Essay On Race And Ethnicity

Like most children, I spent my early childhood blissfully unaware of concepts such as race and ethnicity. Sure, i saw people that looked different from me everywhere I went: school, church, the grocery store, etc., but I never thought too much about it. They were just other people. It wasn’t until the later half of elementary/junior high that I really started to become aware of the concepts of ethnicity and race. There are two main ethnic/racial concepts that most people become aware of at some point in their life. The first is the genetic aspect of race and ethnicity, which in many ways is a much simpler concept for most people and probably the first that they are consciously aware of. For example, I understood in elementary that asian parents were likely to have asian children. Caucasian parents were likely to have caucasian children, and so on and so on and so on. The

Race was not a topic of frequent discussion in my household when I was growing up, but it did come up from time to time, mostly in very subtle ways from older family members and friends. It’s from these subtleties that I feel most children start to form their concepts of race and ethnicity. A comment about how the new neighbors might keep up their lawn because of what they were or suggestion that we might not be safe in a particular part of town because of who lived there. The funny thing about these subtleties is that it’s just not about who speaks them, but also where and when they’re spoken. Those same friends and family who made comments about the neighbors were much friendlier when the neighbors were actually standing in front of us. The cultural rules - or perhaps I should say the one MAIN rule - about race and ethnicity started to become clear; you can voice your honest opinion about others, as long as those others are not