Image: Black Women Looking in the Mirror. Shutterstock.
I first learned about Charles Horton Cooley’s idea of the looking glass self during my first semester in the MSP program, and I knew right away I wanted to weave it into my final project. Cooley describes how our social identity is shaped by how we believe we appear to others. He writes, “There is no sense of ‘I,’ as in pride or shame, without its correlative sense of you, or he, or they” (1902). In other words, who we are is never just about us; it’s always relational. We come to understand ourselves through interactions and through the perceptions reflected back at us.
That’s the heartbeat of my project. Recently, I’ve been digging into Through the Looking Glass: Self and Others by Corrado Sinigaglia and Giacomo Rizzolatti, and it pushed me even further. They talk about the “mirror mechanism” in our brains… basically, how we understand other people’s actions by internally simulating them ourselves. What struck me is how this challenges the idea of identity as something fixed or separate. Instead, identity is fluid, constantly shaped in relation to others. We see ourselves through the way we see and anticipate other people.
This hit home because my project is about Black women in corporate America — the code-switching, the pressure to align with Eurocentric beauty standards, and the impact all of that has on self-perception. The article gives me a framework to explain why identity in these spaces feels like constant negotiation. It’s not just about how we choose to present ourselves; it’s about how we’re mirrored back through corporate culture and the expectations around us.
Last week in class I got amazing feedback on my project from my peers. They helped me think through details like if I should be seen on camera during the interviews for my documentary, my interview questions, and other pieces of my project. My proof of concept with be a very short clip of an interview with one of my interviewees where she’ll discuss code-switching, beauty standards, and self perception.
Sources:
Cooley, C. H. (1902). The looking-glass self. In Human nature and the social order (pp. 149, 151–153).
Shutterstock. (2024). Black woman looking in mirror touching her face [Photograph]. Shutterstock. https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/black-woman-looking-mirror-touching-her-2650290303
Sinigaglia, C., & Rizzolatti, G. (2011). Through the looking glass: self and others. Consciousness and cognition, 20(1), 64-74.
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