At the beginning of ‘White Girl’ Leah shows signs of a modernist concept of identity, her identity has been created by her family (mostly her mother). She starts as a Christian and rejects the teacher and students at her new school because of the differences between their religions and the feeling of alienation she feels from them because of this. This is shown by Leah’s refusal to join in the assemblies or any of the other activities that the other students partake in, Leah does this to keep her mother happy. As the eldest child she also helps take care of her younger siblings and thus her modernist identity is impressed upon her siblings, however when Leah begins creating her identity her mother rejects the change and the younger siblings see this rejection and keep their identity as is. It gives a huge insight into the vulnerability of children to outside influences such as identity and how they grow strong enough to pull away from the modernist values of identity to build their own. Leah is old enough to see that her mother is not infallible and can be wrong and lie which is why she rebels against the identity her mother has created, which displays her maturity and understanding of the situation they have found themselves in at the beginning of the film.
When Leah’s mother takes back her partner (who was the reason they moved in the first place) Leah starts to realise that her mother’s identity is making her unhappy and creates her own identity, a post-modernist identity created by Leah herself. In this new identity she wants to completely separate herself from her previous modernist identity, including the name her mother gave her which she changes to ‘Layla’, she also changes her religion to that of her new school friends (which indicates that outside influence is always needed to create an identity, in this case, peer influence). At first her mother disagrees with this new identity but it gives the newly dubbed Layla a chance to tell her mother the truth about how she feels. Layla’s post-modernist identity shows the mother why she left her partner in the first place which makes her leave him a second time and accept Layla.
‘White Girl’ associates modernist identity with being unhappy while the post-modern identity gives Layla the confidence to talk to her mother, the friendship, self-belief and hope she needed while her mother was rejecting her, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, the clarity that her new identity gave her. Layla’s journey from modernist to post-modernist was mostly positive, even the denial of her mother to accept her turned out to have progressive worth to Layla and her mother. ‘White Girl’ gives the message that post-modernist identity has a positive journey of self-actualisation that is desired by youth who are trying to grow beyond the family values.
