This article is on the strange confluence of culture, identity, learning, and systemic design. We argue that the work of instructional design is, essentially, work on culture and identity. A person's culture and identity fully and inextricably situate their thought, action, and interaction. For this reason, this inherent situatedness of culture and identity must be explored by those who endeavor to do instructional design work. Instructional designers must be able to navigate the complex and treacherous waters of culture and identity in order to create effective and appropriate designs for learning. Here we take on the particular case of African American learners. We argue for the empirically verifiable existence of three identity types of African Americans and we suggest that design work should target learners displaying one of these identity types, referred to here as "primary cultural." In this way, this article may be seen as exploring the problem of constructing theory on primary cultural instructional design. We first explore culture, then identity, and then the interaction between culture and identity. We then move to our study and how it informs our understanding of cultural identification and academic identity and then we conclude with the implications for design research. (Contains 3 tables and 1 figure.)