Who we are and what we are cannot be transcended by the Liberal mindset

In terms of the two questions "what are we?" and "who are we?"  The first question is concerned with metaphysics, while the latter is political

The "who are we?" question seeks to discover some unifying thing or idea that, we are all the same created under 'God's Image'.  Well so much for metaphysics.  answers to the "who" question are always hopeful, for they point to not what we are but who we hope to be.

 An answer to the first does not determine the answer to the second.
The political aspect is a constituting one that points to an ongoing formative project,
and it requires the political community (8 years of Obama) to work through time to achieve their collective ideal identity (a formative project under Trump).  We might view the 'who' and 'what' as
process and as to deterministic implications, away and be gone to your pathological bent.

There are flaws in our assumptions about identity which are revealed philosophy, hermeneutics, phenomenology, race and gender theory, and feminist epistemology to develop her own theory of identity.

In Alcoff's analysis, the social identities of race, ethnicity, and gender function as interpretative horizons. They are the "situations" from which we come to know, understand, and reason about the world. Since our identities so strongly affect our interaction with the world, they cannot be so easily transcended in the way that liberals typically demand


 It is naive for liberals to insist that individuals who recognize and seek recognition of their embodied identities are "reifying" those identities. It is worse than naive, moreover, for liberals to insist that individuals can adorn themselves with a mantle of citizenship that would cover up their embodied and visible differences. This insistence is malicious and exclusionary when it is put forward by a society that cultivates what Charles Mills called an epistemology of ignorance about the social role and presence of gender and race.