My Childhood - Original Writing

One’s identity has the ability to play a central role in one’s schooling experience and in return, affect the way they perceive the world around them. Growing up in an Asian household located in a predominately Asian American neighborhood located in the San Gabriel Valley, I always identified myself strongly to my race and took pride in being a first generation Asian American child. Race has definitely affected my schooling experience in many different ways, both positively and negatively. In addition, there were a variety of other aspects such as stereotypical gender roles and socioeconomic class status which factored into the way I learned in the U.S. education system. In this paper, I will examine how race, class, and gender played a big role throughout my schooling experience.

Growing up in a predominantly white community, I had never thought of the issue of race as a child. My neighbor and I were best friends, and I never thought of myself as different. She had blonde hair; I had black. She had blue eyes; I had dark brown. We loved to play with the same things, thus we were

It appears to be that the discussion of race and class in America has become amplified, especially in the last couple of years. For many, it is a touchy subject that hits close to home. With the presence of social media and news that feeds off of racial tension in America, the issues are polarizing and difficult to productively discuss. America’s handling of race and class relations is generally not something to be proud of, and there exists a long history of issues with race. It is clear that there is a lack of understanding and empathy of what others experience toward those who are oppressed. So often it is too easy to dismiss another human’s experiences as reality if one has had no prior encounter with the same challenges. Race is easy to sweep under the rug, but we must address the problem, and it is not a one size fits all solution. It is a problem that has been years in the making and continues to have an enormous impact on our human capital from an economic standpoint. And most of the time, there is a correlation between race and class.

Seven years earlier, I migrated to Hawaii when I was twenty-three. I had flown away from my mother and my life in the Philippines. Like young adults and being rebellious, I wanted to live on my own away from my mother 's roof. I left the city life I grew up with in the Philippines in hope of a better life in another country.

I grew up in a diverse community where not a lot of people were making smart choices and with people who had different appearances than others I went to school with. My family being the only Caucasian people in the neighborhood made us come off as if we were different type of white people.

Class and race work to give some an unearned advantage over others based on their race, nationality, educational status, and social class (McIntosh, 1988). McIntosh argues that whites enjoy a

My family was one of the few white families around. This made the struggle to survive the neighborhood even harder than it was for others. It was a reverse racism--I was teased because I am white. Still, it did not make me prejudiced at all. My godmother was black and most of my friends were black. I used to beg my godmother, Deanna, to put my hair in corn rolls, tiny braids with beads on the end. It would take hours and was very painful, but I took the pain in order to fit in.

For years, I struggled in an education system that only served to teach students of crime, where day by day, I would roam my high school hallways in search of peace, which I could only find in a few of my class rooms. I visited many schools during high school through a variety of programs that I was part of and through this I got to interact with students of more privileged high schools in New York City, where the Caucasian population was

The neighborhood I grew up in was predominantly white. Those in the neighborhood who weren’t, also happened to be some of my best friends. The color of their skin didn’t determine that. It was the friendly attitudes and humor that did. Growing up, I and many other students have been exposed to the different races and ethnic beliefs that positively permeate America. Our High School has a very equal separation between major races. The people in my classes are all types of races and ethnicities. This has been the case through middle school and all of high school.

As I grew into my teenage years my life started to change. My mother decided to move to a white suburb in Long Island, New York it was my reality check on how people from other races viewed African Americans. It was the first time I experience stereotyping and racism. In this neighborhood whites people were

Attending schools with my primarily white friends has made me realize how different our upbringings are. For example, privacy from family is something most of them take for granted, whereas in my culture, it is unheard of. Others may be able to acknowledge the restrictions

I have grown up in a lower class house hold, and through schooling I have been given the opportunity to lucubrate social inequalities within our society. Through such studious efforts I have gained a desire to further not just my own knowledge, but the knowledge others too. I have been working on a sociological presentation that uses strain theory, labeling theory, Thomas Nagel's theory of moral luck, and various research on the development and upkeep of drug laws and institutional racism to elucidate the disparity of wealth, education, and opportunity for personal success seen in this country. I plan to complete this presentation and, as a guest speaker, use it to educate middle school students of this incongruity had within our society in

By taking this course, I wanted to learn more about the diversity among people, especially in the United States. I also wanted to gain a better understanding of the various issues that minority groups face within the U.S. At first, my goals were very broad due to my novel exposure to ethnic studies, but now my goals are more specific. My goals still focus on minority groups, which include women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans, other non-white groups of the world, and people in the LGBTQ+ community. However, now my goals focus on comprehending their distinctive struggles, and acknowledging the role that race/ethnicity, sexuality, and gender, plays in society. The readings and in-class discussions helped with my understanding of these complex issues. The week we discussed about white privilege and its primary application to the straight, white, male population, allowed for me to understand the extent of the established white

For this assignment, I interview two different males with different race and cultures. The first male is my husband, he is a white Caucasian male, who comes from a lower class family. He began by telling me that class has played a major role in his life, from living in poverty as a young child, to not being able to afford school after high school. Which led him to join the military after graduating. After the military, he didn’t have enough money to go back to school and started to look for any job that could help him better his living situation. Even though the military helped him pay for some of his college he wasn’t able to get into a four-year college and had to settle for getting an education in a community college. His will to work hard and succeed seem impossible, until he started networking with various people who would come into his job. That’s where he discovered he could apply for a job similar to the training he had in the military, which was Aviation Electrician. That same year he talked to the IBEW (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers) and applied for a job position as an Electrician. Through the years, being in a lower class has motivated him to be where he is today, to always have food on the table, never live in bad areas, and always have home for himself and his family. Today, through hard work he is building himself towards the average middle class and hopes that he can give his child a better life and a chance to get him the best education out

While the struggle between the classes has been around for hundreds of years, the struggles of those with diverse ethnoracial backgrounds have been around for thousands of years. However, I have been lucky enough to not have to deal with any issues with my race or ethnicity, even though I have faced struggles in the class that I am in. While I come from a white family, my family also ranks in as the working-class, just below middle-class. My race and my class have both led me to be the person I am today, which I am grateful for, though, because of my class, it will take a lot of work and time to get me to where I want to be in the future. Both my whiteness and my working-class status have impacted my life in differing ways; being white has opened a lot of advantages and has given me privilege, however, the lower-middle class has shut down some advantages given to me because of my race.