phenomenon essentially agrees with a symbolic interactionist view that Charles Cooley calls the “looking-glass self”. My experience in high school is a classic example of “[responding] to the judgements that we believe others make about us” (Ferris and Stein, 2016, pg. 102). I assumed that what was really important to me in order to develop as a person was knowing what others thought of me. However, because I did not always know for a fact what those thoughts were, I had to speculate, which means it was often inaccurate. This internalizing of inaccurate feedback and considering it to be more important than it was prevented me from analyzing the direction I was moving