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My Identity: My Most Significant Moments For Minorities

473 Words2 Pages

My identity is something I have struggled with in the past. Growing up, I never liked being called ‘different’. I feel like as a kid when people called me different it had such a negative connotation. Being a minority has created a few obstacles in my life but it has also helped me grow as a better human being. I am now able to look at being a minority as a positive attribute to my life. I have witnessed the first black president to be elected and many other monumental moments for minorities. Those breakthrough moments for minorities have made me hopeful for the future. Growing up, I remember I had to constantly answer the same question of my ethnicity over and over again. I didn’t realize that I had to explain why I looked different than …show more content…

I never realized that I had to justify that I was an American. I started to feel isolated and alone solely because I didn’t relate to many of my peers. I remember carrying that feeling of isolation with me. In my eyes, I felt that being Indian crippled me from being a 'normal' American. As a result, I began to feel humiliated when my parents would speak in Hindi with me when we were in public. Due to feeling isolated, I began to distance myself from my religion and from my culture. I thought me being Indian outside of my home isolated me, and that it didn’t make me ‘normal’. As I was going through this phase of trying to be normal, I remember my parents had felt hurt because I felt humiliated by parents for just being themselves. They began to notice that I was embarrassed and ashamed of where I came from. This damaged my relationship with my grandparents and parents. I never wanted to go out with them, because they dressed differently and spoke with an accent. My parents didn’t like feeling that I was becoming “too American”. So I struggled with not being American enough and being too American. I constantly felt out of place. The minute I left my house I 'switched off' being Indian and the minute I entered my home I had to 'switch off' being

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For example, Maisami felt no good toward her Iranian family. She was americanized and nothing like them. Maisami felt like she has to be more Iranian to fit in with her family. Toward the end of Maisami’s story she asks her mother, “Mom, am I Iranian or American?” and her mother tells her “you have to look at yourself in order to find out who you are - it's not where you are from that defines you”.

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One’s perspective is affected by their environment, their surroundings, and the culture they choose to adapt. Due to everybody’s unique cultural identity, we are all different, however, to others, one might be viewed as simple-minded or alien, as shown in “An Indian Father’s Plea”. An example from the essay would be “...I can't understand why you have already labeled him a ‘slow learner’ ”. The son was stereotyped because he is different, darker, and unlike the other ‘white’ children. Both part of distinct culture, the Indians and white people, were educated and nourished differently.

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Within Greg Sarris essay, he had to endure many things; the loss of his parents, binging in and out of home, unware and unable to find his true self. However, always feeling that he was, what he said he was, Indian. He faced quite a few stereotypes growing up, one of them is when he and a group of friends where mistakenly placed in the category of being Mexican (Sarris Pacifically a “White Beaner“) , because of their “dark hair and skin” – ( pg.106) when in fact the group he was with were Pomo-Indians.

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Everyone has their own culture some different from others and some don 't really know their full culture. Some of us may not have similar things in common but we are all alike. In an Indian father 's plea, Legal alien, and Multiculturalism explained in one word. They show perfect examples on how culture influences the way people view others and the world around them. “Wind-wolf asks why other kids in school are not taught about the power, beauty and the essence of nature or have the opportunity to experience it for themselves.”

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“In thirty-three years of marriage, we have lived in every part of North America. By choosing a husband who was not my father’s selection, I was opting for fluidity, self-invention, blue jeans, and T- shirts, and renouncing the three thousand years (at least) of caste-observant, “pure culture” marriage in the Mukherjee family” (Mukherjee 548). Moving to America was a new beginning for Mukherjee, and she took every advantage of that. Marrying outside of her father’s choosing opened a new world of opportunity for her. She was able to wear what she wanted, travel wherever she wanted, and make herself who she wanted to be without her Indian heritage holding her back.

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The diversity that may be found all around the world and in our very community has always fascinated me. I am aware that it is a widely held belief that being a minority is considered a disadvantage in various aspects and I would disagree with this. Diversity and culture is a two-way street- as a community, whether that be society as a whole or simply a freshman class, we have the potential to be able to learn from each other. I believe that my status as an underrepresented minority has shaped me into the person I am today. Despite moving to the United States at a young age and being a first-generation college student , I am grateful for the privilege to be able to further my education at the University of Utah.

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Raised in an Indian household in an American environment I am torn between deciding which represents me as a whole. My family dictates that I should cherish my heritage. However in all honesty I am not fond from where I come from, I still don’t know how to read my native language, I am still basic speaker in my mother language, and there are some values in my culture that I am totally disgusted

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At first I wrestled with where my identity lay. The strong values and traditions of the Indian culture sometimes made it difficult to fit in with the crowd. As I grew older, I began to understand that I was not part of an individual culture, but a fusion of two rich and colorful histories. I recognized that there is remarkably more to an individual than where she comes from, and more to her than where she currently lives. Importantly, being from two cultures allows me to incorporate the best qualities of both.

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Even though America has become quite the diverse place with diverse cultures, the cultural appropriation found within the American society contributes to the loss of multiple minority culture’s identity. Native Americans are one of the minority groups most heavily impacted by cultural appropriation. From offensive sports, many American Indians feel as though their cultural identities are lost in the mass of stereotypes and false representations of them in popular culture. In literature and film, Indians are too often portrayed as some variation of “the Noble or Ignoble Savage” (Gordon, 30), violent and uneducated, and it is easy to imagine how this negative representation inspires resentment in the Native American community, who have no interest in having their cultures and peoples being reduced to mere savages,

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I have blond hair and pale skin. On the color wheel, my father is a rich mocha, my sister is a warm copper, and my mother is a perfectly tanned caramel; I am somewhere between cream and eggshell on the opposite end of the spectrum. Being stereotypically white can be difficult when you’re African American. The beginning of high school was when I first began to feel that my fair complexion hid my true identity.

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Washuta explained on page 5, “I cringe every time I hear “part Indian,” feeling my arm sliced off at the shoulder,” (Washuta 5). This statement created a feeling of heartache. This made the audience understand her pain and helped communicate the importance of her argument by adding a very human nature to it. The author also included many rhetorical devices in this essay. One of these devices was repetition.

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Hercules, the great hero and the son of the god of the sky Zeus, is one of the most famous and popular of all the Greek heroes("Zeus"). Hercules was well known for his strength, courage, bravery, and his upstanding personality. Hercules, like most heroes, has a god as his father who was the supreme god Zeus and a mortal mother named Alcmene. Hercules father Zeus was not loyal at all to his wife and cheated on her multiple times with mortal women. This made his wife Hera very mad and jealous, so when she found out that Zeus had an affair with another woman and had a son with Alcmene, she was very angry and sent poisonous snakes into baby Hercules crib.

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When I came to America, I had to go through much struggle. First and the most important was that I did not know how to speak English. Apart from this I was very shy, so I didn’t communicate with people frequently.     Growing up in America and being a son of two Indian parents, I never felt truly American or Indian. I spoke Punjabi at home, but was educated in English so I had difficulty managing two languages.

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