When someone thinks of literacy the first thought that comes to their mind is the ability to read and write. While the idea of literacy does encompass this ability, the broader definition of literacy can be expanded to include any sort of knowledge in an area someone could possess. People can have literacy in anything from Spanish to chicken frying to how to use a computer. If it’s a field that can be learned, it’s a literacy. When thinking about literacies as unique knowledge groups that everyone has, it’s easy to see how no two people have the exact same literacies. A common idea developed amongst those who know about the concept and the uniqueness of literacies is that they have a tremendous impact on not only a person’s character, but also the world around them. I can’t say I’m one to disagree with this. Literacies have a bigger effect on our lives than most could ever hope to realize, shaping how we identify ourselves, how we view others, and how they view us.

            Our identities today have never been more important. People are striving to know who they are and to make themselves known in a society where it may be hard to feel unique. Some of the most common pieces of one’s own perceived identity is the clothes they wear, their culture, sexuality, and their disposition around others. One thing that often gets lost when thinking about identity are these literacies that have been developed over our lifetimes. Indeed, it is easy to forget how our knowledge shapes us because we have been learning for our entire lives that we have gotten used to it. But for those who develop major literacies later in life, the difference between their old self and their new self is night and day. One such example of this comes from the civil rights leader Malcolm X.

 During the period of life when he was in prison, the illiterate Malcolm had been resolved develop his reading and writing skills due to the frustrations he had when corresponding with Elijah Muhammad, someone who helped develop Malcolm’s identity into that of a civil rights leader (X, 257). Eventually Malcolm developed an intense passion for reading, believing “the ability to read awoke inside me something craving to be mentally alive” (X, 257). It’s evident from this statement that developing that key reading literacy was essential to the development of Malcolm’s identity, without it it’s likely he would have never become the passionate leader he was in life. Just like with Malcolm, our literacies constantly change and shape our identities. Sometimes it’s a sudden change like with Malcolm, but often it’s gradual. Slow enough of a change to not be aware of it, but over time we are able to look at our literacies between then and now and see that change in our identities.

Different levels of literacy offer different perceptions. Someone who doesn’t know anything about medicine might perceive Gwyneth Paltrow’s GOOP as a legitimate form of medical science, while someone who is well educated in medicine knows that GOOP is pseudo-scientific garbage. The only difference between the two people is how developed their literacy is. Often as literacy grows, our perceptions start to change. One day somebody may find that something or someone they thought they liked or agreed with has soured in their mind, as the case with Megan Phelps-Roper.

Roper was a member of the infamous Westerboro Baptist Church, having been a member of it for her entire early life. As a member, she was taught Bible verses that where used to justify the hateful rhetoric the church was delivering (Chen, 76). If someone had asked Roper before her days on twitter if she knew the Bible, it’s likely she would have considered herself Biblically literate. And it was through this Biblical literacy Roper supposedly held that she perceived the much of the world to be hated by God and needed to be told the error of its ways (Chen, 75). It wasn’t until Roper joined twitter where she discovered a plethora of new challenges to her church’s dogma. It was through this discourse on twitter that she was able to realize she needed to sit down and read the Bible critically (Chen, 83). Eventually through her newfound Biblical literacy which contradicted a lot of the church’s teachings, Roper’s views of both the church and the outside world shifted (Chen, 85). Roper eventually left the church all together, in part because she had become disillusioned with the church. Before when she was naïve about the Bible Roper perceived the church, she spent her entire life a force for good, but eventually because she developed that literacy she could only think of the church as misguided.

Literacy not only defines part of our own identity and how we perceive it is also one of the biggest pieces of ourselves that people look at. If someone moves to France and doesn’t speak a lick of French, the people there are going to perceive them a lot more negatively than someone who does speak French. Moving back to Roper, her new Biblical literacy didn’t just change her perception of both the church and the outside world it also changed their perception of her. When Roper started to become more aware about the Bible, her church members and people on twitter started to view her in a different light. Higher up’s in the church and her own sister grace took issue with her objections to church practices that Roper felt contradicted the Bible (Chen, 86). Meanwhile as Roper became more friendly to the idea of questioning church values, people who she met up with on and outside of twitter became fonder of her. Eventually after leaving the church the people who once viewed Roper as family now viewed her as a pariah, and the people on twitter that viewed her as a bigot embraced her newfound change of heart (Chen, 88). It helps to be aware that as one’s identity changes over time, so too do people’s perception of that person.

When talking about literacy it’s rather important to know just how much of someone’s life it affects. The knowledge that shapes our character isn’t concentrated in a vacuum. Learning new literacies or demonstrating old ones has ripple effects that are felt not only by the ones with those literacies, but also by those around us, seen or unseen. Had Malcolm X never learned to read and made learning a central aspect of his character, perhaps his ideas would have never gotten traction amongst so many others in his time and today. If Megan Phelps-Roper never decided to read and think critically about the Bible she most likely wouldn’t have been one of the leading advocates against the Westboro Baptist Church today. It’s always important to expand one’s literacy, but it’s also impossible to know just how much it may change one’s life in the future. For better, worse, or both.

Work Cited

Chen, Adrian. “Unfollow.” Emerging: Contemporary Reading for Writers, edited by Barclay Barrios, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2019, pages 73-90.

X, Malcolm. “Learning to Read.” 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology, edited by Samuel Cohen, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011, pages 257-266.