No one decides to become a role model. That is rather the point. As psychiatrist Jacob Freedman observes in his Crossroads essay “I am not a Role Model,” only a Charles Barkley can disown the title; the people who actually shape us—parents, grandparents, the half-remembered branches of a family tree—never get the option. Freedman’s father did not announce himself as the reason his son became a physician. He simply was the reason, the best person in his son’s entire world, and the choice followed as naturally as breathing. The acts of the forefathers, an ancient maxim holds, are symbolic for their children. Identity is inherited before it is chosen.