How to get change

This from Adrienne Rich, “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity,” (1982) 

This essay, then, has no conclusions: it is another beginning for me. Not just a way of saying, in 1982 Right Wing America, I , too, will wear the yellow star. It’s a moving into accountability, enlarging the range of accountability. I know that in the rest of my life, the next half century or so, every aspect of my identity will have to be engaged. The middle-class white girl taught to trade obedience for privilege. The Jewish lesbian raised to be a heterosexual gentile. The woman who first heard oppression named and analyzed in the Black Civil Rights struggle. The woman with three sons, the feminist who hates male violence. The woman limping with a cane, the woman who has stopped bleeding are also accountable. The poet who knows that beautiful language can lie, that the oppressor’s language sometimes sounds beautiful. The woman trying, as part of her resistance, to clean up her act.

 I'm struck by the way she links identity with accountability.  To claim one's identity, she seems to say, is not to withdraw into ever smaller circles, but rather to increase one's responsibility for one's self and one's engagement with the world.  This is a strategy for stimulating and pursuing change.