Personal Narrative: Growing Up In Elementary School

It was during the school desegregation process that I actually began to interact with those who looked like me because now there were others who did not look like me. Feeling more comfortable with my own kind, I forced myself to become a part of a group of peers who seemed to have a great deal in common. Being accepted into this group was perhaps the most difficult task to date as I had never been forced to communicate with others before. Questions about my home, siblings, parents and sporting activities were the norm. I even became close friends with a first cousin

When my mother decided to quit her accounting job to homeschool me (and the other future siblings that were not in existence at this point) it was hard. Being a homeschooled black family was even more isolating since it was rare to find another black family that homeschooled. At this point in our lives, she had never been surrounded with diversity so stepping outside of her comfort zone and joining an all-white homeschooled group was a brave step. But little did she know that her hopes of a positive experience would be crushed due to prejudice. I was too young to recognize all of the prejudice that the other moms held against her, but I can only accept it as a bigoted reality that some may choose to live in.

My block was a melting pot of people but my high school was not. After entering high school is when I realized that I was white or Caucasian. During this time, I was also given the

During grade school I went to school in a predominantly black neighborhood. Although I was not to much out of place being half African American there was always a noticeable difference between me and them. My skin was lighter, I listened to different music,

Growing up, I was constantly surrounded by people of the same ethnic race and culture. I was raised in the small city of Temple City where a lot of older generation Asian immigrants resided, which resulted in my schools being mostly dominated by the first generation Asian American population. Because of this similarity of race and culture with my peers, it was fairly easy for me to bond with other students as well as feel comfortable within the realms of my schools and neighborhood. I had little trouble learning and participating in classrooms and also was able to be very involved in leadership positions in extracurricular programs at my high school which was a good learning experience for me.

When playing on the playground during my early years, race was never on the forefront of my mind. If you were White, Black, Asian, Latino, or bi-racial, it never mattered to me because I never paid attention. My entire elementary education was spent at small, predominantly White, private Christian schools. Being the only Black person in my class from kindergarten to fifth grade had no effect on me until Barack Obama was elected President of the United States in 2008.

As a kid I had never heard a comment that made me really question my racial identity. I always saw others as my friends or family and not by their skin tone. Going for the zoo lights had made me extremely uncomfortable for many reasons. The reason behind that being that I heard racist comments about my cousins and I that made me question my own racial identity for the first time. Having trouble with racial identity will cause us to have varied feelings about fitting in and filling our full potential based on outside influences and treatments from others.

I went to a middle school that was not very diverse. Walking into my classes, I never saw another student that looked like me or came from the same place as me. There was only one other Indian kid that went to my middle school and we were put into different groups. Therefore, it was hard for me to find a group of friends to hangout with because I was different from everyone else. Eddie also was put into the same situation because he was not able to find anyone like him at his school. However, over time I broke out of my shell and made new friends just like Eddie. We both went through a stage where we did not want to go to school because

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 a child I grew up in a middle class white neighborhood. Surrounded by my family of six and adoring neighbors all of whom seemed to seemr normal. It wasn’t until I went into to kindergarten that I was introduced to a black girl. I haven’t seen someone who had a different skin tone than me. No one in my family ever talked about

Growing up we never had a stable household, so basically I went from school to school. I went to 4 elementary schools, the most stable being three years. About my second year of school we went from being somewhat below average to quite below average income wise and lost our house. We basically stayed in a hotel for most of that year. We then moved to a labor camp in Tampa for the finishing of my third grade year. Finally in 4th grade we had some stability where I went to Davenport Elementary for the final three years of grade school. I was very shy for the most part and had few friends in school probably from the contribution of being the only white guy on the black bus outside of the mentally challenged kid who had a grand total of zero

When I made the great big leap to high school, I was dropped into a vastly diverse environment. I scanned the sea of people in front of me, I saw faces that belonged to every race and I realized that I was not alone anymore. For the first time, I saw people who shared my background and I met people who had gone through what I had gone through. After years of being ashamed of my culture and background, I slowly embraced it.

What is it like to grow up in a society where you are one of very few black families is an experience not many people know of. Since society has taught us to be close to those who look like us and have the same aspirations of us we tend to grow up in societies where we all look the same with very few exceptions. Well i'd like to tell you about my story and being one of those exceptions. When I first noticed I was different from everyone else i was in the second grade having just switched from a mostly black school that was thirty minutes away to a mostly white school that was a block away. When I first got to the school i noticed that I had different expectations then the students around me. Sometimes little would be expected from me and other

Going through high school I experienced my first encounter with race. I was in class one day and we had a discussion about continuing education and why it is important. My high school population was very diverse. There were about ten African-American students in the entire high school. The professor made a comment to me while I was searching colleges that I would be better off applying to historically black colleges because chances of

I came from a working class family of six whose ethnicity was mixed - my father, White and my mother, Hispanic. My siblings and I all went to Slater Elementary School from Kindergarten to 6th grade. The school was less than a mile from my home, and the community was made up mostly of working and lower middle class families. The ethnic distribution of my neighborhood was 53.8% Hispanic, 28.2% White, 9.3% Black, 5.5% Asian, and 2% mixed race. Coming from a mixed race family had its own challenges. In addition to being a cultural outlier in the community, I was always confused about who I was ethnically, and was forced to choose which one identified with more (White or Hispanic) on standardized tests, or when participating with play groups.