“Identity” itself, unmodified by race, or gender, or politics, rapidly became an important theme in American culture after mid-century, as our trusty Ngram tool reveals with great clarity. The frequency of the word “identity” in American literature increased more than five-fold over the second half of the twentieth century, as Figure 5.8 shows. Identities, of course, can be collective—“we Democrats,” “we whites,” “we women”—but over much of this period “identity” referred as much to personal identity as to collective identity.
